Worst periods for me were when I had one clear, important goal, not particularly hard but hairy, and nothing else to do, sometimes because I myself cleared it up. I could spend months doing nothing useful, and end up very, very tired and burnt up.
I also several times had a conversation with managers, whom I told that I'd rather work on something very urgent, or otherwise give me something NOT (really) urgent and a big murky area of things to clear out which no one else knows how to deal with. That something won't probably be done, but that area will be improved a lot in creative ways. Typical managers' responses have been trying to micromanage my time up to personal hourly schedules, morning and evening personal reports, and scold me if I did anything out of the order of the list of priorities they imposed on me. Exactly the opposite of what's needed for me to be productive. And of course "let's just try that, and I'm not asking."
Next time I'll see such a response, I probably will quit on the spot; this is unbelievably cruel.
But it looks like the secret of the author is: just work in academia.
I started some ADHD medication today. I have been able to see distractions and just not engage. I've got a bunch of things done. I've been able to cleanly focus blocks of time that I'd drift away otherwise. I do not have music in my head for the first time in *many many years*. I can stop and breathe.
I have absolutely no idea what would or could work for you, but your comment resonated with me and I wanted to help share something that feels like a big change for me personally and hopefully others. I waited decades to ask a professional and I absolutely should not have done that.
Your perception that you have been helped is not coming from the drug, it's coming from the conditioning before you got to the point of trying it. I was willing to put up with a lot of bullshit that would have to be rolled back if RFK just stopped prescription drug advertisements, which are definition targeted to the weakest people in their weakest moments, but that immediately disappeared from the agenda.
> Your perception that you have been helped is not coming from the drug, it's coming from the conditioning before you got to the point of trying it.
I’ve had lots of things that were supposed to help and didn’t. I was told this may or may not help and is the first thing that has made a real difference in decades. Other than taking stimulants before and finding it weird it made me very calm.
I do not live in your country and do not see any prescription drug adverts.
Wild.
Medication here is not exactly new.
...mental health medications, to my knowledge, that’s the only type of medication that when people find out you’re taking it, they feel this freedom to offer up their entirely unsolicited opinions about it, right to your face, it happens all the time...
Like nobody has ever been diagnosed with diabetes and had their ignorant cousin go, “You’re gonna take insulin?” “For now, right? You’ll get off that shit someday.” No one in human history has ever said the words, “What’s so wrong with your life that you need chemotherapy?”
Let me guess: you’d quit but your résumé’s out of date because you, like me, procrastinate updating it?
(Sounds like a manager trying to manage you out; make things miserable enough for you that you’ll quit without having to go through the redundancy process…)
Dammit, now I have to live the rest of my life thinking about that this might be a thing that's actually happening.
This is the norm from what management does to us.
Evil techniques managers use: Isolate the IC. Put IC on a legacy or deprecated work stream. Don’t give IC anything that could increase their longevity. Work politically to get others with you on an empathetic level, such that they understand this person is a drag, in some way that doesn’t make you look frustrated or a poor leader. As a manager, you control popular opinion without the IC even knowing. Micromanage the IC. This is a sure-fire way of ruining any IC.
While what the manager should do is: let the IC do their job, encourage them, foster their growth, and be positive about them to coworkers and others.
if the task requires requires leaving a stable equilibrium and moving to another, I will procrastinate. So things like "fixing these bugs" or "build a prototype" are fine, but "migrate this system from X to Y" are a problem.
It's because these are the tasks where you know things are going to get worse before they get better.
When I work, I want to fix things and shrink my to-do list (why yes, I am an inbox-zero kind of guy). These big migration tasks are the type of work where once you start, your to-do list gets bigger.
Unfortunately, while people that work like this can be exceptional, big projects run on organised measurable work. I have found few places big enough for a specific "Manager" role to be flexible enough to get a good match to tasks.
One thing slightly bothering me is that I have zero problem managing people both like me, and ordered stable focused guys, because I try to use people's strengths and put them on tasks which suit them the best. I've been CTO twice and can speak from experience. The only requirement for me is wanting to be useful in some form, we'll find a task, occupation, or feature lifecycle stage.
And managers who tried to put on me some kind of "personal improvement plan" clearly can work productively only with people exactly like them. Maybe they shouldn't be managers, a lot of good devs have some degree of ADHD, cutting them out or putting them in the box can't be good for business.
You end up with not exactly an intentional bureaucracy, but one where the idea of fairness from somehow "objective" numbers becomes a focus.
This kind of works at this scale, because you need to have a way to abstract and reason about the capabilitys of far too many people than you can know individually.
The training and materials don't scale down though, so you get someone trying to apply metric driven performance in cases where it just doesn't fit.
It's generally "ok" for big business, because projects at this scale can survive on rigid organisation, simply because achieving anything at that scale is a challenge enough to be valuable.
Occasionally you see inspired leadership, but every level of management it has to go through erodes it. It's part of why it's so rare for a big company to produce anything unusualy good at scale, it takes a real alignment of stars.
This post gives me hope as someone with ADD. I have a MTHFR mutation and cross-dominant eye, with a little autism spectrum, psychosis, OCD tendencies, depression, injury, sleep apnea, and insomnia.
I recommend eggs, spinach, potentially fasting, walking, and maybe some kind of fidget device.
I also recommend giving yourself a little slack.
If you’re like me, we don’t belong. We’re pirates when it comes to what’s expected of us. We don’t fit in. We’re made that way. We go all out until we can’t, and then we don’t until we do again. We’re hard on everything, but we care immensely and at the same time, we can’t feel. We exist to be that agent of randomness that does the unexpected thing that saves everyone that one time in a thousand.
Is it relevant to the topic of this conversation? Does it cause any effects, either positive or negative?
Now, after many years of applying stuff like this successfully for a couple months only to immediately regress at the first sign of life disruption, after an ADHD diagnosis & a bunch of therapy, this all seems like a fairly immature avoidant coping strategy in retrospect. I'm now fairly productive & don't procrastinate much (relatively speaking) and tbh I wish I'd read less of this crap in the past: I might've gotten help earlier.
That said, people with different executive function need different things. "Just do it" is about as helpful as "don't be sad".
To be clear, I'm not saying "just do it" or suggesting anything quick or easy. Quite the opposite: coping strategies like this are imo the "easy way out". I'm suggesting a much slower, harder path that leads to long term results (& can't be generalised, packaged & sold in a neat article as it's entirely different for everyone).
e.g. I would never do something that’s challenging, not mandatory, yet potentially beneficial like disputing a charge, requesting renumeration etc.
But I can put the docs in a folder, ask AI about the next step, ask it to take it or at least write the copy.
That seems to be a lot of reduced mental load and gets me do things I otherwise could postpone for months or never do.
There's a prompt I used while moving out, where I had claude ask me questions, what is in each room. And then once we had this item list, organizing it.
That's a powerful pattern also for engineering. Can recommend.
Via therapy I’ve come to realise that the procrastination is ultimately driven by underlying anxiety. That anxiety comes from growing up in an environment where my ADHD frequently resulted in me being punished for not working the same way other children did, not completing tasks as expected, and generally struggling with school work despite being “intelligent”. In short being in an environment that simply didn’t accept it was possible to be “intelligent” and struggle with school life at the same time, and thus punished me for being “lazy”.
The procrastination becomes a coping mechanism to put off the expected punishment from attempting to do a task, and failing/struggling with it. Along with deep associations with those tasks being given by authority figures and having arbitrary deadlines.
The mature coping mechanism has been to confront the anxiety head on, which is much easier said than done, and working on the underlying causes of the anxiety via therapy, mindfulness, and other pretty standard mental health techniques. It’s hard work, and I fail often, but I’ve been failing less and less as time goes on.
The side effect of dealing with the anxiety directly is less procrastination. Not because I’m better at not procrastinating, but simply because I’m getting better at coping and dealing with the anxiety that triggers procrastination.
If you are in a position to address the underlying cause directly, I've found it to be a better option than "coping". Therapy was a big part of identifying the problems. Ultimately, as a sibling commenter mentioned, task avoidance is often a sign of (usually very well disguised from oneself) underlying anxiety. I was always extremely confident & presented as "capable" but ultimately that was a shallow facade that became impossible to maintain over a long period.
I haven't stopped procrastinating but I do it far less & have a pretty good success rate with overcoming it when I apply myself. I'm not using any "tools" to do that beyond (hard fought) self-awareness.
100% identify with this & I would have made very little if any positive progress alone. I needed external help.
One example (of which there are many) is that external validation as a motivator is a big cause of procrastination in some people - working on things "for others" hits on a lot of complex issues around personal insecurities & ego. The idea that your work will be seen & judged can be a big factor in pressures & subconscious negative emotions around doing the work. Addressing motivation properly involves addressing those insecurities, rather than just "getting on with it" & using a temporary strategy to get it done.
That's an example, but it doesn't apply to everyone & it's never that simple for anyone.
There’s something the feeling is trying to warn me about, and sitting with it can help figure it out and let it go. A lot of my own stuff stems from school I think. The funny thing is it’s often totally illogical. Like a sense of panic comes up - “oh no! Someone will be mad I haven’t started this yet!” - yes well wouldn’t getting it done avoid that outcome? “no but it’s too late! They’ll yell at me when I turn it in!”. My brain associated “doing the task” with “getting in trouble” in a weird way, and that emotional program runs whenever something vaguely similar comes up.
The surface-level fear might cover up a deeper fear underneath too (something like, I won’t be ok, or good enough, or loved anymore).
All this emotional stuff has been a recent focus of mine ever since finding Joe Hudson’s work. There’s a good playlist on procrastination that’s relevant here: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrbct081G13-ot5FviKz1bt...
- The 2022 submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30292440): 6
- 2020 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24884347): zero
- 2018 contains a single reference to “ADD”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16948527
- 2017 contains neither “ADHD” nor “ADD” but a single reference to “ADDeral”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13618985
- 2015 has no references but I thought this comment was funny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10163857
The hallmark of ADHD is an "interest based attention system".
If you have ADHD, it may be completely shocking for you to hear that most people prioritize "extrinsically", meaning, whether or not something is "interesting" is *not* primary information in their prioritizations.
I never knew I had ADHD until I had a baby and had to start prioritizing tasks based on time.
And guess what, I can't easily prioritize on time constraints. Which is one of the two fundamental prioritization dimensions, the other being space (eg you only need one auth backend, pick one). I can do space.
Now I have no problem writing hours for each segment of a project and getting it within 100% error bars.
Where my life breaks down is daily tasks. I used to have a 5-7 PM sink. If I had a good day, I wrapped at 5 or just kept momentum to 7 PM. If I had a bad ADHD day, I just worked to 7, manufacturing urgency.
With a child you don't work til 7, so just lop off 10 of your 25-30 core productive hours for the week, unmedicated.
I suspect as I adjust I will come to see 2-3 PM as "ahh this is urgent because at 5 PM, death". But, at least I am medicated now and can work consistently at 9 AM.
Do you have anything I can follow up on for,
> most people prioritize "extrinsically" meaning, whether or not something is "interesting" is not primary information in their prioritizations.
I would have thought the quest for dopamine was pretty universal and there's a good friend in my life who has a serious case of ADHD.
https://www.additudemag.com/secrets-of-the-adhd-brain/?srslt...
Rather, every day whenever other more important chores or duties loomed, I'd notice one of my guitars laying around, in my couch or my bed or leaning next to my desk. And most times, I'd give in. There's always a new skill, technique, lick, or song that I'm working on, or something I've recently mastered that gives me joy to play.
If anything I think discipline would have hurt my guitar skills over the years.
(I'm very much into video games that scratch the same itch as software development does, but with games they give more instant gratification and they present you the next objective in a fairly structured fashion, but often without pressure. I've binged Factorio, now I'm back on Rimworld, where my people just do the tasks they are supposed to and only procrastinate when I allow it and / or when they have a mental breakdown from seeing too many dead bodies)
Much better career advise I've heard is: What kind you shit are you much better at suffering than other people around you seem to be?
Because work is work. There's a reason you get paid to do it. Sure it might be something that you are good at and care about, but if you need to work on it 8 hours a day, then you will inevitably start to feel the grind. This is why you get paid and go on vacations.
I could do blue collar work, but preferably factory work.
This is also true from my observations but what this writing misses is another much more crucial aspect: People with severe, general procrastination problems have a high chance of having (usually undiagnosed) AD(H)D. This is a neurobiological disorder (more precisely, a spectrum), not something you can trick away by reading self-help books/writings. There is effective medication available for those patients.
That said: there's definitely a price to pay for this. I'm very bad at managing energy levels, or making sure I do all of that in a sustainable way, so, it's super productive, until I'm not. At all. Usually quite suddenly. The risk for burnout is quite high.
I'm starting to accept that I'll never find the right balance, rather, I'm just getting better at recognising the symptoms that I'm headed towards burnout, and just accept that it's alternating periods of very high, intense productivity, and periods of basically nothing.
Putting one thing on my to-do list is the most surefire way of me not doing the thing.
I’m still a procrastinator, and the meds only solve so much of the problem. They aren’t going to put me in that “optimal” state for 16 hours a day. This article rings so true for procrastination, and I think the technique is still useful. It’s embracing the fact that my ADHD will let me focus on a difficult, but “less important,” task.
Interesting example. I have a weekend class next week and I’m supposed to read a book before it. Once it’s the day before, odds are 99% I won’t read the book. But I can sneak it in now while it feels less important. Ha, take that procrastination!
It's made me feel like it's not even worth getting a diagnosis because the only clear path forward is medication or eternal struggle with various much-less effective coping strategies. Anyone who can weigh in with their perspective on this is welcome and thanks in advance.
I can either struggle for the next 30 years with whatever I wished I was doing, and be always angry at myself, others, significant other and family, or I can take meds, bear the consequences (side effects really), but be happy for the moments where they do help and I can actually do what I wished for.
Took me almost 10 years to come to that conclusion, so take your time, but once I started my therapy and medication I was so angry at myself for not doing it earlier that it took me almost 2 weeks to shake out of it.
Feel free to check my other comment in my profile that describes my troubles.
My doctor let me change my dosage whenever I feel. She trusts me for this. She is also an ADHDer herself.
I've found that depending on circumstances I can do well with 10~20mg of the cheapest generic methilfenidate, non LR/XR/whatever, so in my country is USD 10/20 per month. I went as high as 50mg of the USD 100/mo famous ones.
Over time with my other therapist (psych) I trained myself to have some discipline processing my feelings, etc. Understanding the routines that were lacking.
Here it's common to have regular meetings the psychiatrist/psychologist combo. So different perspectives.
My biggest issues were knowing what to do, but not getting it consistently, like:
- getting x minutes of sunlight during the morning, and be consistent almost everyday
- drink water even on hyper focus moments
- pay more attention to breathing even when I'm in the zone doing a lot of apparently rewarding tasks
- trying to stop on unproductive hyper focus moments, realizing when they come
But the medication is necessary, since changing habits, specially the bad ones is harder.
I use the meds as an opportunity to understand myself and having easier time relearning my habits, and getting rid of the bad ones.
good luck!
- Not everyone experiences these things in the same way
- Your goals are for you to set; if incorporating meds into your plans doesn’t help you reach your goals, fine. But if meds help you unlock goals you might not be able to access otherwise, maybe they’re worth considering.
- The vast majority of professionals really do want to help you reach your goals; most psychiatrists (for the meds) and psychologists (for your cognitive health) are going to be more valuable in terms of perspective than an Internet thread :D
I still don't want to go this route, I had my ups and that was glorious. Also I hope to get a pilot license one day.
Crucially, it improves the quality of life for your loved ones as well.
This post is totally me: I do exactly as the author says, I procrastinate (just as writing this comment - I really need to do something else) and I learnt to use that to order my todo list, i.e., I literally organise my life knowing that if I want to get my tax return done, then its a good time to repaint the ceiling. Loo and behold, my tax return is done ... followed but much arm waving around why the ceiling never got done.
Not everyone should take amphetamines to be more productive.
The medication often works great, if you can get it to work for you.
For some people that's less of an option. Eg the appetite suppression that comes with stimulants might be a welcome side-effect in adults, but it's usually a big no no in children.
So that is my advice to you: if you want to do the book, add more things to the top of that list :)
Good luck and mention me on the acknowledgements! xD
But, at the same time I have been procrastinating on getting myself diagnosed. Oh, well.
Most adult diagnoses I've seen around me are people in their mid-30s, which is the same rough age as people start having burnout after spending their 20s doing all the things and growing into more responsible roles.
But that said, thanks to the internet, people learn to recognise the symptoms and know that there is help when they need it. In theory anyway, I know in the US and UK adult mental health care is expensive and/or unavailable.
I now suspect I would have had a better time had I opted for treatment. Perhaps not burned out in the first place.
My best time professionally was when I had a boss who was tolerant of my working style - disorganized, spread across multiple projects, no two consecutive days on the same project, happy to help other groups for the smell of novelty, sometimes rather too happy to do that, but able to solve technical problems deemed hard and engaging.
The NHS will accept you on waiting lists, if you're in one or two lucky regions, you have to wait a few weeks, otherwise you have to wait years. If you are in a very unlucky region, you can randomly get dropped from the waiting list, and effectively barred from ever getting back on it, because someone looked at the referral and diagnosed you as not having ADHD. Under the NHS you are not entitled to a second opinion (hence why you don't get to go back on the list).
So the NHS has this system called "Right to Choose" (RTC) where private care providers can register to offer services to NHS patients, charged to the NHS. You go to your GP and you say: "Hi, I noticed that if I go on the NHS waiting list for an ADHD diagnosis, it's uncertain if it will come before or after the heat death of the universe. Can you please refer me to this private provider of my choice instead?" And if your GP knows what RTC is, you get on the private provider's waiting list which is often between to 2w and 1y.
Cool, so that solves it right? Okay, but what happens once you're diagnosed? If you decide to go with the medication route (somehow it's either Meds or therapy but not both - what?), they give you a prescription. You take it to your local pharmacy to fulfil, and you fulfil it at the NHS prescription cost (currently just under £10 per prescription). You do this for a few months, trying different things until you find something that works for you. Now what?
Most providers will tell you to move to a "Shared Care Agreement". They contact your GP and say: "Hi, this person needs meds, they're stable on these meds, can you take over prescribing them." and for a while some GPs would be like: "Sure, that seems like the right thing to do in this situation."
Recently the advice has been for GPs to drop SCAs for ADHD medication. Why? I honestly have no complete picture. But the gist seems to be that it costs the GP practice time and money, that the NHS doesn't reimburse. IDFK. To me it sounds like people with ADHD are being used as a pawn in some idiotic game of chess between the regional NHS authorities and whatever higher-ups set the budgets for those regional NHS authorities. The current move is "People with ADHD get fucked+". I guess we're waiting for the reply from the higher ups. This is a conference chess game and who knows if the privately owned Royal Mail is going to actually deliver the letters in a timely fashion.
So now people who have been stable on medication for months to years are suddenly being told that they have 6 months to get an NHS diagnosis (which in most cases takes at least a year) or switch to a private provider that the practice likes (whose waiting list is now almost inevitably close to a year because everyone else is in the same shoes).
So now that you've successfully managed to deal with a bunch of bullshit, get a diagnosis, deal with the pains of titration etc, you are suddenly told you have 6 months before you'll undoubtedly become unproductive and struggle to hold your job.
And on the Nth day, the devil started creating Hell, and then stopped 5 minutes later because he realised that the UK already existed and would suffice.
Then there are worries that I might get dependent on the medicines and /or my tendency to form whacky spontaneous connections between things (a trait that I find amusing and unwilling to lose).
I know. I know, these are excuses. Thanks for the push.
I ended up needing a nudge from someone else to finally get to it, so let this be a sign that you can do it too! ;)
I have found that having a compassionate partner who knows when not to take your (meaning mine) bullshit and when to yield somewhat, helps a great deal. I am very lucky in that sense, but wish she was stricter. So yes, non-judgemental but unyielding nudges help a lot.
I don't read it later, HN is where I go to procrastinate, lol.
> Sympathetic Procrastination Rotor: a technique for Time and Task Management.
> To aid in the fight against procrastination, arrange all of your tasks in a cycle, such that the natural opportunity for procrastination is always another task on the roadmap. In this essay I will
> Site designed by the author's granddaughter, who did the work while avoiding the far more weighty assignment of her literature test.
Impressive for 1995, he must've thought her HTML and how to use a computer first
HTML 2.0 came out in 1995
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
that's HTML 1.0
Well, I started playing chess. And the same thing would happen, I would get this feeling. And I would start dropping pieces. I would play the opening out of order. I would try my very best to prevent these things and then run out of time. And it made me realize something - because chess is a microcosm model of thinking and knowledge work, more quantifiable and objective - it made me realize that I wasn't being lazy. I had in fact been completely correct when I thought to myself that I can't do this right now. It wasn't an excuse.
But also it made me reflect on my "a-game". It's simply not possible to always be on your a-agame, and you have to plan around that. Somethings are acceptable to do at a lower standard. Maybe it's okay having half-understood the book? Also doing things at your "b-game" is still practice even if the work is garbage.
Try that out. There is a reason why you don't want to do something and that fundamentally has to do with your mental relationship to the task - the repetition fatigue, the way you think and feel about it etc. needs a reset and enjoying the idle procrastination time gives you that.
IOW Zen mantra - when you procrastinate just procrastinate without resistance.
Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36433304 - June 2023 (1 comment)
Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33515388 - Nov 2022 (4 comments)
Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30292440 - Feb 2022 (37 comments)
Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24884347 - Oct 2020 (9 comments)
Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941717 - April 2018 (38 comments)
Structured Procrastination: Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long-Term - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10151481 - Sept 2015 (79 comments)
Procrastination and Perfectionism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287817 - March 2011 (29 comments)
Structured Procrastination - "the art of making procrastination work for you" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212590 - June 2008 (3 comments)
Procrastination as a concept exists to trick you into thinking that you should want to do the thing you don't want to do.
It's much better to just recognize that there's a lot of things I don't want to do, and there is no trick to make me like those things, and it will be miserable doing those things. Sometimes, I'll need to do things I don't want. No way out of it.
In my opinion, it's also beneficial to keep it simple. Instead of playing a game of "if I finish this side project, I'll be able to show it to others, then maybe I'll be recognized, then...", just keep it simple: do you want to work on it or not (does it make you happy?), right now? Do you need to work on it (to pay bills, to support children, etc), right now?
This way, you never procrastinate. You either succeeded at avoiding doing something you don't want to do, or you failed doing something you need to do.
Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33515388 - Nov 2022 (4 comments)
Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30292440 - Feb 2022 (37 comments)
Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24884347 - Oct 2020 (9 comments)
Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941717 - April 2018 (38 comments)
Structured Procrastination: Do Less and Deceive Yourself - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13617083 - Feb 2017 (78 comments)
Structured Procrastination: Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long-Term - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10151481 - Sept 2015 (79 comments)
Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2514972 - May 2011 (2 comments)
Procrastination and Perfectionism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287817 - March 2011 (29 comments)
Anti-Akrasia Technique: Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=939656 - Nov 2009 (4 comments)
Structured Procrastination - "the art of making procrastination work for you" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212590 - June 2008 (3 comments)
In particular, as a scientist I can report that the brain is particularly creative when it is expected to work on something else; it comes up with very interesting and original research topics that are worth being captured in writing (to be executed later on).
The main task can be attacked (better) with Structured Procrastination by making a TO DO list on which we divide it into many small tasks. During procrastination, picking and completing a small task from the list is typically possible, and relatively effortlessly so.
I want to understand the mechanism and purpose behind procrastination. It seems like there's a reason evolution chose for ADHD to exist.
In my experience, sometimes the frustrating signal telling me not to do the superficially "productive" thing is a defense mechanism against doing meaningless shit. It's a voice screaming at you, informing you of your mortality.
Well, evolution is not an actor. It didn't 'choose' anything. It's just that people (organisms?) with ADHD have not failed to reproduce in the past, so it still exists.
Yes, that's the real insight. You can be terribly unsuccessful by society's standards and yet immensely successful by evolutionary standards.
If you're broke/in prison/homeless/addicted/(whatever else you want to include) with 6 kids, you're evolutionary more successful than someone who has it all put together with 0 kids.
Evolution chose -> NOOOO, evolution doesn't "choose" anything -> Evolution chose
Personification of natural selection is a common way biologists speak about evolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...
Normally I don't rely too much on that feature, but this website is hard to read as-is.
This is wonderful framing. I love it
To the author: humans with large monitors can't read text that spills across those entire monitors! Add a max-width: 1000px or something.
Just stumbled on it by chance when I clicked the side bar menu.
This is the reason this method has never really clicked for me, despite coming across the concept in various procrastination blogs. It's the more important tasks that need doing the most, and this method aims to avoid doing those in favour of less important tasks. Yes, the article acknowledges this:
> At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.
But the offered solution is to put fake important tasks to the top of the list: tasks which have deadlines and appear to be important but really aren't. I don't think the human brain is stupid enough to trick itself in this way. If I put a fake task at the top of my list, I'm going to know its fake (because I deliberately put it there for the reason that it's fake!), and it's going to be the actual important tasks which get neglected instead of the fake one.
It’s not fake importance, it’s just taking advantage of the fact that you want to be seen as dependable and effective to other people.
I don't agree with this though. If someone is waiting for me to do something that I've promised, and I don't do it, I'm going to suffer the harm of stress, guilt, shame, etc. related to breaking my promise and people thinking I'm unreliable. I think this idea only works if we define "harm" in a very narrow sense to exclude the types of harms that come from the "important" task that we're going to deliberately avoid doing.
Furthermore, what an effective human is also something that you have to define for yourself.
Procrastination is considered a negative trait for a reason.
But this is simply not true in the real world. As the author notes, he has papers to grade and a mess of work to do in the evenings. These are important and have deadlines.
But the reality of the matter is that procrastinating them really doesn’t hurt anyone that much, and the benefit of just spending time with students is incredible.
If every problem is deeply important and has to be done yesterday, you wind up stretched very thin. It’s stressful!
I don’t think this is about creating a fake task at the top. It’s more about recognizing that it’s very frequently ok to procrastinate important things if you get value from what you did instead, and aiming to maximize that value. You’re tricking yourself, but in a way that fits how some procrastinators think. As he says, it relies on some level of self-deception.
And it should go without saying that there are obviously exceptions, and that it’s just one tool in the toolbox.
He read it as a teenager, and it became part of his personal philosophy. And so he used it to avoid feeling responsible for his own priorities, and struggled in every role he had for years.
He routinely derailed projects and created chaos by switching away from projects as soon as they became mission-critical. And he demanded an infuriating amount of managerial attention.
His absolute brilliance and charisma made this far worse, as his attitude was inherently culture-setting. The more impressionable employees around him would inevitably become worse than useless, while the more senior, mature employees ended up hating working with him despite his incredible impact on the thing he was paying attention to at a given moment.
Be convinced of this article's ideas at your own risk.
It helps to maintain extensive and detailed context notes so that doing this context-switching is easy.
Many great individual works in history were not produced in a "straight line" by the creator just sitting down and powering through them. They were produced as I described, in disconnected sprints over years and decades.