I have a few tricks for handling procrastination that are in this ballpark:
1. When I see myself wanting to procrastinate, I ask myself 'If I follow this feeling, will it increase my power (i.e. capacity/agency/utility) or decrease it?'. Then I have a dialogue with myself: Nope, let's refocus, maybe try reading things out loud or draw a diagram or some other perspective change OR Yeah, I should stop for now, do something else, as long as that increases my power.
2. I observed that usually procrastination really is tied to novelty, quite similar with how it's presented in the article so I did this thing: instead of going on YouTube or games I started typing exercises online. After some time, I realised that I could get better at typing and get some extra-novelty by typing an existing book! So I have a Tampermonkey script that, whenever I try to go on a random typing website, redirects me to a website where I can type books (I could push it as a gist if anyone's interested). It stores in Local Storage what page I reached and from where I left them of. I got to read On the Origin of Species this way and now I type around 100 WPM from 80 WPM.
Quite a lot. And I'd say that I process more info by typing than by simply reading. I typed the first edition and got the printed second edition too after.
I always searched videos of what he was exemplifying and found quite amazing material for many (enslaver ants, ants tickling aphids, honeycomb construction).
Was super impressed to hear about Darwin's peers which he calls out by name every time, how there were people specialised in breading races, judging what constitutes species.
Was kind of stunned to find out that people didn't know dogs were all the same species, how hard it was even for specialised breeders to identify that their pigeons were changing, since they were not really taking pictures.
How Darwin published a book that was approachable to common folks, how the book was built on mountains of hand-collected data.
There's so, so, so much more I could talk about (tree of life, organs, descendant resemblance happening at the same age, embryology weirdness) but biggest mind-fuck would be the anti-teleological stance he holds. Basically, out of nowhere (although I saw that he read Hume [0]), Darwin figures out that things don't happen 'for a reason'. Things don't live because they're 'better'. All the creatures we see today are simply the things that survived. There's no final goal, no 'ought to be' in the world. We're simply patterns that survive that resemble patterns that happened to survive.
The article identifies novelty and avoidance as separate drivers, but they're one mechanism viewed from two angles. The productive side tasks aren't just novel. They're safe. They generate evidence of competence without risking a verdict on the thing that actually matters.
The temporal discounting data is the most interesting part because it reveals something the article doesn't quite name: the older a task gets, the more it shifts from "work I'm choosing to do" to "work I should have already done." That transforms its emotional signature from opportunity to obligation, and obligations trigger avoidance regardless of whether you enjoy the underlying work.
The Zeigarnik point works against its own framing too. Multiple productive side projects create multiple open loops, all competing for the same working memory as the main task. The "productive" procrastination isn't just avoiding the main task. It's actively fragmenting the attention budget that the main task needs.
I hate that in our modern world, we are obsessed with being "productive". Why is this important? Why do we punish ourselves for being "unproductive"? Maybe we should try and spend as much of our time in things that are unproductive or unquantifiable as possible. Is having a relaxing afternoon the beach "productive"?
We've lost our ability to just "be". We must always "do". A sad state of affairs.
Sometimes procrastination means I’m not even suppose to do it. Maybe I just overheard an idea that sounded something “I should do” but there is nothing more to it.
How I hack this: I say to myself “I’m never going to do it” and there is an instant feeling if that statement is true or not. Then I either start it right away or let it go.
I believe everyone has a different strategy for this, so here’s mine in case it’s useful to someone:
I noticed that when I procrastinate, it still weighs on my mind, often more (cumulatively over time) than the actual discomfort of doing the task in the end. Now whenever I have the chance and enough mental energy, I attack the task immediately, so I don’t have to worry about it. Basically I've trained myself to want to avoid procrastination-induced stress. It only works if I have enough mental energy for the task tho.
The second trick I use, for bigger or more (perceived) challenging things, is saying to myself I’ll just start it and get it rolling today, so I don’t feel bad about completely avoiding it. Sometimes, I get carried away and just complete it, but even if not, it’s still easier to pick it up (a short while later) - a win in any case.
The whole of it seems more a question of an easily distracted mind. For one side because caveman brain looks away and does not adress the negative emotion , from the other because it's easily diverted from new shiny object. It's a question of effectively polish focus.
Budhist monks would simply do a mandala for the sake of it. Then they destroy it afterward, the whole purpose is to get some reps training focus.
Great article, especially appreciated the graphs. The idea of "keep adding novelty" is probably what separated my successful long term projects from the unsuccessful ones.
I previously attributed that to having lots of variety and freedom, but the consequence of those factors was indeed novelty.
I want to mention Neil Fiore's excellent book The Now Habit, which is a practical manual on overcoming procrastination. The core thesis is training yourself out of the Victim Mindset, with language like "I have to", and into the Producer Mindset, with language like "I choose to."
What's interesting to me is that this isn't an arbitrary choice. "I have to" is actually a delusion.
Think of the most extreme scenario. Someone has a gun and is "forcing" you to blow up a school. Do you "have to" do it? Or would it be better to say no?
If that freedom holds even in the most extreme scenario... doesn't it always hold?
Sometimes your options are truly terrible, but you always have a choice.
That might sound too philosophical, but I think that's an important distinction to learn to recognize in everyday life.
Because the failure to recognize it is what supports this delusion of "I have to", which seems to be the main cause of procrastination: the resentment and pushing against perceived loss of autonomy.
So my meaning here is that it isn't just more useful to think this way, as some psychological trick, but that it is actually more true as well.
Also the dead bot comment is right about the Unschedule! Another technique from the same book :)
I use that one and have found it provides a massive benefit to mental health, at least for my personality type which tends to be consumed with work.
In the "Unschedule", a.k.a. Guilt-Free Play Time, you deliberately set away time for enjoyable activities. You put them in your calendar. (And then you actually do them!)
This removes a major cause of resentment, "life's all work and no play" which drives that psychological resistance to work.
While I'm at it, I'll mention one more :) The Work of Worrying... for a situation you're avoiding, intentionally go through the worst case scenario, and then realize, actually, I'll still be okay. Even if that terrible situation happens... I'll survive, I'll move on, I'll be okay.
Interesting to effectively see Jean Paul Sartre being brought up here. As verbose as he was, though, I do agree with the framing. Putting aside the fundamental physical paradoxes and incoherence of free will, at the level of subjective experience, every action ever taken is a choice, possibly between extremely shitty options, but a choice nonetheless, and owning that is the only way I've ever found to stay sane about life.
That said, I'm not sure about the novelty thing. I'd rate the greatest long term project in my life as being staying fit, athletic, and healthy as I near 50, in spite of some horrible injuries and setbacks, and remaining thus far in a reasonably happy marriage. In both of those pursuits, novelty is almost the anthesis to success. People program hop and never improve, and substitute one-night stands and serial cheating for any form of lifelong relationship. To me, it is just habit-formation and basic discipline, trying to always remind myself what truly matters. Heck, it's probably even fear as much as anything else. I know I'm going to be hurting terribly in my 60s and 70s if I'm alone and unhealthy, regardless of what else I may have achieved, and if I wait until then to try and cram lifetime pursuits into a single decade, it'll be a lot harder than simply starting in my 20s, doing a little bit every week, and sticking with it in spite of how much of a grind it might be at times, because I know how much it will mean to future me and I have to make the choice that future me matters just as much as present me.
In contrast, I'm not convinced that consistently uploading a lot of videos to YouTube is all that important, but of course this guy is free to have his own priorities.
> the fundamental physical paradoxes and incoherence of free will
Are those even true? They sure are in classical, Newtonian physics, but are they in modern, e.g. quantum physics? Not saying that one proves free will, but is there an actual hard impossibility?
I get it but I still believe that the most efficient answer to productivity is discipline, all the tricks to trick (sorry for the word play) are just effort taken away from our work
I still believe the most efficient answer to productivity is not working and lots of resting, never do I reach higher productivity than after being idle for a while.
Well, I'd again say you can't afford to not rest in those cases, if you actually need to meet that deadline.
Probably every programmer have experienced the case of "Banged head against issue entire day, after sleeping and waking up the problem was simple". Sometimes, a nap or a walk or doing something else can trigger that same thing, but you skip the whole "banged head against issue entire day" if you do it immediately :)
We mostly use figma for brainstorming and RICE-scoring, which can be hard work. Hence my lukewarm reaction. My other reaction was "cool, how’d he do that".
Alternatively, you must be okay to have lifelong struggle and always feel inferior to everyone around you basically doing stuff effortlessly while you suffer.
There is non-stimulant medication as well for ADHD. If you're really struggling, it might be worthwhile to suspend judgement and actually try these out for a while. In the worst case you go back to how you were without medication. For many people the potential upside is worth the experiment.
Several people on my department got that recently. Clearly in fashon. But it seems just a license to be lazy
If you know you have dificulties you need to work on bettering yourself, small steps, not find a justification or mask it with drugs
And with the widespread addiction of social media, youtube... frequent world crumbling news, boring jobs... most people would qualify for some sort of diagnosis, which is misleading
I have a few tricks for handling procrastination that are in this ballpark:
1. When I see myself wanting to procrastinate, I ask myself 'If I follow this feeling, will it increase my power (i.e. capacity/agency/utility) or decrease it?'. Then I have a dialogue with myself: Nope, let's refocus, maybe try reading things out loud or draw a diagram or some other perspective change OR Yeah, I should stop for now, do something else, as long as that increases my power.
2. I observed that usually procrastination really is tied to novelty, quite similar with how it's presented in the article so I did this thing: instead of going on YouTube or games I started typing exercises online. After some time, I realised that I could get better at typing and get some extra-novelty by typing an existing book! So I have a Tampermonkey script that, whenever I try to go on a random typing website, redirects me to a website where I can type books (I could push it as a gist if anyone's interested). It stores in Local Storage what page I reached and from where I left them of. I got to read On the Origin of Species this way and now I type around 100 WPM from 80 WPM.
Could you share the Tampermoneky script in the gist? Would love that.
Yes, please share it!
But how much have you learned about the Origin of Species?
Quite a lot. And I'd say that I process more info by typing than by simply reading. I typed the first edition and got the printed second edition too after.
I always searched videos of what he was exemplifying and found quite amazing material for many (enslaver ants, ants tickling aphids, honeycomb construction). Was super impressed to hear about Darwin's peers which he calls out by name every time, how there were people specialised in breading races, judging what constitutes species.
Was kind of stunned to find out that people didn't know dogs were all the same species, how hard it was even for specialised breeders to identify that their pigeons were changing, since they were not really taking pictures.
How Darwin published a book that was approachable to common folks, how the book was built on mountains of hand-collected data.
There's so, so, so much more I could talk about (tree of life, organs, descendant resemblance happening at the same age, embryology weirdness) but biggest mind-fuck would be the anti-teleological stance he holds. Basically, out of nowhere (although I saw that he read Hume [0]), Darwin figures out that things don't happen 'for a reason'. Things don't live because they're 'better'. All the creatures we see today are simply the things that survived. There's no final goal, no 'ought to be' in the world. We're simply patterns that survive that resemble patterns that happened to survive.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
The article identifies novelty and avoidance as separate drivers, but they're one mechanism viewed from two angles. The productive side tasks aren't just novel. They're safe. They generate evidence of competence without risking a verdict on the thing that actually matters.
The temporal discounting data is the most interesting part because it reveals something the article doesn't quite name: the older a task gets, the more it shifts from "work I'm choosing to do" to "work I should have already done." That transforms its emotional signature from opportunity to obligation, and obligations trigger avoidance regardless of whether you enjoy the underlying work.
The Zeigarnik point works against its own framing too. Multiple productive side projects create multiple open loops, all competing for the same working memory as the main task. The "productive" procrastination isn't just avoiding the main task. It's actively fragmenting the attention budget that the main task needs.
I hate that in our modern world, we are obsessed with being "productive". Why is this important? Why do we punish ourselves for being "unproductive"? Maybe we should try and spend as much of our time in things that are unproductive or unquantifiable as possible. Is having a relaxing afternoon the beach "productive"?
We've lost our ability to just "be". We must always "do". A sad state of affairs.
Maybe it’s feels important/necessary as it can give a feeling of control.
Things are uncertain(were they ever certain?), every day there is another armageddon prophecy screaming at you from social media and newspapers.
So one can try to hedge, squeeze more out of oneself to make sure he did all he could.
Sometimes procrastination means I’m not even suppose to do it. Maybe I just overheard an idea that sounded something “I should do” but there is nothing more to it.
How I hack this: I say to myself “I’m never going to do it” and there is an instant feeling if that statement is true or not. Then I either start it right away or let it go.
I believe everyone has a different strategy for this, so here’s mine in case it’s useful to someone:
I noticed that when I procrastinate, it still weighs on my mind, often more (cumulatively over time) than the actual discomfort of doing the task in the end. Now whenever I have the chance and enough mental energy, I attack the task immediately, so I don’t have to worry about it. Basically I've trained myself to want to avoid procrastination-induced stress. It only works if I have enough mental energy for the task tho.
The second trick I use, for bigger or more (perceived) challenging things, is saying to myself I’ll just start it and get it rolling today, so I don’t feel bad about completely avoiding it. Sometimes, I get carried away and just complete it, but even if not, it’s still easier to pick it up (a short while later) - a win in any case.
The whole of it seems more a question of an easily distracted mind. For one side because caveman brain looks away and does not adress the negative emotion , from the other because it's easily diverted from new shiny object. It's a question of effectively polish focus.
Budhist monks would simply do a mandala for the sake of it. Then they destroy it afterward, the whole purpose is to get some reps training focus.
Great article, especially appreciated the graphs. The idea of "keep adding novelty" is probably what separated my successful long term projects from the unsuccessful ones.
I previously attributed that to having lots of variety and freedom, but the consequence of those factors was indeed novelty.
I want to mention Neil Fiore's excellent book The Now Habit, which is a practical manual on overcoming procrastination. The core thesis is training yourself out of the Victim Mindset, with language like "I have to", and into the Producer Mindset, with language like "I choose to."
What's interesting to me is that this isn't an arbitrary choice. "I have to" is actually a delusion.
Think of the most extreme scenario. Someone has a gun and is "forcing" you to blow up a school. Do you "have to" do it? Or would it be better to say no?
If that freedom holds even in the most extreme scenario... doesn't it always hold?
Sometimes your options are truly terrible, but you always have a choice.
That might sound too philosophical, but I think that's an important distinction to learn to recognize in everyday life.
Because the failure to recognize it is what supports this delusion of "I have to", which seems to be the main cause of procrastination: the resentment and pushing against perceived loss of autonomy.
So my meaning here is that it isn't just more useful to think this way, as some psychological trick, but that it is actually more true as well.
Also the dead bot comment is right about the Unschedule! Another technique from the same book :)
I use that one and have found it provides a massive benefit to mental health, at least for my personality type which tends to be consumed with work.
In the "Unschedule", a.k.a. Guilt-Free Play Time, you deliberately set away time for enjoyable activities. You put them in your calendar. (And then you actually do them!)
This removes a major cause of resentment, "life's all work and no play" which drives that psychological resistance to work.
While I'm at it, I'll mention one more :) The Work of Worrying... for a situation you're avoiding, intentionally go through the worst case scenario, and then realize, actually, I'll still be okay. Even if that terrible situation happens... I'll survive, I'll move on, I'll be okay.
Interesting to effectively see Jean Paul Sartre being brought up here. As verbose as he was, though, I do agree with the framing. Putting aside the fundamental physical paradoxes and incoherence of free will, at the level of subjective experience, every action ever taken is a choice, possibly between extremely shitty options, but a choice nonetheless, and owning that is the only way I've ever found to stay sane about life.
That said, I'm not sure about the novelty thing. I'd rate the greatest long term project in my life as being staying fit, athletic, and healthy as I near 50, in spite of some horrible injuries and setbacks, and remaining thus far in a reasonably happy marriage. In both of those pursuits, novelty is almost the anthesis to success. People program hop and never improve, and substitute one-night stands and serial cheating for any form of lifelong relationship. To me, it is just habit-formation and basic discipline, trying to always remind myself what truly matters. Heck, it's probably even fear as much as anything else. I know I'm going to be hurting terribly in my 60s and 70s if I'm alone and unhealthy, regardless of what else I may have achieved, and if I wait until then to try and cram lifetime pursuits into a single decade, it'll be a lot harder than simply starting in my 20s, doing a little bit every week, and sticking with it in spite of how much of a grind it might be at times, because I know how much it will mean to future me and I have to make the choice that future me matters just as much as present me.
In contrast, I'm not convinced that consistently uploading a lot of videos to YouTube is all that important, but of course this guy is free to have his own priorities.
> the fundamental physical paradoxes and incoherence of free will
Are those even true? They sure are in classical, Newtonian physics, but are they in modern, e.g. quantum physics? Not saying that one proves free will, but is there an actual hard impossibility?
I get it but I still believe that the most efficient answer to productivity is discipline, all the tricks to trick (sorry for the word play) are just effort taken away from our work
I still believe the most efficient answer to productivity is not working and lots of resting, never do I reach higher productivity than after being idle for a while.
Yes, I agree, but if you have work to do and a deadline you can't afford resting until you deliver right?
Well, I'd again say you can't afford to not rest in those cases, if you actually need to meet that deadline.
Probably every programmer have experienced the case of "Banged head against issue entire day, after sleeping and waking up the problem was simple". Sometimes, a nap or a walk or doing something else can trigger that same thing, but you skip the whole "banged head against issue entire day" if you do it immediately :)
Well, sometimes a 15minute walk will do wonders and you are fresh and can achieve more in the following 15min.
Stop minmaxing. Not everything has to be perfect.
See structured procrastination for a slightly different approach.
https://structuredprocrastination.com/
In reference to the first line, how can it be possible to skip rope with seaweed? Is it really that strong?
There are many different types of seaweed, and some, like kelp, can be very strong: https://www.instagram.com/p/DQZjvH1iYnB/
How to disable seeing other viewer cursors on screen? Makes it unreadable
Yeah, sorry about that. Not really made for many visitors at the same time. I’ll add a limit. (update: removed the cursor interaction from blog posts)
What's the purpose of having this at all?
It’s meant to be a fun reference to Figma, since it’s my design portfolio. I gather you’re not a fan. Noted!
We mostly use figma for brainstorming and RICE-scoring, which can be hard work. Hence my lukewarm reaction. My other reaction was "cool, how’d he do that".
scroll down and click turn turn off fancy cursors
If you struggle with procrastination please get assessed for ADHD.
A positive diagnosis is life changing.
Only if you are okay with the idea of taking stimulant medication.
Alternatively, you must be okay to have lifelong struggle and always feel inferior to everyone around you basically doing stuff effortlessly while you suffer.
There is non-stimulant medication as well for ADHD. If you're really struggling, it might be worthwhile to suspend judgement and actually try these out for a while. In the worst case you go back to how you were without medication. For many people the potential upside is worth the experiment.
Note that not being okay with that idea is a symptom of ADHD. Talk about it with your psychiatrist.
Several people on my department got that recently. Clearly in fashon. But it seems just a license to be lazy
If you know you have dificulties you need to work on bettering yourself, small steps, not find a justification or mask it with drugs
And with the widespread addiction of social media, youtube... frequent world crumbling news, boring jobs... most people would qualify for some sort of diagnosis, which is misleading