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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

The closing lines: "You do have the time. You just need to make it." are demonstrably false.

One cannot simultaneously conduct Nobel-caliber research, train as a top-tier professional athlete, be deeply involved with running a serious business, and spend a fulfilling/requisite amount of time with family. There is not enough time.

For me, the critical part of dealing with procrastination/perfectionism has been mastering, and executing upon, prioritization.

The rest of the tips in the article are useful, but that last one, I couldn't abide (and hence have been delayed by ~5 minutes doing the things I want to do today).

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At the same time, I look back on how much time I wasted by constantly moving the goalpost for any given project, or even about what projects I should spend my time on. And a ton of this was due to me worrying about how to make money, and which projects would make the most money, and all kinds of useless questions like that.

But historically, the projects of mine that got the most positive feedback and have the most users, are ones I did purely because I wanted to, because I saw a need and knew how to fill it and knew it would be an interesting and satisfying challenge.

So the other night I decided to go back to that. I've got a super cool new app that will make Mjolnir/Hydra/Phoenix/AppGrid look like stone age tools, that I plan to dedicate serious time to. I've also started re-typesetting a very fascinating public domain book printed in 1885, which I found on archive.org, and got Tesseract to do most of the work for me last night in about an hour flat.

So yeah, I can get a lot of really cool stuff done in a very short amount of time, as long as I stop worrying so much about how things will be provided for me and trust in Divine Providence to take care of that. That's how all those other cool projects were made anyway, so I have even more evidence against my worrying and overthinking it.

Same, the course I took in college 'just for fun' ended up being how I got my first real job after graduation. And I did my best work for my previous employer when I deliberately focused on satisfying my own curiosity.

There's a lot to be said for a "keep moving" approach to project work. I'm a worrier with a perfectionist streak, but I do better with multiple projects because I ruminate less on each one: If I cycle through them over the course of a day, I forget what I was worried about and just focus on accomplishing something I had put in the to-do, which levels things out and lets me do more work at less than 100% when it's called for. When I do work at 100% it means I'm destroying myself trying to calculate every possible option. The 100% work only needs to come out some of the time.

The article is about procrastination. If someone is simultaneously trying to do all the things you mentioned, and the only problem is that there's not enough time to do all of them (of course), then they likely don't term it procrastination. By definition, procrastination is about when one has the time but is unable to do the things one wants to do.

Procrastination can actually manifest in seeing that there's so much to do, but not enough time, then feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed by perceived effort and/or consequences and/or required decision/choice, and thus doing nothing. I know this situation all too well myself. The GP totall is speaking about procrastination :)

I'm not going to say it's possible to do all those things at once, but I will say that the 80/20 effect is real and can be leveraged for some extremely serious productivity if you let it guide you.

It's not just a question of making the time, but also making the time count.

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