Some time back, I read all I could on procrastination, and watched dozens of videos on it, and by far the best thing I found on it was this video by Tim Pychyl: [1]
It focuses particularly on procrastination in graduate school, but is widely applicable elsewhere.
One of the key insights that Pychyl, a psychologist who studies procrastination, had is that procrastination is not (as is commonly believed) a time management problem but a problem with managing negative emotions.
He has lots of really useful, practical tips for overcoming procrastination in the video, which I highly recommend.
I really do hope your page helps some people with their procrastination issues. But I can't help feel like your whole approach suffers from engineers disease. But maybe that's what will resonate with some folks.
A compassionate therapist can also do wonders for procrastination.
Most procrastination is emotional management, a sort of self-medicating from stress. Having a skilled therapist working through it with you sounds fantastic.
I really like a technique called the "Sedona Method" for releasing difficult emotions.
I find it amusing when I look up "Sedona Method" I find lots of blurbs in the search previews about how simple and powerful it is, yet none of them actually give any clue as to what it involves (but you can buy a book that will reveal the secret!).
Not a criticism of the technique (since I have no idea what it involves, although I'm curious), moreso of the optics to someone searching for it. As opposed to something like the Pomodoro Technique which a search for does turn up blurbs about what it involves.
Sorry it seems really vague. I think it's so simple it's confusing. Essentially, the Sedona method is to connect with whatever's bugging you and ask yourself these questions.
1. Could I let it go? (You can say yes, or no or anything. Saying "yes" is typical because it's just asking if it's possible. Saying "I don't know", is to be generally avoided because it doesn't let you "try it out".)
2. Would I let it go? (Same deal as question 1, but it puts you in the driver's seat in terms of would you take action)
3. When would you let it go? (It's an invitation to say, "now!", but answer honestly)
When explaining the Sedona Method they have you hold a pen and when you "let it go" you physically let it go. That's it. People protest and say, "it's not that easy", but if you do it earnestly you find you have a slight release. Then you just keep doing it over and over again and most stuff just tends to go away.
The way I think about it is that our mind can be run as a powerful emotional simulator, but all emotions are actually real. When we watch movies it's all a simulation but we have a genuine emotional reaction when we watch. The Sedona Method is a process that simulates letting go of resistant feelings that we have, but amazingly it does actually go away. It may come back but like regular exercise you keep chipping away at it bit by bit. Over time it does wonders.
> jumping straight to proposing solutions rather than working with people to understand the problem 1st. “You think you know enough to solve the problem”. [0]
aahhhhh..... yes, they warned us about this so much in university that I've had "talk to stakeholders to really understand the nature of the problem, then keep observing" firmly lodged into my professional identity.
I’ve always known myself to procrastinate, but I only think about 1 and 2. In retrospect, I have done 3 in a lot of cases. I just never really thought about it. In fact, I am extremely focused on working on the other task that I’ve always wondered where the motivation comes from.
Sometimes when I am very emotionally upset or have a very negative task I want to avoid like studying, I will get the sudden urge to clean or work on a similar low-brainpower project (which is not something that comes naturally to me in normal times).
If I were merely trying to feel better I'd just go for video games or something like I normally do, but there must be something else going on that directs me to focus on simple and useful ways to feel better in the most extreme cases. It'd be nice to capture that in a bottle.
Feelings are complex. Personally, at any given time, I have two or three of sideprojects, videogames and TV shows I could focus on, each. But when I procrastinate, I end up reading HN or some subreddit or something similar, instead of coding my side projects or playing a game I've been waiting to play for the past year.
I've traced that to feelings of guilt. I can't enjoy a videogame if I feel I'm only using it to escape and make my situation worse. I can probably enjoy a TV show a bit, for a while, until my brain realizes that it's just an escape mechanism and I get more stressed. But social media in general, offer you a bite-sized escape. There's nothing wrong in taking 2 minutes break to skim comments on a HN thread, or scroll through some funny pictures somewhere. 2 more minutes won't make a difference either. 2 more? And suddenly it's been 5 hours.
So in the end, I don't do the things I have to, and I also don't do the things I want to - all because negative emotions.
(Part of my solution to this problem was just blocking certain sites (like HN) on the router during work hours.)
Yeah I can connect with that feeling of guilt. Sometimes I'll need an escape when something needs doing. So I'll browse around Reddit or play a video game, but not an involved, captivating one, but something like a simpler puzzle game so I can feel like I'm not totally abandoning the stuff I'm meant to do.
It's really odd and I'm better off just burning an hour or two on a more intense form of distraction and getting it out of my system. I've found it's worse when my wife is home, I guess it's an urge to keep up appearances, even if she doesn't really care? But when she's out of town I think I get more done just because I chunk time for work and play more effectively.
> I've found it's worse when my wife is home, I guess it's an urge to keep up appearances, even if she doesn't really care? But when she's out of town I think I get more done just because I chunk time for work and play more effectively.
I've got exactly the same. I know she doesn't care, but the urge keep appearances is still there. I tend to schedule checking out videogames for those times when she takes our daughter to visit her parents - even though she would be fine with me taking a break to play games, I would feel guilty about not spending time with them instead.
I'm kind of wondering if it's the brain's way of saying you should talk your problem over with other people. And HN is a sort of maladaptive (for various reasons) version of that.
At first your comment didn't make sense to me (why would it be an instinct to talk to people about our inner turmoil?), but it does make sense, because we procrastinate on mostly societal impositions (work, education, and other productive endeavors), and the way to negotiate ourselves out of them is by talking to the people making that imposition.
Oh that's not what I meant, I was thinking of discussing something completely different, or only tangentially related. When you should be seeking counseling.
I misunderstood you, sorry. And yes, I agree with your clarified point too - that definitely happens for me, and I'd guess for a lot of us here. I'm not ashamed to admit that HN discussions satisfy the same needs as meatspace socializing, even if they're doing it the way McDonald's satisfies hunger.
HN is really the worst. With other sites I visit, I can at least honestly say it's a pure waste of time. But here, every couple weeks I'll find something that solves a tough problem I have; every year or two I find something career-altering. If I were to integrate ((value I get from HN) - (opportunity cost of time spent here)), I'm not sure whether it's even negative. My monkey brain definitely feels it's positive (magic of temporal discounting). If I spent this time on other things, maybe I'd be running a space company now. Or maybe I'd be depressed and stuck doing PHP for ridiculously low salaries.
I have this. I think it's because we're procrastinating on a "productive" thing. So to escape to empty feel good is too far for the brain, cue something mindless, easy but still somehow productive.
Procrastination is an escape from stress, unease, and discomfort.
Cleaning provides that escape. It gives you a boost of dopamine as well since you're accomplishing something. In addition to that, it's a visual activity - you immediately see progress. It's a super common procrastination activity.
Interesting video. Pychil claims that procrastination is a weakness of will. For another perspective, check out the book, "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much" [1], which claims it's not just about will (executive function), but also about tunnel vision and reduced fluid intelligence, all caused by a situation of scarcity--time scarcity in the case of procrastination. And they claim reduced executive function is situational. It's not a fundamental attribute of the procrastinator.
I still think this is too limited. Analogous to how Keynes said classical / Ricardian economics discussed distribution of goods given a fixed level of production, the linked article doesn't consider that the maximum productive output on any given day is not the same, even when the 3 variables considered are maximized.
"Behavior" here seems to be a boolean, "why we take action or not take action at any given moment", but I think many people who ask how to be more motivated or productive are asking about total output, not just about the ability to begin a task. They might be able to sit down at their desk and start working, for example, but not be able to continue long even after doing all the tricks.
In my experience, there is some sort of "mental energy reserve", and as that is exhausted it becomes increasingly difficult or maybe impossible to do any further productive work. If you are doing a strength training workout in the gym, no amount of "motivation" is going to let you continue lifting heavy weight indefinitely. I haven't seen much research to quantify that "mental energy reserve" or quantitatively measure how different tasks exhaust it.
Well it is a lot more complicated. There is no "mental energy reserve", but we do get energized by norepinephrine in the brain and once it becomes saturated it it loses its effect.
A simple technique to reset it is to activate the "sigh reflex". You just breathe in twice at a normal pace and then slowly exhale through the mouth.
Another more powerful reset is to do yoga nidra for 10-20 minutes. Yoga nidra, once you figure it out, will actually deactivate the prefrontal cortex and simulate sleep. Which has a huge boost for your cognitive abilities.
Both of these techniques will increase serotonin and dopamine in the brain which will decrease norepinephrine. Once norepinephrine is no longer saturated you can become energized by it again.
For example, imagine a football team winning the super bowl. They've been pushing 110%. Suddenly, they're jubilant and jumping all over the place. The dopamine and serotonin pushes out the norepinephrine allowing to return and become effective again.
I'll definitely try this, but do you happen to have any links about this?
And yes, I realize "mental energy reserve" isn't a scientific term, it's just a term I'm using for lack of something better to label something I experience.
Re: the football team though, no matter how energized they are, that team will not be able to lift more than their 1RM (1 rep max), they won't be able to lift their 10RM (10 rep max) more than 10 times (maybe a few more on a good day). Eventually there are physical limits to their ability. Similarly if that team had not slept for 48 hours, or had done non-stop math problems for 18 hours and was asked to continue doing them.
> Re: the football team though, no matter how energized they are, that team will not be able to lift more than their 1RM (1 rep max), they won't be able to lift their 10RM (10 rep max) more than 10 times (maybe a few more on a good day). Eventually there are physical limits to their ability. Similarly if that team had not slept for 48 hours, or had done non-stop math problems for 18 hours and was asked to continue doing them.
I want to challenge your thought experiment. Consider Navy Seal training. Pushing through via sheer force of will isn't possible. There needs to be a cycling and restorative process that enables above and beyond grit.
Clip of Prof Huberman on "quitting behavior" such as quitting a long bout of work. (Note: Noradrenaline is norepinephrine. It's a weird historical thing where two teams discovered it and nobody agreed on the real name)
> "Pushing through via sheer force of will isn't possible."
> That's exactly what I'm saying. I'll check out the link.
What I'm saying is that you can't push your way through Navy Seal training by trying harder. But you can significantly increase your output and down regulate the process around "quitting" by using other techniques that will trigger the norepinephrine reset.
I think you're identifying something important to talk about. If I understand correctly from the PodClip, really the idea is to give your brain a small reward for making progress.
I think many of us on HN are familiar with being able to work 10-12 hours if we're feeling like we're on the track to success. However, even then, at 10-12 hours, eventually the brain gets tired. That's something that I'm also interested in learning about.
When your brain gets tired maybe all you need to do is some Yoga Nidra or alike and you can reset and get more clarity back by pushing out the norepinephrine.
It gets me nearly every time. I'd say 7 out of 10 times I listen to it I enter an altered state of relaxed alertness, somewhere between awake and and sleep, where I'm aware of my body and mind, but not fully present. Observers say I looked like I was asleep because I start twitching like I'm about fall asleep, but you're aware of what's happening.
Do it a few days in a row and the change in mental / emotional resilience is nothing short of phenomenal.
Studies by Dweck, famous for Growth Mindset, and others point to "ego depletion" simply being a reflection of people's beliefs (My willpower is limited) as opposed to an actual resource that gets depleted.
I remember reading a study about the mental energy reserve that you speak of, or concentration, proving we have a limited amount, but the people who were informed of this fact were giving up sooner than those who didn't.
This actually looks like the ground work for cognitive behavioural therapy.
The idea (grossly simplified) is to take those observations of negative thoughts and build a rational response to those thoughts (cognitive part). Then you build a habit of noticing those thoughts and responding with the rational response. It’s far easier said than done, and perhaps best dispensed by a therapist. But these mental tools have been crucial to improving my own mental health.
Some great books on that go into more depth than I ever could include Feeling Good by Burns or Byrne, Overcoming Anxiety and Overcoming Depression.
- how much of society is related to driving up or enforcing overcoming these avoidant reflexes
- the negative feeling is often due to a social obligation that may be distorded. You could renegotiate smaller chunks or different terms.. the idea is that in a different context you might approach it with lot more will.
ps: my current gig is in a national office and I could very well rebrand it as land-of-the-procrastinator. It's an endemic disease where nobody wanted to do things (the way they were asked), any newcomer will be dragged down, ensure a good status-low.
Thanks for posting this video, I found it really helpful. For people who don't have the time to watch this is a strategy I learned from it that I might try out with my TODOS:
"In situation X I will do behavior Y to achieve subgoal Z"
His example was
"When this workshop ends today, I'm going straight to the library to read 4 pages of that paper that I'm struggling to read to achieve the subgoal of finishing this paragraph in my thesis"
The idea is you don't have to think about some vague topic. You just go on autopilot like, oh the workshop is over now I have to do this thing, therefore you're more likely to do it.
>> "In situation X I will do behavior Y to achieve subgoal Z"
I was pondering something very similar to this about 10 minutes before he talked about it only I was thinking about changing perspective for the given task, that is:
"what 'mode' do I have to be in to get this done?"
in place of 'Y'.
His short sentence is much more elegant than what I was trying to think but I think 'mode' also fits just as well.
Basically, I think we get too overwhelmed (emotion) with what we have to do and breaking it down into smaller chucks may not be enough. Breaking it down into modes or specialties might make it less daunting. We can all 'plan', 'study', 'code' or whatever hat you need to wear along the way and wearing them all at once, even on a small task can still be overwhelming.
For example, say I have a new coding project but I'm having trouble organising it into chunks as I'm new to the platform/API. What I can do is say "ok, I need to put my 'study' hat on and learn just an overview of how this all works" (study mode) then go back into 'plan' mode to reorganize tasks into further modes to complete item one ('hello world' app say), rinse and repeat.
If you don't have the steps to achieve X and you can't come up with the steps on the fly (or the steps you know do not work) then you will not be able to do X when you want to.
I know I procrastinate when I don't know how to start.
But learning how to break things down into chunks and make a checklist makes it a lot easier to avoid that. A well defined task is actually fun to do, and I'm much less likely to avoid it.
I think this has to with the unknowns of modern work.
In knowledge work, we need to:
1. Define the work
2. Do the work
Can't do what's not defined.
In general, the simple advice I give our clients is to take a piece of paper and a pen, and put all the ideas about the task out there. Take 5-15 minutes and try to define it.
Basecamp's Shape Up book is a lot about managing the unknowns.
Thanks for this. I found the article to be really naive in a Dale Carnegie kind of way, that probably appeals to someone in their mid-20s trying to reinvent themselves, but is actually a psychological dead end. For me, procrastination has definitely fit the profile of pain avoidance rather than a lack of any of those three elements the article focuses on.
The article is entirely based on Fogg's behavior model. Your criticism isn't really addressing the article, it's addressing the model used. As for pain avoidance, that seems to be a part of the factor Motivation, which is divided into the sub-factors Sensation, Anticipation and Social Cohesion. I've found a number of sites explaining the model and they all have something like this to say about Sensation:
> Searching to experience pleasure or avoiding pain. These strong motivators are thought to be a primitive and immediate response to information.
I can't find an official source for it, so I have to assume it's in Fogg's book. But it seems pain avoidance is something that is addressed by the model.
Doubts, sure. Asking for more evidence isn't a problem. But 1) blaming the author and 2) insulting him with something baseless like "I found the article to be really naive in a Dale Carnegie kind of way, that probably appeals to someone in their mid-20s trying to reinvent themselves, but is actually a psychological dead end" is a problem and needlessly adversarial.
I watched the talk and found it interesting. Thanks for the link!
One thing that I was surprised to see was the "ego depletion / willpower is like a muscle" discussion at the end. Did you encounter that a lot in your reading?
In summary, they failed to reproduce a classic experiment for ego depletion, and propose some other theories. Some of the theories proposed imply that holding the _belief_ that willpower is a finite resource is self-fulfilling.
Looking on HN for "ego depletion", a number of articles have been posted regarding the reproducibility of that particular theory.
[...] procrastination is not (as is commonly believed) a time management problem but a problem with managing negative emotions.
Could there not be a catch 22 here where the negative emotions causing procrastination are in turn caused by the accumulating mess that said vice so often causes?
Also an ADHDer here. My current model of things is that Dopamine broadly signals messages like "you're going the right way, keep going".
Insufficient dopamine and you end up being really open to needing frequent positive feedback to follow through on a plan. Leading to either:
1) Distractibility -- greater task-switching in the face of frustration or negative emotions.
2) Hyperfocus -- lower task-switching in the face of frequent rewards (like from a video game or novel or programming with test-driven-development).
And then there's a bunch of other mood impacts from the life-impacts of that. For example: Emotional sensitivity due to memories of people being disappointed in you.
It focuses particularly on procrastination in graduate school, but is widely applicable elsewhere.
One of the key insights that Pychyl, a psychologist who studies procrastination, had is that procrastination is not (as is commonly believed) a time management problem but a problem with managing negative emotions.
He has lots of really useful, practical tips for overcoming procrastination in the video, which I highly recommend.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA