They're not browsing lemmy I'll tell you that for free
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Well hello there fellow procrastinator.
Having less of the perfectionist mindset and more of the "80% quality". Bad experiences from procrastinating helps you learn too.
This. It took a damn long time but I finally realized that at least doing something lackluster is better than doing nothing at all. "But if I start now I'll never catch up" well, at least I can catch up a little instead of doing nothing.
Well, that, and actually failing a big life objective because of procastination.
Same boat. I decided shit does not have to be perfect but by doing so and getting down to the work, I think I am getting far more done and on average I am now coming out with end results that are often better then when I was striving for perfection.
ADHD meds and therapy. I tried a ton of different methods, but ultimately I was procrastinating for two reasons. 1) my brain finds the things I need to do under stimulating, which feels like pulling teeth, so it looks for stimulation elsewhere and draws me to a different task. ADHD meds give my brain the proper amount of stimulation/reward for doing things that need to be done. 2) for a variety of reasons, I had an underlying current of anxiety around the possibility of failure. Much easier to avoid failure if you avoid ever doing the task. Therapy helps me reason through the anxiety, and realize that I am essentially already failing by not trying, so trying involves a risk of success rather than a risk of failure.
Edit: I still procrastinate plenty, but significantly less than I used to. It no longer reaches a point of nearly ruining my life, now it is just an average level of procrastination compared to my peers. Instead of avoiding tasks for weeks, months, or years on end, I avoid them for a few hours, maybe days at most (if I have the luxury).
Same here.
Research suggests the combination of ADHD and anxiety leads to the worst type of procrastination.
ADHD meds and therapy allowed me to break the cycle and learn new habits.
Now I'm mostly off the meds and the habits I learned on the meds still help me a lot.
Likewise. Meds help me ...but so did therapy. I still have to have the mindset right. If I do and I'm on meds then it actually works.
I totally believe (without any evidence but my own experience) that procrastination for me with ADHD is at least partly a response to prior unhappy experiences.
Now that I recognize some of the emotional components involved I can work through those directly and have a much better chance of getting motivated .
And also I still procrastinate plenty and I have come to avoid self judgement. Because beating myself up doesn't help me get motivated. It does the opposite. I accept that this is a tendency but one that I continue to improve upon.
Lists. always lists. A hot sheet of 4 quarters, what I need to take care of soonest (top left), what can wait (top right), shit I forgot (bottom left), things that can keep in mind but have to be taken care of later/long term projects. Also, if I get to this list later in the morning and I have completed some items, I always write them down and then cross them off...it's a trick to keep your mind progressing.
I started planning procrastination as a daily activity I need to do. And I don't really wanna, so I stopped.
Doctors hate him! He baffled the medical world with this one simple trick to master procrastination. 🤫 #ProcrastinationPro
Starting the day with small achievable goals and building/keeping momentum. ADHD medication.
Recognized that it was part of what makes me successful and learned to control it a little. For example, when I struggled with getting things done on time, I learned to set deadlines for myself and stuck to them. I realized that I work better when I know I'm a little up against the clock, so I kind of built that in for myself. The hard part is the not moving the deadline. You can't view it as moveable or it doesn't work.
I also ask myself "how long is it going to take" and most things if the answer is less than five minutes, I just try to force myself to do it and get it out of the way.
For other recurring things I do them on a schedule. So like, every weekend there are things around the house I need to do. It doesn't matter when I do them but I have to get them done the day I say I will. That's the deal Iake myself and it helps.
Those are some of my personal hacks. They don't work for everyone but they work for me.
Things I find myself saying frequently, to spur me beyond inaction:
Don't let perfection be an enemy of what's good
The only way to find out is to do it. Or, only way to know is to try.
Done art my entire life, and have learned even when I produce failure, I learn from these mistakes, and over time improve.
I get so wrapped in my head, plan things to death, to inaction. Like 2 days ago, been wanting to make my own wound salve. I could've waited, kept researching, to death, but impulsively bought few ingredients on Amazon. Got the ball rolling way more quickly.
The only way to break out of a slump is to try something. I don't know what will happen. But intellectually I know decisions, actions breed more possibilities, expanding one's world.
Go big or go home. Play Sims, and have an idea to build a house with a huge tree in the living room? Do it, make bold choices, take risks. That's the only way we can evolve.
Dan Harmon once responded in a similar way on an AMA. It was about writer's block, but I feel it's the same principle.
My best advice about writer's block is: the reason you're having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it's the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from "writing well" to "writing badly," you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don't like to admit it, because we're raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let's just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that's a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn't going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it's no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one day write something good" to team "I have no choice but to write a piece of shit" and then take off your "bad writer" hat and replace it with a "petty critic" hat and go to town on that poor hack's draft and that's your second draft. Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn't make abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester. Happy hunting and pecking!
This is great. Although...
when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it.
I wish! "Fix" is wayyyy too optimistic.But maybe, just maybe, I could make it suck a tiny bit less. Still left with utter garbage, of course. Okay, well didn't you just say you could make it suck a tiny bit less? So do it again. And again, and...
I still struggle with it, but one thing that I've been learning lately is that little improvements at a steady pace is way more impactful than it feels like in the moment.
I often find myself putting of large tasks because I think that they will take so long and there is no point in breaking them up into little pieces because it will take so long.
The irony is that if I had just done a little bit of work once a week on the project consitently, it would have been totally done long ago. But me putting off any work until I feel like I can get it all done at once is ultimately what causes it to never be done.
TL:DR, even if it's 5-10 minutes once a week, do at least that on a large task or project. You'll be surprised how fast that will get things done even though in the moment it feels like it's not worth it.
This has been a godsend for me because my personal obstacle is always just getting started. So I give myself permission: I’m only going to do 15 minutes of this huge task today.
More often than not, once I get started I just keep going. But I give myself the freedom to stop and if I do, hey at least some of it got done!
Same!
Adderall
Sadly not available in my country, so concerta and rithaline !
When I got a job that was constant priorization of tasks I found that it carried over to my personal life. I would get home and bang out everything that needed doing then relax for the rest of the night.
I quit my job so now I have all the time in the world and I still only get 60-80% of the things done. And I really need to force myself to do it.
Momentum is huge for me too. Whenever I start my day with a meeting (aka forced to jumpstart work mode), the rest of my day is smooth. On days when I don’t have a morning meeting or reason to get started by X time, it just sliiiiiides until it’s 3pm and I’ve done nothing lol.
I think momentum does indeed play a role. I remember when I do things to "get my life back on track" such as cleaning the house, going to the meetings I am supposed to go to, doing some activities I tell myself I should be doing, then the next few days I'm very productive, but then at some point fall back to where I started.
I stopped drinking.
I've been stuck in a procrastination spiral for a while now.
I want to pursue my dream career, but a fear of failure and worrying I won't be able to learn what I need to means I keep putting it off. But then the act of putting it off makes me feel guilty.
ADHD meds
At some point I just realized something. Stop putting more stuff of future you. He's probably already got enough going on.
I learned that many things take less than 5 minutes and the joy of having something finished felt way better than putting it off
When I deleted my reddit account many years ago, my productivity skyrocketed. It has now dipped considerably since I started using Lemmy, so I’ll probably stop doing that soon.
It’s not just the extra time you get from not using the site; there’s a very real effect on my ability to focus on tasks when I don’t have Reddit/Lemmy as an escape hatch.
I thought that losing my 10yo+ account would hurt, but it turned out that I didn’t give a shit.
When I deleted my reddit account many years ago, my productivity skyrocketed. It has now dipped considerably
I remember having the same experience, but I don't know if it was just a side-effect of having stood up and decided to do something about procrastination. Nevertheless I think I may again edit my /etc/hosts file and set some sites to 0.0.0.0.
There is some interesting research on procrastination as an emotional problem. It's important to note the difference between procrastinating and being lazy. Procrastination is typically productive (I am cleaning the house or being active and engaged in some way instead of writing that term paper) and laziness is not (I haven't eaten or bathed because I don't want to and my ass is glued to the couch while I passively watch TV).
The main hook into procrastination is that your subconscious percieves a low emotional return for the task to be performed. Instead it finds any other task it percieves to have a higher emotional reward and sets you about doing that instead.
It helps to intentionally focus on how good it will feel to complete the task you are putting off, and so you sort of hijack your own brain.
I would like to make a distinction between laziness and executive dysfunction, which can look like laziness at a surface level. It’s very common for people with undiagnosed ADHD to absolutely hate themselves for their inability to willpower themselves out of being lazy.
ADHD in particular doesn’t just perceive a low emotional return for work invested, it fails to produce the chemicals that give a higher emotional reward in the first place. People with executive dysfunction can’t just convince themselves that the task will feel good once it’s complete, because the brain almost never actually feels good after completing the task. Trying to focus on the good feeling doesn’t work, because there is no good feeling. This is why, for people with more severe ADHD, behavioral/attitude adjustments hardly ever help, and medication is necessary to make the behavioral/attitude adjustment stick.
Of course ADHD is a spectrum, so everyone’s mileage will vary, each person will have different “tricks” that work for them to hijack their brain. And people with ADHD aren’t the only people who experience executive dysfunction.
Besides getting medicated, I started using this website called goblin.tools - it uses chat GPT to break down tasks into tiny steps. You can do each step recursively, until it's something you can finally make your brain do. That way it gets rid of the executive function planning step so that you're not exhausted by the time you start whatever you're doing.
Employing people that required me to "function"
When my wife asks me to do something suddenly I stop procrastinating on my tasks.... however the thing she asked me to do... well...
But in all seriousness my medication helps me focus a lot but doesn't solve all my problems. I find thinking of the bad outcomes if I was to procrastinate longer, helps a bit.
My case isn't as serious as some of the comments around here, but mostly it's deciding that I don't care how I feel about the task at hand. This only works for things that don't require a lot of concentration, but for example you go "I'll do this and now" and just do it no matter how much you feel like using Lemmy or yt. It helps to think of how whatever it is you wanna do to waste your time, it feels better to do it when you're free than when you're busy.
Damn, I wanted to answer with that joke...
I'd say I still procrastinate but less. The main factor is it make me feel anxious of not finishing stuff so I wanted a solution.
The way I'm improving is to look at big tasks into smaller steps which are easier and quicker to accomplish, this way I feel better since there's something I finished even when the big task might be still a long way of being finished.
I remember something about 2 minute tasks or something like that, but also I saw this from my job, splitting projects into epics and each epic into tasks and even then you could split them into sub tasks (taken from the Jira types at my job)
Having to do lists and noting things in the calendar. Having clear deadlines really helps in my case.
I don't think I have stopped struggling with it. But removing some distractions has definitely worked. Windows was a big one. So many popups and bullshit. Stopped using social media entirely for some time. Just blocked the websites and the apps. Stopped using YouTube. Always made sure to leave the house and go to a library or cafe in the morning where there are less distractions. It works well.
Eh, just procrastinate tomorrow