Years ago, I was eating dinner at a restaurant one evening, at a table by myself, and overheard a conversation at another table. "It's my N - 1 theory of work," someone was saying. "You always do the second most important thing." It was so true I burst out laughing.
I liked the advice:
First, don't listen to most of the advice offered to procrastinators.
Second, don't sit around feeling bad because you lack willpower.
Third, avoid perfectionism.
Sometimes procrastination happens because you are not prepared enough to do a specific task or achieve a goal. The article has some concrete suggestions to address those situations as well.
Yeah, the universality of certain experiences can tempt people to think they're afflicted with something when they just have a normal human allotment of it. Things like procrastination and anxiety may not be (or may be) distributed according to a perfect bell curve, but they are distributed on a continuous distribution. Advice from one part of the continuum isn't necessarily helpful on to people on other parts.
The most helpful and self-aware non-advice I ever got was in Little League. I asked an older kid how to remain calm when batting in a crucial situation. He said, "Just think of all the home runs you've hit, and how good people think you are. They don't think that for nothing. Think of how nervous the pitcher must be to be pitching to you. If he's scared, why should you be?" He was a wise-ass, but he had a point. Why should I expect him to have answers that were applicable to my (very different) situation?
