> Action leads to motivation, not the other way around.
I've found this to be very true. A trick I found that made this easier for me is to leave a trivial task to start tomorrow with, often with notes to remind myself what to do. Ideally the trivial task is on the way to something bigger, not finishing something. That gets me into my editor, gets me running the code / tests / etc., and gives me a trivially easy way to get moving. Then the motivation kicks in and I can start moving for real.
The same approach helps me with tasks outside of software development, and even outside of work.
That's Hemingway’s trick: “You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.”
there are so many different names for this. and time blocking. but it really works. small reminder. it works even when, like me, someone has serious case of ADHD. but its slightly different and there are extremes on both end. where it does not work or it works to well. but it always work. what I am trying to say if you feel its not efficient you still have to feel it out until you find how it works for you in whatever form it works.
When there are no clear tasks, I sometime leave a syntax error at the place work should continue tomorrow. This is quite effective. It can make the answer to the "Where was I?" question immediate instead of taking a few seconds and this is one fewer barrier.
Yes. It's funny how this kind of trick can instantly snap the entire working context back into your mind. Essentially leaving you free to forget about the context during your free time and overnight. Truly a useful "hack".
It's also useful to jot down a quick list of (say) three items that are at the top of your mind when you leave work for the day, and they too will help with a context restore.
I've done that too. Especially if I have to stop working, but I'm in the middle of something. There are no compilation errors or tests failing but the feature isn't completed.
Introducing a syntax error is like a saved game, portal back in time. I'll come back to it tomorrow and it'll take me max one minute to reload the context into my brain.
I do this also. My tweak is to make the syntax error just a sentence of what tiny step needs to be done next. Then the next day I turn that sentence into a comment, do what needs to be done next and then delete the comment. It me the dual endorphin hit of completing a task and deleting code.
I remember being on a session with the pragmatic programmers (ie the people from the book) and they recommended making a compile error on purpose as the last thing one did before leaving work. The next day you compiled the code and get an error, fix this and they continue working. You are already doing work. This sets your mind on the right track from they day before. I gave used this a bit and it works pretty well.
It most definitely does work the other way around. The problem of course is that you can’t just wait for motivation to appear. But you can start an action.
I’m just stating the obvious, but I find it odd that the author states the opposite isn’t true.
While directing actors on the film set one of the questions to ponder is whether you first need to put people into an emotional reality so they can produce gestures matching that reality or whether you tell them how to move and then they find their emotional reality within the movements.
In my experience both works and some actors prefer one and some the other. But you can try it yourself, think of a sad thing, slumb together make a sad gesture and listen (emotionally) what happens on the inside.
Same, it's so much easier to quit just when you hit your limit and keep a 2 min window to bookmark your solution search and leave some potential follow ups. Makes restarting your job a lot easier.
It doesn't matter what I need to do, I start every day by building my code. It gets me typing commands in the terminal and more often than not there's a build error or warning I need to address
I disagree with the idea that getting past procrastination should (always) be the target.
Mostly because I don't think procrastination is inherently bad. There's a lot of stigma attached to procrastination as it's seen as being "unproductive". But I think procrastination can lead to great insights.
Your brain is telling you that it is not interested in the current task. The question is: Why? Overworked and needs a break? Much more interested in exploring something else? Protecting against the pain of failure?
Investigating the why instead of forcing "overcoming" is quite fruitful in my personal experience.
My guess is "action leads to motivation" might be helpful for solving one of the root causes (likely fear of failure/imposter syndrom) but not all of them.
I procrastinate a lot on hard tasks and usually it's because I don't yet fully understand the risks with each decision that goes into the design.
I think for younger engineers "fail fast" makes a lot of sense; there's not enough of a foundation of experience to tell right from wrong so the only way to learn is to fail.
For more experienced engineers, there's a greater sense of "I have a sense where this can fail; how do I design around that?"
It's not that a more experienced engineer will know exactly how it fails, but that there are modalities of failure that have been encountered so the goal is to design with some flexibility or optionality in mind. And sometimes, this just requires a bit of "gestation" or "percolation" before carving the path.
I think of it like an experienced sculptor sizing up a block of marble before making the first strike with a chisel. It's a kind of procrastination, but really, its a process of visualizing the path.
My expert machinist friend (mold/tool maker) calls it "couch machining". It appears like he isn't working but really in his head he is laying out the entire process from start to finish.
Then when he goes to CAM it up it flows very quickly and the entire part is already mostly planned.
I think often people who don't visualize in their head can't grasp this...it appears as inactivity. The reality is it seems to be a hyperactivity...procrastination comes from having too many tasks and directions with unsolved solutions. (in my case...)
Another way to put it I have heard is "Thinking is working". If it doesn't appear like I am working...I am likely thinking.
Wow, that's a really insightful perspective. I often feel a bit ashamed for reading hacker news or some other IT related post on the net when I know I should be doing some development task.
Your description pretty accurately describes the reasons for my procrastination.
Thank you.
I'd say that procrastination is bad when it drives you into some unproductive but addictive behavior, like watching silly tiktok videos, etc. It can be actually good if you do "structured procrastination": can't force myself to do task X, but find solace in solving problem Y really neatly. Another approach is to take a walk, do push-ups, etc, anything that changes your focus away from mental tasks, and preferably brings more oxygen to your brain.
Yet another approach is analytical: "I can't stomach doing that thing! But what thoughts or feelings make me loathe it so much? Where do they come from?" Interesting insights can follow.
In a certain large part of the population procrastination is a symptom of mental disorder (like for example ADHD etc.), and often a particularly severe one. Dismissing it as a "benefit" is not constructive.
I suspect that you use word procrastination too general, to include all possible cases. If a person is lazy for 5 minutes or for an hour it's not a procrastination. Procrastination is severe case of inability to do something a person wants to do. And before anyone interjects about "duh, work may be unpleasant", it also extends to ALL other spheres of life. Imagine wanting to play a game and literally not being to force yourself to click Start. Or scrolling saved watch list and not picking anything you want to watch. Stuff like that.
Procrastination and related issues is a severe mental disorder and I'm sick and tired of people normalizing it or dismissing as something good or beneficial.
PS: to rephrase all that above - the answer to the question "Why?" is not exclusively something external (like "not interesting") but often an internal one, a chemical disbalance in a person's brain, some brain structures under- or over-developed etc.
Yeah, maybe there are different types of procrastination, but there's nothing good about my type. If I hadn't procrastinated through my 20s and 30s, I could be retired and spending my 50s fishing instead of working to make a living. I've got enough of a handle on it now that I keep my bosses happy, but it's still a struggle at times, and there are plenty more things I want to do that I may never get around to. It's a bad thing.
One can model procrastination as a reaction to some form of mental pain. Doing the work hurts one in some way, so one subconsciously finds excuses to do something else instead.
But pain is a valuable signal, and often learning and resolving the root cause of the pain can be more valuable than reaching for the oxycodone to power past it.
I think the same thing applies. Have you been procrastinating for months for example, perhaps because you utterly hate your job? Perhaps you should switch jobs.
I procrastinate all the time, listen to much to your mind or chase the fun stuff only, would not get you traction, probably it’s a distraction, because the mind is lazy. Most of our systems wants to conserve energy or expend at little as possible. Going to the gym in a cold morning is not something that the mind or body is seeking, so listen to the idea of not going would be bad for you. Muscles are lazy too, they just want to chill. But if you make them do a little work, they like it and ask for more. We are weird and we need to force us to do stuff. That’s your job, you command your body
I have always found that when a task becomes difficult to the point of procrastination, that is a sign that the approach to the task needs to be reworked.
The phrase "do something instead of nothing" might be more useful than "action leads to motivation." I have plenty of motivation - but my brain does not always comply when I try to focus on purpose. In such a case, I work on an unrelated task that is easy to engage with. This gives my brain a chance to focus, which begets more focus, until there is enough focus to do so on purpose.
This post and similar advice is aimed at people who feel pain from procrastination. You are not one of them, probably. It's not an inherently bad thing, just like any number of things some, not all, people struggle greatly with (drugs, food, etc.).
I would say that the original poster is intimately familiar with procrastination, because they recognize that the underlying cause of most procrastination is a barrier of some sort. Different people have different combinations barriers, so it can be difficult to recognize someone else's experience.
> Your brain is telling you that it is not interested in the current task. The question is: Why?
I think for a lot of us it's something like: Because it's nonsense busywork that I don't care about. Procrastinating isn't going to help, and it is absolutely bad because it leads to uncompleted tasks and that leads to financial distress. I need to get it done regardless of whether it's going to provide a dopamine hit or not. Best thing to do is to stop thinking about it and get it out of the way so that I can focus on the things I want to do. I'm not overworked, I just don't want to do this task. I am interested in exploring something else but that's not a choice that I have right now. I don't have the privilege of doing whatever I feel like doing. Pain of failure? No, it's not at all something that I'll fail at. It's drudgery avoidance. Unfortunately there's plenty of drudgery that has to be completed.
I find that shutting off one's brain and just slogging through a task leads to work quality on a par with AI slop.
So if one really is as uninterested in the quality of the output as you suggest, perhaps it might actually be better to dump the problem into Claude/Gemini/Cleverbot and just copy/paste/act upon the results verbatim and then mark the checkbox as "done" and move on.
For me personally, the pain of such efforts is ordinarily from making sure that the output is correct when the input is largely guesswork or speculation that always leads to hunting through a morass of poor documentation of some library or seeking a workaround to some irritating problem or rolling the dice on what the risk to various decisions might prove to be over the future: "eh, duct tape this and it ought to hold".
And most notably that doing more of this work correlates to an exponential rise in the volume of similar work that will be required down the road to maintain the same results.
Those are often exactly the time one would be best served by taking a step back and questioning the entire framework that supports the busywork in question. Perhaps starting from scratch or making some huge change would reduce the garbage portions of the effort and keep them from further proliferating?
Why? The answer is easy: the work is pointless corporate bullshit. Not sure if it ever going to hit the prod at all. But they pay huge salary and I need money. Turns out nice things are expensive.
I was going to post something similar until I saw your comment. I completely agree. It's difficult to motivate oneself when one knows the work they are doing is actually not worth doing.
I develop apps and after I have completed 80% of the crucial work, the remaining 20% of the work involves boring and brainless stuff like adding in app purchases, adding features like send feedback to developer, asking for reviewing the app, designing the app icon, designing the App Store screenshot, writing the metadata for App Store description etc.
I procrastinate super long on this 20% of boring task even though it could all be done in maybe 2 days.
To me, procrastination is the brain overestimating (or perhaps just estimating) the unpleasantness of a task in the future. The unpleasantness could come from general lack of pleasure in performing the task, anticipation of frustration or irritation due to a gap in the skills or resources required, anxiety about not being able to successfully complete the task, or the output of the task not meeting one's personal expectations.
One example for me is getting out of the house: I loathe the idea of getting dressed, getting into the car and driving, whenever I contemplate it, but once I'm behind the wheel, the thought always is "this isn't so bad". If I think about the getting dressed bit, that too, thought of in isolation, isn't so bad. It seems it is the anticipation of a seemingly complex sequence of tasks that tend to put the brain off.
"Across a decade working at hypergrowth tech companies like Meta and Pinterest, I constantly struggled with procrastination [...] I was not making progress on the things that mattered."
Maybe unless one can really convince themselves that their daily work matters (really matters and not just for their team/company metrics) one is bound to procrastinate as a symptom of some subconscious sense of pointlessness.
Relentlessly trying to lock up as much of the world's information as possible behind your login wall, I'd be struggling with procrastination as well.
Maybe the answer isn't so much finding new tricks to play on your mind, but finding something to do that doesn't involve codifying more power in the strong leader, to increase his masculinity in the worklace or whatever the political issue du jour is.
Power and control over people's lives and public image is what they get off on, how can anyone feel like they have purpose working on that is beyond me, so it's true that innovation would be thwarted by procrastination - if they give them the "next big thing" it'll be monopolized and weaponized rather than given to the people like tcp/ip initially was. The key term is decentralization, and it's being blown up in favor of locked up datacenters behind layers of digital policing.
Yep, it's hard to summon genuine motivation when, deep down, something feels meaningless. You can build all the productivity systems in the world, but if the work itself feels hollow...
I think the programmers in most environments aren't judged based on some hard metrics that could say someone procrastinated half of the time and could have done twice as much.
Most judgement comes from remembering whether anything has been done at all, and if yes then whether it was sunbathing of quality. People (I at least) will rate higher someone who worked less but contributed higher quality code. Also good contributions to discussion, mentoring juniors is something a procrastinator might not even think is work but is valued highly.
And even while procrastinating some part of your brain often thinks about problem so the time isn't completely lost.
All in all procrastinators aren't as bad as it sounds unless we get into some deep pathology.
I think almost everybody has procrastination problems of some degree from time to time. Especially in occupations that need concentration on complicated things.
But procrastination problems don't mean infinite procrastination. It's just that work keeps piling up and then it has to be done in a burst when it has to really be done. I find this doesn't necessarily mean my output is less (in the short term), it's just that it's exhausting.
Also productivity requirements at work, no matter how fancy workolace, are typically way less than you may think. Just showing up and not actively cause grief goes a long way.
What you tend to see publicly is people in their productive phases, or quite exceptional outliers, or just messaging.
I made similar comments on this site alluding to how when I went into this field, I thought I was going to be working with passionate people that truly cared about the craft. I was met with the rude reality that none of my coworkers care about this craft in the slightest, and it is all merely just an ends to a means for them. Now, I do not necessarily blame my coworkers. Passion is not really within one's control.
For the sake of analogy, I feel like I wanted to be a photographer and take beautiful and artistic pictures, but in reality, I just take school pictures for a living.
Now, I do believe there are passionate jobs with passionate programmers out there, but:
1. I do not know where nor with whom one would even find such roles.
2. My lack of skill would be more burdensome than helpful for such teams. I'm not new either. I've been at this game for over a decade now.
So, I am stuck in this procrastination loop -- I lack the skills to better my situation, but I also feel so far behind that I, at some level, believe I am incapable of ever being able to find/retain such a job.
Long story short, I am not sure what your particular reasons are for procrastinating, but brother/sister, I don't blame you one bit for it.
My boss met with me this week to have me finish something important to get done by Friday. That really kicked me into gear this week and I was very motivated and productive. Come Friday, no message, no more push from him, no mention of how he needs my work or asking how it's going. That instantly tanked my motivation to continue
> Come Friday, no message [...] tanked my motivation to continue
I see the bookends, but notice the root cause
> That really kicked me into gear [...] I was very motivated and productive
You don't have intrinsic motivation for these tasks and the job. This is the thread to pull on. Keep asking "why?"
In the least, I recommend a pro-active note, letting him know you're done and ready for his feedback on the assignment or new priorities. Figure out why he didn't (or persistently doesn't) follow-up.
in situations like this i forgive them if the only effect is that i get work done faster without downsides to my other activities/responsibilities. priorities change. if less procrastination is the only sideeffect i am not complaining.
It is normal to struggle with procrastination from time to time but if is a regular occurrence you need to check the actual causes.
You might have ADHD.
And is is very important to know whether you have it or not because all that advice for neurotypical people will not work for you then. In fact it will harm you. It will make you feel as a failure.
You need to figure out how your brain works and only then you will finally manage to make lasting changes.
I would argue the other way around. I have ADHD, but the thing that really helped me with work procrastination, which I think would help even without ADHD, was to find a job that is actually interesting.
In approx 7 years I went through working at all the top software companies in my country, but what really fixed my problems was moving on to being a researcher at the university. I’m now paid less than half from before, but it’s still enough, and I couldn’t be happier.
Getting to work on what I think is actually important and interesting every day is what helped. I also seem happier than the younger researchers who didn’t work at companies first, who don’t know how good they have it.
>What’s an example of the kind of advice that doesn’t work?
For some people struggling with chronic lifelong procrastination, the oft-repeated advice from the author such as "Action leads to motivation, not the other way around." ... and similar variants such as, "Screw motivation, what you need is discipline!" ... and other related big picture ideas such as Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams' "Systems instead of Goals"
-- all do not work.
And adding extra rhetorical embellishments to the advice such as using the phrase "it's simple [...]", and using the word "[...] just [...]" as in:
- "Stopping procrastination isn't that hard to solve. It's simple. Just chop up the task into much smaller subtasks and just start on that tiny subtask. That will give you momentum to finish it."
... also doesn't work. Some procrastinators just procrastinate the initiation of starting that tiny subtask! For the few that actually do try to start with that first step, they'll quickly lose steam because of boredom/distraction/whatever and the overall task remains unfinished.
A lot of books and blogs about time management repeat the same advice that many procrastinators have all heard before and it doesn't work. The procrastinators understand the logic of the advice but it doesn't matter because there are psychological roadblocks that prevent them from following it.
EDIT reply to: >That doesn't mean the advice is bad,
I'm not saying the advice is wrong. Instead, I'm saying that some well-meaning people who give that repeated advice seem surprised that it doesn't work on some people. Because the advice givers believed "Action Precedes Motivation" worked on themselves, they automatically assume that imparting those same words to other procrastinators will also work. It often doesn't. The meta-analysis of that advice and why it sometimes doesn't work is not done because the people giving that advice are the ones who used that technique successfully. This creates a self-confirmation bias.
ADHD is so stigmatized now that you cannot with a straight face tell someone "I have ADD" without getting an eye roll, unfortunately. many won't believe you were correctly diagnosed
I've also found that there's no real cure for it. You can take the meds but they'll chip away at your personality and health in other ways.
It's not stigmatized, more like reverse. It's "normalized" and neurotypical people just dismiss it outright, as a "play-pretend illness". Also it become a "fashionable" diagnosis. People who don't have it pretend that it brings them closer to a focused genius Sherlock Holmes or similar characters, which is completely wrong in 99.9% of the cases.
I used to think that being diagnosed would not change much but for me it did. A lot. Just having more knowledge about myself has been extremely empowering. Even just knowing myself that I have it helps me be kinder to myself.
Also there is ADHD coaching. Having someone who had ADHD themselves coach me through my problems was an absolute game changer.
Maybe that could be an option for you as well. Worked much better that traditional therapy for me personally.
As for medication, well for most people with ADHD it works really well and is worth the relative mild side effect. But that is most, for some it does not work unfortunately. I think it is always worth trying but yeah it is no silver bullet that works for everyone.
Some great comments in this thread and I agree, a lot of it comes down to understanding yourself.
In my case, not always, but often, procrastination shows up when fear is involved. Fear of failure, of not doing something perfectly, of the task being too big. What’s helped me is turning the task into a challenge, because I know that personally, I thrive on challenges. It re-frames the fear into something exciting, and once I get started, I follow all of the other advice such like breaking it down into small steps. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve had a similar experience. If it’s a “I must do” with high stakes, I get a fear of failure, fear of disappointing and if left unchecked it unfortunately becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, challenges that start with “I wonder if”—like wondering if some bold idea just might actually be possible—give me a huge reservoir of energy to work well beyond my normal limits and find new solution that truly make a difference.
Of course in most projects, actual innovation is only a fraction of the work so some reframing of “run the business” tasks is necessary. That’s when I tap into gratitude: for being able to work on a project, for being entrusted with a particular task, etc.
> Across a decade working at hypergrowth tech companies like Meta and Pinterest, I constantly struggled with procrastination
I used to procrastinate a lot when I was a PhD student and later in academia. Sometimes, it was literally weeks of doing nothing and stressing out.
I eventually migrated to big tech and I now rarely procrastinate. We have pretty tangible goals, good results are rewarded and lack of results would raise concerns pretty quickly.
In my case, working in the right environment helped a lot with procrastination.
It's good to read this while being in one of those nothing-months myself. I have extended the deadlines and my goals are not clear.
Incidentally, I have a supervisor who felt the exact same way when he was doing his PhD and fled to industry. Evidently he found that there was something to be enjoyed in the freedoms of research and returned.
The older I get, the more I realize there's no point. I'll never be rich. I'll never have a family. I'll never go to space. I'll never take part in Olympics. Best I can do is beating a video game on medium. So I try to focus on that, instead of spending 80% of my life trying to make myself 20% more productive.
Regarding the family part. Don’t feel terribly bas about not having a family. There is the possibility of a divorce and the resulting court ordered payments that can be far more devastating. It’s simply too hard to keep someone else happy all the time. Frustrations add up, more fights, more insults, more angry words. As humans I don’t think we can ever be happy.
i'll never be rich either, and contrary to the KFC founder who got rich very late it is not lack of opportunity but lack of motivation to be rich. as soon as i earn some money i'll spend it on hiring others to help me build what i want, or if it is enough, even stop earning money to focus on my interests.
family is trickier. finding the right partner is very hard. it takes a lot of introspection and being able to recognize flaws in yourself and in your partner. it took me decades to understand what i need in a partner. and now i feel like i'd rather stay alone than have a partner that doesn't fill my needs. that sounds very selfish, but it goes of course both ways, i also look at the needs of my partner and evaluate whether i can fulfill those needs. (in short it's about compatible goals. many chinese women for example just want their husband to be successful and enable a comfortable life. fortunately the woman i found didn't because as i said above, that's just not a life goal for me)
when you mention space, the olympics and video games i get the impression that those are not even your real goals, and you are more likely lamenting that you feel like you don't have anything to strive for.
as i wrote above, it took me decades, not just to understand what i need in a partner, but simply what i need in life. the interesting thing is that now that i think i understand that, actually fulfilling that need became less important. understanding myself helped me detach.
as for beating procrastination, for me it's not about increasing productivity but being productive at all. it's not just 20%, it's 200% or more. it's about keeping that job and doing enough to get leads for the next one.
On a serious note, you never actually _know_ that e.g. you'll never be rich. E.g. KFC founder was ~62 years old when they founded the company. The median age of (successful) founders is also roughly 40, if not more.
see my comment above. i know that i'll never be rich, nor do i want to, because trying to get rich it would interfere with how i want to live my life...
Readit News
I've found this to be very true. A trick I found that made this easier for me is to leave a trivial task to start tomorrow with, often with notes to remind myself what to do. Ideally the trivial task is on the way to something bigger, not finishing something. That gets me into my editor, gets me running the code / tests / etc., and gives me a trivially easy way to get moving. Then the motivation kicks in and I can start moving for real.
The same approach helps me with tasks outside of software development, and even outside of work.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fi...
When there are no clear tasks, I sometime leave a syntax error at the place work should continue tomorrow. This is quite effective. It can make the answer to the "Where was I?" question immediate instead of taking a few seconds and this is one fewer barrier.
It's also useful to jot down a quick list of (say) three items that are at the top of your mind when you leave work for the day, and they too will help with a context restore.
Introducing a syntax error is like a saved game, portal back in time. I'll come back to it tomorrow and it'll take me max one minute to reload the context into my brain.
I’m just stating the obvious, but I find it odd that the author states the opposite isn’t true.
In my experience both works and some actors prefer one and some the other. But you can try it yourself, think of a sad thing, slumb together make a sad gesture and listen (emotionally) what happens on the inside.
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Mostly because I don't think procrastination is inherently bad. There's a lot of stigma attached to procrastination as it's seen as being "unproductive". But I think procrastination can lead to great insights.
Your brain is telling you that it is not interested in the current task. The question is: Why? Overworked and needs a break? Much more interested in exploring something else? Protecting against the pain of failure?
Investigating the why instead of forcing "overcoming" is quite fruitful in my personal experience.
My guess is "action leads to motivation" might be helpful for solving one of the root causes (likely fear of failure/imposter syndrom) but not all of them.
I think for younger engineers "fail fast" makes a lot of sense; there's not enough of a foundation of experience to tell right from wrong so the only way to learn is to fail.
For more experienced engineers, there's a greater sense of "I have a sense where this can fail; how do I design around that?"
It's not that a more experienced engineer will know exactly how it fails, but that there are modalities of failure that have been encountered so the goal is to design with some flexibility or optionality in mind. And sometimes, this just requires a bit of "gestation" or "percolation" before carving the path.
I think of it like an experienced sculptor sizing up a block of marble before making the first strike with a chisel. It's a kind of procrastination, but really, its a process of visualizing the path.
I think often people who don't visualize in their head can't grasp this...it appears as inactivity. The reality is it seems to be a hyperactivity...procrastination comes from having too many tasks and directions with unsolved solutions. (in my case...)
Another way to put it I have heard is "Thinking is working". If it doesn't appear like I am working...I am likely thinking.
I'd say that procrastination is bad when it drives you into some unproductive but addictive behavior, like watching silly tiktok videos, etc. It can be actually good if you do "structured procrastination": can't force myself to do task X, but find solace in solving problem Y really neatly. Another approach is to take a walk, do push-ups, etc, anything that changes your focus away from mental tasks, and preferably brings more oxygen to your brain.
Yet another approach is analytical: "I can't stomach doing that thing! But what thoughts or feelings make me loathe it so much? Where do they come from?" Interesting insights can follow.
I suspect that you use word procrastination too general, to include all possible cases. If a person is lazy for 5 minutes or for an hour it's not a procrastination. Procrastination is severe case of inability to do something a person wants to do. And before anyone interjects about "duh, work may be unpleasant", it also extends to ALL other spheres of life. Imagine wanting to play a game and literally not being to force yourself to click Start. Or scrolling saved watch list and not picking anything you want to watch. Stuff like that.
Procrastination and related issues is a severe mental disorder and I'm sick and tired of people normalizing it or dismissing as something good or beneficial.
PS: to rephrase all that above - the answer to the question "Why?" is not exclusively something external (like "not interesting") but often an internal one, a chemical disbalance in a person's brain, some brain structures under- or over-developed etc.
But pain is a valuable signal, and often learning and resolving the root cause of the pain can be more valuable than reaching for the oxycodone to power past it.
The phrase "do something instead of nothing" might be more useful than "action leads to motivation." I have plenty of motivation - but my brain does not always comply when I try to focus on purpose. In such a case, I work on an unrelated task that is easy to engage with. This gives my brain a chance to focus, which begets more focus, until there is enough focus to do so on purpose.
I think for a lot of us it's something like: Because it's nonsense busywork that I don't care about. Procrastinating isn't going to help, and it is absolutely bad because it leads to uncompleted tasks and that leads to financial distress. I need to get it done regardless of whether it's going to provide a dopamine hit or not. Best thing to do is to stop thinking about it and get it out of the way so that I can focus on the things I want to do. I'm not overworked, I just don't want to do this task. I am interested in exploring something else but that's not a choice that I have right now. I don't have the privilege of doing whatever I feel like doing. Pain of failure? No, it's not at all something that I'll fail at. It's drudgery avoidance. Unfortunately there's plenty of drudgery that has to be completed.
So if one really is as uninterested in the quality of the output as you suggest, perhaps it might actually be better to dump the problem into Claude/Gemini/Cleverbot and just copy/paste/act upon the results verbatim and then mark the checkbox as "done" and move on.
For me personally, the pain of such efforts is ordinarily from making sure that the output is correct when the input is largely guesswork or speculation that always leads to hunting through a morass of poor documentation of some library or seeking a workaround to some irritating problem or rolling the dice on what the risk to various decisions might prove to be over the future: "eh, duct tape this and it ought to hold".
And most notably that doing more of this work correlates to an exponential rise in the volume of similar work that will be required down the road to maintain the same results.
Those are often exactly the time one would be best served by taking a step back and questioning the entire framework that supports the busywork in question. Perhaps starting from scratch or making some huge change would reduce the garbage portions of the effort and keep them from further proliferating?
The productivity fetishists want us to hate ourselves for resisting the orders issued by the executive mind. Fuck that.
I procrastinate super long on this 20% of boring task even though it could all be done in maybe 2 days.
Dead Comment
One example for me is getting out of the house: I loathe the idea of getting dressed, getting into the car and driving, whenever I contemplate it, but once I'm behind the wheel, the thought always is "this isn't so bad". If I think about the getting dressed bit, that too, thought of in isolation, isn't so bad. It seems it is the anticipation of a seemingly complex sequence of tasks that tend to put the brain off.
Maybe unless one can really convince themselves that their daily work matters (really matters and not just for their team/company metrics) one is bound to procrastinate as a symptom of some subconscious sense of pointlessness.
Maybe the answer isn't so much finding new tricks to play on your mind, but finding something to do that doesn't involve codifying more power in the strong leader, to increase his masculinity in the worklace or whatever the political issue du jour is.
I procrastinated so badly I could never apply for jobs. And the jobs I did get I lost quickly due to the same procrastination.
I think the programmers in most environments aren't judged based on some hard metrics that could say someone procrastinated half of the time and could have done twice as much.
Most judgement comes from remembering whether anything has been done at all, and if yes then whether it was sunbathing of quality. People (I at least) will rate higher someone who worked less but contributed higher quality code. Also good contributions to discussion, mentoring juniors is something a procrastinator might not even think is work but is valued highly.
And even while procrastinating some part of your brain often thinks about problem so the time isn't completely lost.
All in all procrastinators aren't as bad as it sounds unless we get into some deep pathology.
But procrastination problems don't mean infinite procrastination. It's just that work keeps piling up and then it has to be done in a burst when it has to really be done. I find this doesn't necessarily mean my output is less (in the short term), it's just that it's exhausting.
Also productivity requirements at work, no matter how fancy workolace, are typically way less than you may think. Just showing up and not actively cause grief goes a long way.
What you tend to see publicly is people in their productive phases, or quite exceptional outliers, or just messaging.
For the sake of analogy, I feel like I wanted to be a photographer and take beautiful and artistic pictures, but in reality, I just take school pictures for a living.
Now, I do believe there are passionate jobs with passionate programmers out there, but:
1. I do not know where nor with whom one would even find such roles.
2. My lack of skill would be more burdensome than helpful for such teams. I'm not new either. I've been at this game for over a decade now.
So, I am stuck in this procrastination loop -- I lack the skills to better my situation, but I also feel so far behind that I, at some level, believe I am incapable of ever being able to find/retain such a job.
Long story short, I am not sure what your particular reasons are for procrastinating, but brother/sister, I don't blame you one bit for it.
I see the bookends, but notice the root cause
> That really kicked me into gear [...] I was very motivated and productive
You don't have intrinsic motivation for these tasks and the job. This is the thread to pull on. Keep asking "why?"
In the least, I recommend a pro-active note, letting him know you're done and ready for his feedback on the assignment or new priorities. Figure out why he didn't (or persistently doesn't) follow-up.
You might have ADHD.
And is is very important to know whether you have it or not because all that advice for neurotypical people will not work for you then. In fact it will harm you. It will make you feel as a failure.
You need to figure out how your brain works and only then you will finally manage to make lasting changes.
In approx 7 years I went through working at all the top software companies in my country, but what really fixed my problems was moving on to being a researcher at the university. I’m now paid less than half from before, but it’s still enough, and I couldn’t be happier.
Getting to work on what I think is actually important and interesting every day is what helped. I also seem happier than the younger researchers who didn’t work at companies first, who don’t know how good they have it.
(I’m always curious to learn other potential diagnostic markers for adhd)
For some people struggling with chronic lifelong procrastination, the oft-repeated advice from the author such as "Action leads to motivation, not the other way around." ... and similar variants such as, "Screw motivation, what you need is discipline!" ... and other related big picture ideas such as Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams' "Systems instead of Goals" -- all do not work.
And adding extra rhetorical embellishments to the advice such as using the phrase "it's simple [...]", and using the word "[...] just [...]" as in:
- "Stopping procrastination isn't that hard to solve. It's simple. Just chop up the task into much smaller subtasks and just start on that tiny subtask. That will give you momentum to finish it."
... also doesn't work. Some procrastinators just procrastinate the initiation of starting that tiny subtask! For the few that actually do try to start with that first step, they'll quickly lose steam because of boredom/distraction/whatever and the overall task remains unfinished.
A lot of books and blogs about time management repeat the same advice that many procrastinators have all heard before and it doesn't work. The procrastinators understand the logic of the advice but it doesn't matter because there are psychological roadblocks that prevent them from following it.
EDIT reply to: >That doesn't mean the advice is bad,
I'm not saying the advice is wrong. Instead, I'm saying that some well-meaning people who give that repeated advice seem surprised that it doesn't work on some people. Because the advice givers believed "Action Precedes Motivation" worked on themselves, they automatically assume that imparting those same words to other procrastinators will also work. It often doesn't. The meta-analysis of that advice and why it sometimes doesn't work is not done because the people giving that advice are the ones who used that technique successfully. This creates a self-confirmation bias.
I've also found that there's no real cure for it. You can take the meds but they'll chip away at your personality and health in other ways.
Also there is ADHD coaching. Having someone who had ADHD themselves coach me through my problems was an absolute game changer.
Maybe that could be an option for you as well. Worked much better that traditional therapy for me personally.
As for medication, well for most people with ADHD it works really well and is worth the relative mild side effect. But that is most, for some it does not work unfortunately. I think it is always worth trying but yeah it is no silver bullet that works for everyone.
In my case, not always, but often, procrastination shows up when fear is involved. Fear of failure, of not doing something perfectly, of the task being too big. What’s helped me is turning the task into a challenge, because I know that personally, I thrive on challenges. It re-frames the fear into something exciting, and once I get started, I follow all of the other advice such like breaking it down into small steps. Thanks for sharing.
However, challenges that start with “I wonder if”—like wondering if some bold idea just might actually be possible—give me a huge reservoir of energy to work well beyond my normal limits and find new solution that truly make a difference.
Of course in most projects, actual innovation is only a fraction of the work so some reframing of “run the business” tasks is necessary. That’s when I tap into gratitude: for being able to work on a project, for being entrusted with a particular task, etc.
I used to procrastinate a lot when I was a PhD student and later in academia. Sometimes, it was literally weeks of doing nothing and stressing out.
I eventually migrated to big tech and I now rarely procrastinate. We have pretty tangible goals, good results are rewarded and lack of results would raise concerns pretty quickly.
In my case, working in the right environment helped a lot with procrastination.
Incidentally, I have a supervisor who felt the exact same way when he was doing his PhD and fled to industry. Evidently he found that there was something to be enjoyed in the freedoms of research and returned.
Sounds more like fear than “not” procrastinating.
But on the other hand fear is a good motivator
It's definitely going to be too hard as it is imo simply not possible and is a non-goal for a marriage.
family is trickier. finding the right partner is very hard. it takes a lot of introspection and being able to recognize flaws in yourself and in your partner. it took me decades to understand what i need in a partner. and now i feel like i'd rather stay alone than have a partner that doesn't fill my needs. that sounds very selfish, but it goes of course both ways, i also look at the needs of my partner and evaluate whether i can fulfill those needs. (in short it's about compatible goals. many chinese women for example just want their husband to be successful and enable a comfortable life. fortunately the woman i found didn't because as i said above, that's just not a life goal for me)
when you mention space, the olympics and video games i get the impression that those are not even your real goals, and you are more likely lamenting that you feel like you don't have anything to strive for.
as i wrote above, it took me decades, not just to understand what i need in a partner, but simply what i need in life. the interesting thing is that now that i think i understand that, actually fulfilling that need became less important. understanding myself helped me detach.
as for beating procrastination, for me it's not about increasing productivity but being productive at all. it's not just 20%, it's 200% or more. it's about keeping that job and doing enough to get leads for the next one.