People who struggled with procrastination and have now stopped, what made you stop procrastinating? What do you think were the factors leading or contributing to your past procrastination and how did you stop or improve the situation?
Please don’t answer with the “I’ll tell you later” joke.
They’re not browsing lemmy I’ll tell you that for free
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.
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.
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.
ADHD meds
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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.
Employing people that required me to “function”
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.
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).
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.
Medication.
I got diagnosed with ADHD and started methylphenidate. That coupled with changing to my dream job things have improved immensely.
That said I’m still not really happy in down time but maybe I’m just never really fully happy.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
