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.
I stopped drinking.
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.
Having to do lists and noting things in the calendar. Having clear deadlines really helps in my case.
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.
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.
Eh, just procrastinate tomorrow
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.
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.
Adderall
Sadly not available in my country, so concerta and rithaline !
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 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
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.
Starting the day with small achievable goals and building/keeping momentum. ADHD medication.
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.
