As someone who procrastinates, I've yet to come across a true "cure" for the habit. "Forgive yourself" is such a vague and abstract mantra that I don't even know how to actualize the advice.
I think the worst explanation for procrastination I've come across is that it's caused by not truly enjoying the activity that is being procrastinated upon. But if that were really the case, then the remainder of my life would be spent sitting in a chair reading useless articles online.
Other questionable explanations I've stumbled across include: being unable to bond empathetically with your future self, that the procrastinator's brain has a [insert neurotransmitter of choice] deficit, that fear of failure keeps one from starting, that too much is tackled at once, and so on.
When I try to recall what has given me the greatest sense of fulfillment in life, everything I can think of is something I worked really hard to achieve. That which contents me momentarily does not seem to coincide with that which provides overall life contentment. I don't necessarily seek happiness — I would rather have demanding work that positively impacts the world over some job that allows me to surf online all day.
What's funny is that I procrastinate only with regard to intellectual activities — not physical ones. Getting myself to exercise is no trouble at all. But prodding myself to finish a VPTree implementation... that's much more difficult. My hypothesis is that I procrastinate on those things that I was naturally good at during childhood. Academically, I was decently above average (well, at least up until college), so I never had to study. I always completed homework at the last second before it was due, and I crammed most of my test studying into the night before the exam and then promptly forgot the material as soon as I walked out of the classroom (as I'm sure many of you have noticed, this "strategy" doesn't work nearly as well in college, and it fails dramatically in grad school).
On the other hand, when it came to sports, it was pretty much a guarantee that (at least initially) I would naturally be the worst out of everyone participating. I was determined to improve though, so I developed training schedules and religiously followed them until I got the results I wanted. I think that habit has stuck with me, and I still have no trouble starting an exercise regimen.
I'm just another chronic procrastinator and from what I've experienced there is no single "cure". Here's where I stand in trying to solve my own procrastination problems:
- Removed myself from things that enable procrastination; I installed software (Coldturkey) that blocks websites and programs on my computer(games), and I won't be able to change the configuration of Coldturkey for another couple weeks.
- I have a calendar next to my work area, I get a red X on days that I do a reasonable amount of work; I got this from Jerry Seinfeld's method of getting better at something, "Don't break the chain!" of red X's.
- I often ask myself "what sort of person do you want to be? Do you want to be remembered as someone that did a half-assed job most of the time? Or do you want to be remembered as someone that killed it any chance he got?"; that sometimes gives me a little push to get stuff done.
- I am always behind in my mind.
- I've been working on making a habit of following through to the end anything that I am tasked with; I have unfinished stuff but there is less than there used to be.
This is just what I've come up with for myself. It's just come down to not trusting myself, so I try to make it so I don't have to.
> It's just come down to not trusting myself, so I try to make it so I don't have to.
Very wise words in my experience. I think of it more as understanding yourself and setting yourself up for success. Make it hard to do the things you want to avoid and easy to do the things you want to embrace. If I have healthy food premade on hand I'm more likely to eat it rather than pick up a cookie from coffee shop down street. If I'm meeting my buddy to work out or surf I'm way less likely to skip it. Recognizing that you're unlikely to change established behaviors easily and having a plan to reward behaviors you want to cultivate and reduce the ones you want to get rid of.
Having kids particularly drove this home. Setting them up for success with good sleep, good food and a good environment of activities makes a world of difference for them and turns out same is true for myself.
What about mixing things you like with things you don't like? For example, you have to build a web app. So you start implementing a little framework (things you like) and then use it to finish the project. That way it takes more time but you enjoy it. I found out over the years, taking into account all my good, mediocre and bad results, that I did my best work when I enjoyed it, as silly as it sounds. It doesn't matter that I waste 50% of the time if I get the job done and enjoy it. The alternative is to do it even slower and disgusted.
I think procrastination is a kind of anxiety. We enjoy the creative parts and fear the complexities of debugging that monster when it's 99% done. We need to switch back to enjoyment to get in the flow. That means doing things you like, instead of things you should do, but we can be smart and try to combine the two things.
Another example: I had to work on an old script that was really ugly and messy. I took a day to refactor the old codebase, clean it up, just so I don't see it as a scary monster any more. Then I was much more likely to work on it.
Going off the calendar thing -- some years back I managed to lose a ton of weight and be super productive; I had this little system where every day I would try to keep the number of vices I had that day to less than half.
For example, if I smoked a cigarette and ate poorly, to keep that day at 50% I'd need to exercise and do (home or project) work done. If there was a day where I didn't want to exercise, I'd have to do at least 2 of the other things.
Like most people in this thread, I know I can't trust myself to be perfect, so I give myself outs. I can do whatever I want, so long as I pay for it elsewhere.
Those help but the thing that helps me most is to actively engage my rational brain instead of autopilot brain. Try to make it a habit to trigger your rational brain when your autopilot brain is making the decision to procrastinate, and then analyze the situation. OK, I have a choice between browsing news sites and working on the VPTree. What are the pros and cons of each choice? Could I delay browsing news sites by 10 minutes and look into that VPTree first?
Recently I've had success with imagining myself as having finished whatever task it is I'm avoiding, and how good it will feel to be onto the next task. If that's too vague, I will break it down into a task that I can imagine finishing, and envision myself finishing that task.
I think I'm realizing I bite off chunks that are too big, then freeze up when I feel overwhelmed
The "always feeling behind", is actually helping me personally. If I'm not just a tiny little bit stressed, I start procrastinating. I need to have something to lose, otherwise I'll never get going. So I tend to work myself into situations, that require me to put in an extra effort.
It's just how I work, and I've forgiven myself for it.
I think that may work well for me when it comes to work. I'm not sure it would be sustainable when it comes to food or exercise, but there's no reason I can't get a reasonable amount of work done every day at work.
I bought the pro version a couple months ago and I'm sure it's already paid for itself.
In the past I couldn't even have games installed on my computer for fear of getting sucked in for hours on end. Now I don't have to worry, I can be productive and still enjoy games at the end of the day.
Highly recommended for people that work from their personal computers.
I'm positive that it is different for everybody but I feel like I'm honing in on what causes procrastination in myself. After some recent periods of intentional self-discovery, I'm forming the conclusion that perfectionism is the death of my productivity. The common theme with things I procrastinate with is anything where the end is uncertain or I don't have full confidence in my direction. Maybe that's the "fear of failure" you allude to as there is certainly some overlap but I think that's just one notch on the axis for me.
Even though, at an intellectual level, I know that taking any step is better than no step, I freeze up over-analysing whether it's the right step, and fatigue myself. The natural reaction is to procrastinate by taking my attention away from the stress causing decision, even though the stress is totally sourced internally.
But, like I said, it's probably different for a lot of people.
This is me all over. Intellectually I know that doing anything, genuinely any of the possible first steps, is better than nothing but when there are too many first steps I freeze up. I even know from experience that the biggest, sometimes only, hurdle is just starting, but even that knowledge isn't always enough. There is somehow a difference between intellectually knowing that, and really internalising it.
You may need to externalize the responsibility, to have someone else "make" the decision.
For myself I've found someone who is above me in our org, even though they aren't particularly technical. I can take them these problems, they'll hear me explain why I think X is a good direction, or why it's better than Y (even though I'm uncertain of the outcome). They will ask sensible questions (costs, risks etc) and approve the direction, eg "then I want you to pursue option X, and come back to me when you hit unexpected circumstances".
This person can be anyone that you feel some ultimate responsibility towards - in a one-person startup perhaps it's your significant other, as you owe it to them to be efficient and effective (and not wasting time procrastinating).
Perhaps try another angle: what if somebody asked you to explain how a "VPTree" works, and what an implementation would look like. Would you do it more easily then?
Anyway, I think mental tasks take much more energy than physical tasks, so what you are saying makes sense. Also, I've noticed that many tasks require an "activation energy", meaning that once you have started on a task, it doesn't take so much energy anymore, and it even becomes fun. The trick is to get over that initial hill first.
I've been a heavy procrastinator all my life, way back to elementary school (23 now). I've given up thinking that there is one simple intelligible cause of it, or that I will ever fully be "cured". It will likely be a constant struggle that I always have to deal with. The thing that comes closest to a cure is that I know I can win that struggle; things just take a little more self-control for me than for most people, that's all.
And I need to get the fuck off the internet. It's simultaneously the best and worst thing to ever happen in my life. I procrastinated before the internet, but there's no doubt that the internet is the main driver of my procrastination right now.
What you said resonates with a lot of Nietzsche's thought, a core theme of which was it is better to experience the overcoming, the removal of an obstacle under your own power, than to have the obstacle removed for you. Nietzsche's take: the former makes you a master, the latter, a slave. I agree: that this is a universal human desire, and I'd rather be moving under my own power than having to take from others for everything I do.
Solving procrastination has become a sort of my own personal overcoming. Self-motivation is one of the core problems of life that everyone has to solve, I feel. Forgiving myself is just one of the tactics in my arsenal.
For me, I see the ideal of me doing anything I set my mind to, easily, without loss of energy or "motivation" (in fact transcending these concepts), and that is so tantalizing, and I am so naturally not good at that, it becomes a great target of Overcoming for me, and has an effect of having a constant but large reduction in procrastination.
>I think the worst explanation for procrastination I've come across is that it's caused by not truly enjoying the activity that is being procrastinated upon.
I actually believe in this, though it's a somewhat far-fetched conjecture. There is some talk in psychology about "will power" being a scarce resource, though professionals are unsure why. But maybe human brains aren't made for keeping a thought for long. The need to procrastinate then would be like a homeostatic response from the brain saying "these neurons have been firing for too long, shut them off". But whereas diligent people leave for a cup of coffee and some fresh air, the procrastinator keeps the idea at the back of his head and goes check HN.
As for "forgiving youself", it could be something as little as acknowledging that I did indeed spend 40 minutes wikidiving by my own will, and not because of a little demon residing in my head. Low belief in free-will and self-efficacy spoil one's mood.
What do you think of the following Idea that I'll get around to launching at some point... when I am done procrastinating:
A service that is like any normal Executive Assistant services -- but focused on helping procrastinators:
"What is the thing you're putting off? OH - its your tax issues? Well - we will meet with you confidentially and get all the details and make the calls for you and fill out the forms... and include you on each step that you need to either literally talk to someone yourself - or sign a piece of paper."
"Oh, you havent been able to do that thing with the DMV? We got you covered."
You don't agree with the explanation. I think it's totally fine to come up with an individual explanation anyway. So lets refine the prescription from a vantage point where everyone seems to agree: procrastinating and lacking passion for a given task correlate.
Given that, I found a very simple method to do away with being unproductive while still getting a decent dose of procrastinating. Simply, I started to enrich any activity that tops the to-do list with an element I enjoy about pondering/procrastinating. For me it works repeatedly. I'll give you three examples.
1) On doing the tax-filing. Instead of plunging right into, I thought of people I'd like to contact anyway and make a cross-section of who just recently did that or sports an expertise in that. In my case it was my brother (we usually don't connect too often). Besides enjoying talking about side-topics, I learnt tax rules new to me. Namely, some step-functions where different social security fees apply. Very worthwhile!
2) Physical workout. I'd have a better body and probably mind as well, if I could stick to a rigorous schedule. Now, I like to engulf myself in curiosities from time to time as well. Easy fix: moving the workout session to Venice Beach. Jogging there, some calisthenics plus absorbing new (mostly human) attractions in one sweep!
3) Getting "work" done. I needed to implement this iteration of an ML algorithm. There was no particular deadline. However, knowing that starting soon would yield a better outcome irrespective of any other factor, I decided to procrastinate by researching on sources I would like to read anyhow. That became hackernews quite recently. So instead of randomly reading posts (like this one, lol), I put in keywords of ML into the search box and sort by date. Et' voila.
Conclusion: find out what is it that fancies you about your urge to procrastinate at this exact moment and then draw a link to what you should do. It works.
Oh and here is example 4) I should now follow-up with a dozen of new acquaintances and prepare to meet them for dinner tonight. But I'm on HN right now. So I decided to take the insight from this discussion and use it as a topic for tonight's dinner. Be gentle, be curious and be interesting to people that matter!
I forgive myself by embracing the mundane tasks. Haven't procrastinated since. Work isn't work, they're just building blocks that when I get done, I feel good.
> being unable to bond empathetically with your future self
Late one Sunday evening drinking session, a bloke I know ordered another round of spirits. "Don't you have a big day at work tomorrow? You're going to be ruined" -> "That's 'Tomorrow Tom's' problem. Tomorrow Tom hates Today Tom. Tomorrow Tom thinks he's an arsehole"...
"My hypothesis is that I procrastinate on those things that I was naturally good at during childhood" Yup exactly, because there's an intense emotional connection to those activities, so we avoid them sometimes since they produce feelings of vulnerability.
What's helped me deal with procrastination is, to keep a backwards list of things I have done.
I used to make a timetable, plan my work ahead, and always end up not following it.
I then did it the other way around, now I think about the work I have to do, just pick it up and start working, once I am done with my work, I write it on a notebook I carry around with me all day.
Its now like a part of my life, I even write down things like, "had a shower", "bought bread". I have noticed I have become really productive compared to the person from around 7 months ago. I am really happy as a person, and when ever I have a doubt if I have done enough work, my note book is there to tell me how much I have done.
I guess this is one of those carrot and stick things in this case, a self-governed carrot and stick I guess.
I think most programmers can relate to this feeling when you consider that amazing feeling you get after a whole night of debugging and seeing it run beautifully. I feel like this backwards list is also something like that. Looking forward to seeing that book fill up is making me do the work, and seeing all the work I have done lets me feel accomplished.
And I don’t get to be disappointed by plans that never worked out.
Also, if you're not usually the procrastination type but find yourself in a procrastination hole: take leave. When you're hungry you eat, when you're thirsty you drink; unusual tendencies to procrastinate are simply another signal that your body is sending you.
It's always good to take time off when you have earned it, you'll come back twice the hard worker than you were before.
I am the procrastination type, but I have lots of friends who aren't, and I've watched too many of them burn themselves out. Some of them are miles smarter than me, and far more hard-working, but my innate laziness and procrastination have actually given me an edge.
I became a bad procrastinator due to overworking myself and almost got a formal verbal warning for it (more of an informal fix your shit warning happened). At the time I had over 1 month [effective] leave "saved" up; I took it.
I came back and became the exact opposite - by a very substantial degree. It felt like I was 20 again: I had all the brains, guts and dedication that got me hired in the first place.
Burn out can really mess you up - far worse than being a plain-old incompetent bad hire.
The danger is that you come back and find you haven't found the "twice the hard worker" energy that you had hoped, at which point the "take leave" solution stops seeming like a realistic option. I do think taking leave, as you suggest – or even just working on something different for awhile – usually works wonders, but it only makes the hole feel deeper if it doesn't.
You always can - even if it means time between jobs. If your employer won't let you they are doing both themselves and you a disservice and you'd be best be far away from a leader that unwise.
Do floor managers in factories let their machines go to rack and ruin? No, they maintain them and leave is how you perform maintenance on humans.
"Do floor managers in factories let their machines go to rack and ruin?" From my experience developing software for and supporting users of machine tools, ...yes.
Most organizations designed by and made of humans are inefficient and ineffective.
If you always bail on (quit for managers, fire for subordinates) people who are fuck ups I feel like you'd have a hard time staying fed / keeping the lights on -- but maybe I'm just unlucky in my professional experience so far.
I like the idea, but is "forgiving yourself" even a thing you can consciously do? Probably, but I'm not sure. The study did not ask people to actively choose to forgive themselves, just whether they had forgiven themselves. That's a rather different thing.
If I rationally decide to say "I forgive myself for having slacked off", I'm not sure I'll actually feel forgiven deep inside. I strongly suspect, however, that self-forgiveness can be difficult but can be practiced.
Does anyone here have experience to share? Did anyone ever consciously practice self-forgiveness? It seems like an interesting approach to me.
It's one of those things that's easier said than done, like "just letting go" (the word 'just' in that phrase is brutal). But I think it can be practiced. Imagine in an ideal sense the love a parent has for their child. It's an unconditional love, one that comes without strings attached or any expectation of greatness beyond the miracle of that child's very existence. Tough love, sometimes, but not necessarily contingent. The trick is to find a way to give that to yourself. It takes time.
Procrastination, like other problems of self-improvement, is multilayered. Some of my friends who constantly agonize over their productivity levels confound me, because often from my vantage point they seem perfectly well adjusted, if not for the constant feeling like they should be doing more. Other times procrastination is a response to stress or trauma that needs to be addressed on its own. Some kinds of distraction are arguably more of a reflection of changes in our culture than individual pathologies. Sometimes you just need an egg timer. Sometimes human beings are just garden-variety imperfect.
At the risk of venturing in cheesy territory, I'd recommend checking out Brene Brown's TED talks on vulnerability and shame, if you're not already familiar with them.
"Forgiving yourself" may not be the best advice for all procrastinators, but I think the idea is that when many people procrastinate, it causes them extra stress when the decision comes back to bite them. A part of that stress is simply because they have less time to do what they need, but another component is that they are kicking themselves for being stupid in the past. Forgiving yourself lets you remove the stress from the latter part, and thus would reduce the total amount.
I'm the exact opposite. I used to slack a LOT more, and have cut down on it heavily since my school days. Back then I would regularly last night assignments and pull multiple all nighters to do it, because I _knew I could_. As long as I subconsciously knew "I can get this down in the delta between now->due date" I would put it off, even if that delta involved not sleeping/eating/etc, and "Forgiving myself" only made it worse since I'd just keep doing it.
It was when I got into industry, and instead was posed with the equation of "If I didn't rush, I would have done better work, and more effectively used the time of the people paying me", which had enough external variables that the need to change became pressing. I used (and still use) the feelings of guilt at wasting my bosses time, the feelings of falling behind in my skill/learnings, and dominatingly (as I get older) the feeling of "There just isn't enough time in the day" to force myself off of procrastination every time I notice myself doing it too much.
Take this with the context that I've never been one for positive reinforcement. Seeing my own flaws and failings drives me far more than getting a pat on the back. I think you hit the nail on the head re: rationality, as that I don't think I _could_ forgive myself even if I tried, I wouldn't really internalize believing it in a way that would impact my behavior.
(And aptly, I've now procrastinated enough in writing this, and need to be back to reading docs :) )
A fair point; I try and take it a different way (as opposed to their having leverage over me), if my conscience is clear in terms of having done GOOD WORK and not wasted any time by procrastinating, they have _less_ leverage from my point of view, since I know I've been delivering 100% and can come from a position of strength.
In terms of motivating myself by negatives instead of positives, that's something I've put literally decades in trying to adjust and something I'm not sure I'll ever break myself of. It's too useful in other areas (looking critically at my own code, looking critically at problem spaces, being unbiased in introspection) that as with the OPs point of not truly internalizing something despite agreeing logically that "X should be this way", I'm not sure I could truly internalize looking at things in a positive light.
I think changing yourself goes like this: thoughts->emotions->habits. You need a clear victory(albeit a philosophical one) in neocortex so that you can start to train your limbic system.
Correlation does not imply causation? Maybe I didn't read the research right, but what if people who have the ability to change themselves and stop / decrease procrastinating, because the mere fact that they managed to stopped procrastinating (e.g. stopped a negative behavior in their mind, and got good results out of it), they were able to forgive themselves for past procrastinations?
E.g. if someone was addicted to drugs, and managed to go clean, they are more likely to forgive themselves (and others to forgive them) than those who just keep taking drugs, right?. Any 5 years old will tell you that if the bully started becoming nice, it will be easier to forgive them than if they stayed a bully. forgiving oneself is not that different than forgiving others, and if you correct your ways, it's easier to forgive yourself, just as much as it is easier for others to forgive you. no? what am I missing?
All the procrastinators are here so here's my most recent thinking on the subject: Procrastination is just an emergent behavior of the "human runtime executive".
Consider first a cat: it sleeps (in the warmest place it can find, but not too hot) until it is either hungry or bored or someone shows up to amuse it. Then it hunts prey, plays with it, possibly eats it. Repeat.
I believe the human (at least male human) version of this algorithm is roughly: sleep when tired, otherwise absent some imminent threat (see below) work on various plans directed toward having sex in the future, otherwise go figure out the world. Imminent threats (hunger, leaking roof, dangerous predators, "sprint" deadlines...) trigger immediate and focused activity.
I think this explains procrastination and pretty much everything else: doing things like the VPTree implementation doesn't rise to the level of dealing with an imminent threat (unless someone needs to ship it in a product tomorrow), and it doesn't fall into the category of "figure out the world" because you already know how said trees work and are used well enough. And of course it isn't terribly sexy, most of the time.
I have an unusual procrastination tackling method inspired from yoga. It involves stimulating the prefrontal cortex (the area of the brain behind the forehead). The role of the PFC is to counter emotions and work out rational solutions to unusual (novel) situations. When it is stimulated I feel like all my work inhibitions are gone.
The technique is simple: with my eyes close, I orient my inner sight (including my eyeballs) to look at the middle of my forehead and then just sense any sensation that appears in that spot. It feels like a kind of pressure or energy building up in the forehead.
The eye trick is good for focusing my attention there. It takes 10 minutes to get my PFC into gear, then I can work like a robot for a whole day.
This spot in the middle of the forehead is called Ajna Chakra and in yoga is considered the "command and control" center. When it is stimulated, it allows for better emotional control.
I recently realized that the cure for procrastination is to be on a mission. I'm on a mission to build my company, Browserling, to be an amazing company. As funny as it sounds I just don't have time to procrastinate.
I tend to procrastinate on things that are only really important to me like side projects, job hunting etc. When someone else is expecting me to do something, I will just do it. I worked on a side project that my wife asked me for and did it in one sitting.
My "fix" has been to create external pressure somehow. Want to learn something? Sign up to a course that has hard deadlines. Want to build something? Tell someone about it and offer to show them a draft by a certain date. It seems to work for me.
This. Is there any study about this approach? That's exactly what I do, and it seems to work. Unfortunately it's har to apply for strictly personal projects
What's to say that the students who forgave themselves didn't do so as a result of some other underlying reason that happens to be correlated with a propensity to forgive oneself?
At the very least, one could argue that inability to forgive oneself could in some cases be indicative of, say, depression. Perhaps self-confidence is simply what helps one succeed?
The best - and worst - thing I've done had cured my procrastination issues. It's essentially a personal moon shot system wherein I describe my perfect 5 years, 1 year, month, week and day. Like a pace car doppelganger. No human could do what I set out to do, but I work at it tirelessly. My productivity is gobs better than it was, I get more done on time than any other time in my life.
The 'bad' part is it still feels like perpetual failure. Even if I do 10x more in a day than I did 5 years ago, I only did 40% of my perfect day. I never feel satisfied. It's depressing.
So if you're willing to sacrifice mental health for productivity, try my system. Maybe it will work better for you. Maybe it's worthwhile in the short term.
It doesn't seem like you need to sacrifice mental health at all: your productivity is up 10x on 5 years ago, can't you be happy about that, while still acknowledging there is room for improvement?
Apparently, no. Like I said, it's a pace car, a lure. I'll never catch it. I can't complete 10 of 15 impossible daily tasks and be satiated. It may just be my personality.
Procrastination is a form of anxiety. There is no single thing you can do to will yourself away from procrastinating. If you can afford it or it's available to you, work with a mental health professional to figure out a program that works for you.
I'be been struggling with procrastination for 25 years. It's quite miserable not least because it's clearly self perpetuated. I'm deep in a quest to slay the beast at the moment and just a few hours ago read this, which definitely tickled something deep in me, as procrastination and guilt seem to be close bedfellows.
"By contrast, in guilt we’re not truly interested in healing. Most of our energy is committed to the internalized child-parent (or adolescent-parent) conflict that allows us to indulge in doing “it”—whatever we “shouldn’t” be doing—and to justify continuing to do “it,” we have to keep the threat of parental punishment (from ourselves or from others) hanging over our heads, so that we can, in a sense, “wipe the slate clean” after our misdeed.
To work with your guilt, bring as much attention as possible to the shame that has become locked into guilt’s framework. Stay with that shame, exploring it and your history with it, approaching the shamed you with as much compassion as you can. Don’t let your inner critic trespass here. As you do this work, you will feel the childish side of guilt fleshing out more. Embrace that side and protect it, just as you would a shamed, frightened child." Robert Augustus Masters.
Procrastination. Get it done or get out of the way and someone else will get it done. If you look back and nobody else did it, congrats, it wasn't worth doing anyways (validation for your procrastination.)
There is no cure for procrastination.
However, I have a similar method to the article for dealing with "blocking" issues such as feeling overwhelmed or just don't want to pick up the phone to take an ass chewing. Sometimes you just have to let go. You screwed up. Live up to the mistake and move on rather than continue to let it eat you up and cause problems for everyone else involved. Be honest, work out a way to move forward and pass the torch to someone else if you have to.
I'm a huge procrastinator! On a previous and recent "procrastination" post here on HN, I read someone's post about his experience with mediation and how it helped him overcome this. Of course I heard about meditation before, but I wasn't sure what it meant exactly in practice. I found this video very informative, and I hope someone else will find it useful too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5Qv9tUObI
"Keep forgiving yourself and keep working.", "Guilt is rarely a constructive force, and it can lead you to make bad decisions to compensate.", "forgiving yourself only works if you trust yourself".
I know this is a trite, possibly overused saying, but in this case it is completely accurate. The study had no ability to draw the title as a conclusion, regardless of its results.
(Not to mention that they appear to be treating number assignments for a "strong agree <-> strongly disagree" Likert scale as actual numbers and doing things like averaging them. Ick.)
I think the worst explanation for procrastination I've come across is that it's caused by not truly enjoying the activity that is being procrastinated upon. But if that were really the case, then the remainder of my life would be spent sitting in a chair reading useless articles online.
Other questionable explanations I've stumbled across include: being unable to bond empathetically with your future self, that the procrastinator's brain has a [insert neurotransmitter of choice] deficit, that fear of failure keeps one from starting, that too much is tackled at once, and so on.
When I try to recall what has given me the greatest sense of fulfillment in life, everything I can think of is something I worked really hard to achieve. That which contents me momentarily does not seem to coincide with that which provides overall life contentment. I don't necessarily seek happiness — I would rather have demanding work that positively impacts the world over some job that allows me to surf online all day.
What's funny is that I procrastinate only with regard to intellectual activities — not physical ones. Getting myself to exercise is no trouble at all. But prodding myself to finish a VPTree implementation... that's much more difficult. My hypothesis is that I procrastinate on those things that I was naturally good at during childhood. Academically, I was decently above average (well, at least up until college), so I never had to study. I always completed homework at the last second before it was due, and I crammed most of my test studying into the night before the exam and then promptly forgot the material as soon as I walked out of the classroom (as I'm sure many of you have noticed, this "strategy" doesn't work nearly as well in college, and it fails dramatically in grad school).
On the other hand, when it came to sports, it was pretty much a guarantee that (at least initially) I would naturally be the worst out of everyone participating. I was determined to improve though, so I developed training schedules and religiously followed them until I got the results I wanted. I think that habit has stuck with me, and I still have no trouble starting an exercise regimen.