Not in every case but many times it really is a valid approach. Perspective matters a lot for our mental well being. There are definitely people that get “addicted” to being chronically unhappy.
I'll tell myself I can do the most absolutely abysmal 3 sets of whatever lift, and I can walk out if I'm not feeling it. 99% of the time, I stick it through.
This is my trick. I tell myself to just do something small then I can quit, which always turns into doing it all like normal. But having the option of bailing makes it feel so much better, which makes the suck less sucky.
I hear you can exercise your pecs and triceps by punching someone in the face. If you grab their neck with the other arm, you can get your lats involved too.
For me, I noticed that my main reason to procrastinate was that the task seemed so big that causes me fear of not being able to accomplish it. So this advice is one I can relate to when feeling that way, because when I break it down to simple things/tricks like saying to myself “I’ll just do 5 min of this”, or even “I’ll just write a few sentences and then we’ll see”, that happens to help me overcome the fear of the task. I know it really feels like BS, but, at least for me, I can find some help just changing the approach from seeing the big picture to more of a micro approach where you feel good if you just start by doing something small, and then it gives you that compounding effect, extra motivation and confidence to keep doing a little more.
Of course the ultimate content of any advice for this problem will be "start working". The question is what mental frame to provide so that it actually happens.
I have a weird form of procrastination where I can’t get myself to read/watch content I consider myself an expert on. Probably something along the lines of it will prove I’m not an expert on the subject or something. So I compensate by telling people I’m not good at said thing. It probably comes off as self deprecation but it really isn’t.
Did you start getting into that topic/field as a hobby/passion and now it's just work?
Initially IT was just fun and games (for many people literally, just LAN parties, endless crazy things on IRC), then script kiddies grow up and have to prepare for meetings and review proposed standards :o
For me, I visualize myself doing the work. Thinking about working for long enough reduces the mental barrier to actually doing it.
The problem is often distraction, so turn off your screens and just think about the work you're not doing. Not the consequences of not doing it - the actual doing of the work.
The only one that works for me is "a little bit of something is better than none of something."
e.g., Don't feel like working out? Well, it's harder to commit to 30 minutes than it is to commit to 10 minutes, and 10 minutes is still beneficial. Who knows, you might accidentally go for 20 minutes.
The version I like is “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” Vacuuming the grossest parts of the floor is better than not vacuuming, even if I don’t bother to clean up all the toys and do a thorough job.
It may be funny, but if your mind is saying this will be hard and/or take a long time, then it’s surprising empowering to limit yourself to work on something for just ten minutes.
Start small has worked for me really well recently. Can I find 1-10 lines of css that I can fix first thing in the morning? Great. That is enough for me to actually get into code and get started for the day.
Start playing in a domain as closely related to the work as possible (i.e. explore a tangent you're curious about), then, if/when you gained some momentum try to identify a good stopping point try to smoothly pivot into what you should really be doing instead of stopping.
It doesn't always work, but every now and then it does.
Sure, the end stage is to work, but the first stage can be anything. Call a friend, ask a coworker to help, or peer programming, or look at the description of the task, keep a journal [like lab notes], write pseudocode, open an empty document and break down the task into smaller ones. add emojis if you want to to keep track of progress
A lot of people either don't understand or forget that options 2 and 3 in particular are very real. I know better and still sometimes forget. Particularly in my writing (my coding side it mostly comes to me continuing to put off a compiler idea I have because it feels so large). Reminders are good.
But it would be even funnier if the advice was something like "to start working don't start working", although I can see how this advice can be very attractive if you 're into counter intuitive zen aphorisms that make you feel smart.
I find it is helpful to have a baby step. For me, that’s: open my laptop and read my notes from where I left off. It takes almost no effort and nearly always gets me into the swing of things. When it doesn’t work, I just take time off (a perk of working for myself).
Procrastinate until you feel so bad about it that you fall into a depression. The only way to get out of the depression is to get started. It can take up to a few months/years, but it will get you started at some point. Works for me every time.
protip: if you develop a keen sense of anxiety, you can short circuit the depression.
of course, as a side effect, you'll start to only work, being wonderfully productive as the depression wraps everyone around you in your irritability blanket and snuffs the life out of your relationships
This used to work for me for the longest time until it slowly didn't. And then anxiety slowly kept building up since I stopped being as productive as before and it overwhelmed me to the point where I couldn't do any work.
oh, it wasn't real advice -- i was just having a bit of a dark sense of humor about mental health. apologies if this wasn't as obvious as i'd intended.
it does work, but as you note, it's not sustainable. It's horrible for the mind and body.
please take care of yourself -- overwhelm is the pits.
Haha yeah, thanks! It just hit a bit too close to home as I'm going through this right now where thinking about work gives me the shakes and I can't seem to do any sort of long term deep work.
Last time I felt like this it took a couple of months until I broke down completely and was fired, so take care of you!
If what's stressing you out is the work you have to do or where you're working, now is actually not a bad time to search for a different workplace. You don't have to prove anything to anyone if that means that your mental health takes a toll, and you'll not be able to prove anything anyways in such a state.
If it's something different then feel free to chat here, or write me via mail(if you want to vent to a stranger), or look after your mental health by visiting a professional, if that's possible for you.
Are you able to take any time off to decompress at all, or have a mental health professional you can talk to about it?
I'm fighting the urge to tell you all sorts of different things that I've tried and have helped me in that spot -- but I recognize that's probably not what you need.
do you have any sense of how a random group of HNers could support you? If nothing else, I hope knowing that you're not alone in the experience helps.
Don't worry, you aren't the first! Take care of and be good to yourself, even acknowledging the problem "out loud" here is a good start. (Like the article says, "start small!")
This would be a good way for me not to do anything for years. I suppose as long as I could fake working for that long and keep getting paid it could work....but then my skills would still suffer.
Here's one from Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder):
"If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing."
Narrowing the scope of what you need to accomplish is extremely effective. The best advice I've ever gotten for dealing with depression is to just do one thing at a time.
For example, if I'm sitting in a chair and I need to do something, I only need to try standing up. I can always sit back down if I don't have the energy to start walking. Most of the time, I keep going. The times I don't, well, I know I tried.
If you can define what trying looks like, then you know when you've tried your hardest and failed through no fault of your own. (For most people, it's a lot more than just five minutes!) Accepting failure makes moving forward in another direction a lot easier. Guilt isn't a good emotion to dwell on.
The important thing with this advice is to remember you probably don't know your limit. Most people keep more energy in reserve than they realize and they can afford to spend that occasionally. This means the advice to push beyond your limit is really good advice for most people. But for many people dealing with chronic health issues, we already tend to push beyond our limits and hurt ourselves. Thus we need the opposite advice. :)
Edit: I should clarify, by "dealing with depression", I mean trying to be productive when you are depressed.
I think this is somewhat similar to what I often do when I need to work on something and never seem to get started: Define the absolutely minimal next step very concretely.
Procrastinating on filing taxes. Next step is to log in to tax preparation app.
Procrastinating on cleaning office. Next step is to pick up a piece of paper off the desk and throw it away.
Whatever it might be, once I get to something absolutely concrete and absolutely doable... I can usually get started and make some progress.
It's much easier (for me) to procrastinate on "do your taxes" than "log in to tax prep app." Once it's that clear it's like... ok, why procrastinate on that?
This is one of the techniques I use for my depression and it does help me "deal with it".
In my case "deal with it" doesn't mean "make me not depressed": I'm still depressed but it does help me turn some some of my bad, hard-to-do-anything days into ok or even occasionally productive ones. And having something useful come out of a day I thought I would be useless is also helpful in fighting depressive thought loops about being a useless/lazy/bad person generally speaking.
Well, to start, you're literally saying "to deal with this particular symptom of depression, just don't have that symptom." That's extremely invalidating and completely denies the nature of depression as a condition. It's not something you just "get over" or "stop having." If it was that easy, a depressed person wouldn't need this advice. Getting started is very often the whole problem.
Ah, let me reframe what I'm saying. This is meant to apply to any task, including getting out of bed and going to the bathroom.
The advice is to break the goal down into the smallest possible pieces and start there. For getting out of bed, I'd probably start with rolling onto my side.
It's not a cure. It's not guaranteed to work. It's a strategy for expending as little energy as possible to get started. If you can focus on one small, actionable item, it can help reduce how overwhelming the entire task feels.
If you don't have the capacity to do something, there is no advice that will make that thing possible and no one should be expecting you to do it.
The problem is my procrastination brain knows this hack. It knows that once I do the 5 minutes I won't be able to stop and it doesn't want that. So it still doesn't let me start.
That can work but unfortunately it's not very reliable. Sometimes it just takes a lot of motivation to keep going, especially if the task is cumbersome from the start.
This does not work if you have ADHD. I've tried this, and I'm like: "Ok. 5 minutes, and I'll do the very simple task" and then it will be an hour later and I'm like "Oh no! More than 5 minutes has passed!"
I've tried setting timers too, and those help, but I also sometimes turn them off because I'm more focused on something else, and I don't understand what the timer is supposed to mean.
I find a lot of this advice is well intentioned, but it does not solve mental illness.
That works for many kinds of tasks, but not those that involve other people. For example, if you have to call someone it's not compelling to say "if I don't like talking to this person I'll just hang up after 5 minutes".
You could conceivably still make yourself an out for that. You could have an excuse for hanging up ready to go. Or, if you're talking in person, there are probably several apps that allow you to receive a fake phone call, and step away.
Some thoughts since I should have started working an hour ago.. right now the only thing working for me is to "practice" what I have to do since I no longer derive satisfaction from most of what I have to do each day to survive. I tell myself that I'm practicing doing chores so that I don't devote conscious attention to them, I pretend at going to work, going through my mountain of mail to pay bills, etc etc.
I just remembered where I was going with this: the practicing helped me remember learning certain tasks like brushing my teeth. So now I replay good memories of a task as I perform it instead of concentrating on the task itself. The higher the percentage of time spent NOT thinking about what I'm doing, the easier it is to start the task next time.
Maybe this doesn't make sense if you don't struggle with anxiety or haven't burned out yet. But for people who have, changes happen in the brain where it's hard to forget what happened, so you come out of the experience a different person, disillusioned. The games help overcome the mental logic that (often correctly) predicts bad outcomes after years of negative reinforcement loops. Spending more time daydreaming helps restore the feeling of novelty and being young.
Wow, this is exactly the comment I needed right now! I've long connected the source of procrastination with some kind of avoidance/learned helplessness behavior, but haven't been able to make much progress towards actually doing anything about it. "Just start doing it, even if it's only a tiny bit or done poorly" doesn't work when the stimulus of "start it" is exactly what is causing feelings of distress.
I really like the idea of "practicing in order to devote less consciousness to it". I think this works well for a lot of low-thought tasks that aren't very mentally stimulating. Not sure about those where it requires conscious effort (paying taxes) but it's certainly a new avenue I haven't tried before.
I often give myself a clear task, and then set a 10 minute timer, and make myself focus for just 10 minutes. This is usually enough to get the ball rolling, and let me overcome the hump of not wanting to work. It's a simple little trick, but is usually enough to help me focus for much longer than 10 minutes.
What usually happens with me is I do the thing for 10 minutes and then reach some logical breakpoint or a point that needs a context shift and I come crashing out of the "work zone" and back to square one where I don't want to do it any more.
I think there's room to be a lot smarter here. For example, is the thing you're trying to do a single time task or a habitual task?
If it's a habitual task, e.g. practice guitar or write my novel or get 1 hr of code review done, then the best thing to do in my experience is to associate the habit in your brain with a dopamine hit. For example, as you sit down to do code review, have a cup of coffee or maybe a sugary drink. Or as you sit down to practice guitar, have a twitch stream on. After 5 or 10 minutes, let your focus switch move over to the activity and turn off the video and continue the task.
But the point is, after weeks of this, the beginning of that activity will be tied to a dopamine hit for you. And then you won't dread the activity (but actually look forward to it!)
One year in high school I was in a mild panic the morning after Christmas break because I couldn't remember my locker combination. On the way to school I was mentally preparing myself for going to the office and asking them to help me. Then when I got to school, as I was taking things out of my locker I remembered that I needed to go to the office so I could... hold on. My locker is open. I opened it. What was the combination again?
Then I stood there probably looking like an idiot (mercifully I came in a bit early so it was a mostly empty hallway) spinning the dial around trying to recall what I just did a minute ago.
Perhaps you would be interested in my manuscript on depression. It turns out that the trick is to stop doing things depressed people do, and start doing things that depressed people don't.
I really think it's going to be a profound addition to the literature. I am thinking it's going to be a NYT best seller, but I can't seem to find an agent.
I recently came across an Aristotle quote that ‘happiness is a state of activity.’
I’m sure I’m missing the context and nuance, but I’ve started applying the quote to mean I can be happy in any activity, no matter how small or short in duration.
Has been working for me lately to get me moving on projects I’ve procrastinated on, but YMMV.
When I'm procrastinating hard on something, my best solution so far is to divide it to lots of tiny action items (~10 minutes each) and commit to doing at least one item every day.
Sometimes that's enough to get me in the mood and I can satisfyingly cross out a dozen items in one go; other times I'm not in the mood, and after just a few minutes I can check the box for the day and move on. The knowledge that in the worst case I'm just literally 10 minutes away from feeling good takes the edge off a lot of causes for procrastination.
Scroll HN for 30 minutes while agonizing on whether to commit to 3 hours of feverish debugging or just have a nice evening? No thanks, I'll just spend a few minutes setting up the debug environment in the most convenient manner possible, or find out just one tricky detail, and deal with the rest in the future.
Of course, not all tasks can be split up like that, YMMV etc.
Edit: if the task is big and just writing the todo list is too daunting, that too can be split up.
Also, despite the simplicity, obviously some days will be missed, and that's perfectly fine. In my mind it's not even "at least one item a day" anymore as much as just making the smallest unit of work less painful than the baseline suffering rate of procrastinating on something.
Something that can help is "greasing the path" to the task so you make it easier to start. Say you want to go to the gym tomorrow. Instead of thinking "I'll see tomorrow when I can go", you can block time in your calendar, get your gym bag ready by the door, text a friend to go together at an agreed time, etc.
Some of the tools I create for work are about fighting my own procrastination, half of the rest are about fighting the procrastination of others.
If your partner won't go to the gym, you can't make them, but you can make sure their gym clothes got washed. If your coworker won't do things, you can't make them, but their boss can, and that's easier if you've made the task more straightforward.
Here's my method: start by drawing on a piece of paper. Doodling helps with focus and is something you can’t really screw up. Do that for a while until your brain becomes more single-tracked. Helps me every time.
How about "start by helping another colleague" - it often feels like there are different reward systems in my brain for stuff I do "for myself" vs what I do "for others" - even if ultimately I'm just comparing two things the company that pays me wants me to do. I struggle far more with motivation on the "for myself" part, but if a colleague needs help with something I'm more than happy to jump in and provide it, and the act of doing so can be a pretty good impetus helping you refocus on your own tasks.
I am always most productive after actively focusing on rest. Today I solved in 2h what I've been struggling last 2 days because I went sunbathing, swimming and to cinema over the weekend and work didn't feel daunting anymore. I could chose to work over the weekend and try to complete because it because it felt like I am behind schedule but that's not a healthy nor correct way.
Hmm... I am big believer in mini-habits[1] and chaining habits. The way how I structure by day is to start off small with one habit then keep chaining it to other habits. For instance, I would start my day brush my teeth. It is a small easy habit to get going in the morning. Then, I will chain this habit to exercising. With exercising there are two versions... one I call my minimum and the other is my regular training regimen. My minimum is like 2 min or so of working out, something easy to do that can be replicated each day without any problems. Then, I chain my exercise routine with creating a todo list of the day. Which is chained to tracking my spending. My goal right now is to establish some evening habits. Right now I am little reckless with my evenings.
A lot of this stuff is great for when you're churning through some new features or a project you are invested in. Say for instance you have to find an issue in a legacy code base that is incorrect business logic and now you have to reproduce it, grok through tons of code, make some updates, rinse and repeat for a day or more.
Just start? stop reading HN and go read the code.
Start small? Open up my editor?
Start sloppy? Dump some printlns?
Anyway, time to go read* through some old cold fusion code I've been ignoring all morning.
There is no magic to want to work which is why you are being paid to do it or there is some form of incentive. The only advice I'd give is pay attention when you drive under bridges and overpasses and remember you're only a few bad decisions away from meeting your new neighbors, drive home and remember you get paid to tinker on a computer, then get to tinkering.
Articles about procrastination always fall into a "work when you don't feel like working" catch-22 that makes them hard to take seriously.
I didn't cure my procrastination until I internalized a sense of professionalism. I go to work like everyone else who goes to work. When I'm at work I have an obligation to my employer, my family, and myself to do what I'm supposed to do as well as I can. This also makes it easy to indulge in what I want when I'm off the clock.
If you can't get started, at least try and avoid distractions during your "professional" time. You can work or you can do nothing. That is typically uncomfortable enough to gain some forward momentum on a project.
For me, this means playing fewer video games, watching less television, and going to bed earlier.
There is a ton of other knock-on stuff that I can add to this, but doing less is the first thing. If your job eats every waking moment of your time and is paying less than 200k, it is time to find a new job... or move to a new city that isn't stupidly expensive.
We are all used to working in the office where pieces of work is cut out for us and the accountability is built in. This is the main problem, it’s hard to create a system that can replicate office setting without a real business already in track. These trick will only duct tape the big problem in front of you.
I always assumed work procrastination was the standard response if you're fairly divorced from the positive outcome of said work. For a majority of people working hard enough to stay employed is the goal; why would you exert yourself to make a corp more money?
One of my favorite quotes is “motion precedes emotions”. i.e. don’t wait around until you feel like doing something, just start and it’s likely that you’ll continue to want to so said thing.
Here's a better tip – get diagnosed and take antidepressants. All of the "just do it" bullshit motivational speeches in the world aren't going to work until you get to the root cause of the issue.
You need to shift into structured procrastination [1]. Play your tasks off of one another. Beware that sometimes you are avoiding doing truly important tasks, but you'd likely be avoiding those anyway so you may as well make use of their existence.
Haha, my ex always burst out in laughter, whenever she visited my place and found it spotless. Just meant a deadline at work was coming up.. :) She was never wrong (on this).
Are you talking about when you figure out you can make task A less onerous and avoid task B entirely if you do this other thing first, and then you can't get yourself to start on Task C because there's no immediate payoff?
Because if that's what you mean then I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. Lovely weather we're having, right?
There's no such thing as procrastination. There's definitely depression and the reason why many people "procrastinate" is because accomplishing tasks simply does not produce any feelings of reward in their brains.
Otherwise the natural aspect of wanting to do work would have kicked in and with it the loop of work hard -> reward cycle. Every single thing I've learned about productivity is wrong. If you ever go down the rabbit hole of productivity or battling procrastination the odds are that something else is very wrong.
As a person on the extreme end of the ADHD spectrum, this is a interesting take to me.
From a strict definition point of view:
> pro·cras·ti·nate
> /prəˈkrastəˌnāt/
> verb
> delay or postpone action; put off doing something.
I'm not sure if I agree with your assessment. That is, procrastination has no implication of why the action was postponed, merely that it is.
Procrastination is a symptom of depression, ADHD, and other disorders that impact productivity -- the actions do in fact get postponed. The neurological process driving the postponement is irrelevant to the classification.
I think perhaps a better phrasing may be "there's no such thing as laziness" -- laziness being an attributed cause of procrastination.
There's generally a reason other than laziness, but society likes to dismiss those excuses and instead insist that the person themselves willfully choses to procrastinate. This is of course incredibly unhelpful in every regard, but society loves a good opportunity to shame people outside a standard deviation of typical.
When you explain apologies to children, it often comes down to explaining to them that it doesn't matter what their internal narrative is, it matters what the other person's internal narrative is.
Yes, you didn't mean to hit Sally with a stick, and yet here we are, with one crying child, and you, protesting your innocence. You need to apologize. Even if it was an accident.
Similarly, you can avoid doing a task because you are mortgaging future you to deal with something you don't want to, or you can simply forget that it needs to get done. The motivation is different, but the outcome for the person who expected that you made a fancy dinner reservation you keep forgetting to make until after the last responsible moment is the same.
I think in part this is a big factor of tension around The Last Responsible Moment with respect to Agile and YAGNI. People know themselves or their coworkers better than the author does. The last responsible moment is quite a bit earlier than you'd think, once you factor in not only queuing theory but also illness and distraction. You're not being responsible if you haven't accounted for predictable failure modes, Parkinson's Law, and some extra buffer into the equation for Hofstadler's Law, and then some extra buffer into the equation for <checks notes> Hofstadler's Law, and some extra buffer into the equation for Hofstadler's Law...
For my money, you should tackle a task when it pisses you off. You will never be this motivated again. But I will qualify that advice by saying that one of my favorite passtimes is to invent Plan B and sometimes Plan C in my head, so at any given moment if you ask me to fix something, odds are at least 50/50 I have a coherent solution tucked away in the back of my head somewhere, instead of just throwing bullshit at the problem until it looks different, so YMMV.
Depression may be the only way procrastination surfaces for you, but it’s not the only way for others.
For one example, someone who knows themselves to do certain work well under pressure and even get a thrill from it, and who has many interests that “pay rewards” available to them at any time, may choose to procrastinate on work until there’s enough pressure to trigger that special lovely “no time to waste” flow state.
There’s no depression there, no lack of reward triggers, just a priority sort and a special extra reward for working in a certain pressured mode.
But it still looks like procrastination from the outside and still raises some inner dissonance over risk management and social conformity that make people fret over it as a strategy.
I get what they're going for, but it's sort of funny to me that the three 'tricks' to start working all amount to "well, start working".