Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

I don't really struggle with procrastination much any more, but it took all sorts of work that would have seemed apparently unrelated to me. E.g., a regular sleep schedule is really helpful, and that required an automated lighting system that helps me keep in sync with the sun. Regular cardio helps keep my baseline anxiety level much lower. Meditation, therapy, medication, food choices, and an awful lot of introspection and self-experimentation were necessary. And time, just a lot of time to unwind the bad habits and bad associations.

I get that it feels hopeless sometimes, but I hope you'll continue. Note that you can't catch up if your baseline is some arbitrary standard. But the right way to measure it is improvement from where you are now. Then there's no "catching up". There's just today, and whether you're going to make things better by one day's worth.

Imo, it's a brain malfunction/illness. Some spectrum of ADD, some people being affected more than others. Perhaps it was useful in the millions of years of evolution, but it's counterproductive in a modern society.

Which is why I would love for (more) doctors to recognize procrastination/Attention Deficit as a real problem in itself and not just wave it away as a symptom of something else.

A real problem for which there is real, working medication, that thousands of people are happy with. But unfortunately due to the nature of these drugs, everyone shies away from it.

It's not the perfect solution, but it's a working solution. Medication would've changed my life, but I can not get it. And so I continue wasting hours, days, months and years of my life.

Not to mention it causes anxiety and depression, and they continue reinforcing each other, making things much worse.

For me, it is a feeling like you said, of never being able to catch up. Like with debt, for years, I would just keep spending on my credit cards. I tried consolidating several times, and finally, I have used a 401k loan against myself to consolidate. My student loans and car loan are paid off, and I have < $10,000 of actual credit debt for the first time since college.

When something seems hopeless, or too much to overcome, I think the mind says "fuck it", and wants to escape.

I find myself very productive at cleaning when I am on the phone with friends and family. I will pace the house, sweeping or mopping or throwing away papers that need sorted. Why? Because doing it alone is lonely, boring, unfulfilling.

I'm lonely. Despite several good friends and family who care about me, I am very lonely for someone to love and care for me in the way I feel I can care for them - I've had love before, though I didn't know it when I was younger. I miss it.

With debt finally going away, and with a good job, I at least see the light at the end of that tunnel. I may finally be able to travel more, buy a sailboat, buy a house. I have been more intentional about my spending, that I don't use any credit I can't pay off immediately. See? having hope, seeing that things can be better, really helps.

I had to get that out there. TLDR: I procrastinate on doing chores and making hard decisions because it is overwhelming at times, hard to envision the immediate benefit, and so I go a bar to chat with other people who are running from something, too.

Fuck, there should be a support group for this.

What I like about it is that many facts are backed by science research.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/d...

Again totally recommend this video on the wall of awful for ADHD procrastination https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo08uS904Rg

Not having a real passion on pretty much anything, but have small impulses for pretty much EVERYTHING. Means that I wasted a lot of hours/days/weeks but didn't gain much. Plus no experience of major positive feedback makes me less and less confident.

One fact I found really interesting is that fear is embedded in your brain & body. A fear response is triggered immediately (30ms) even decades after the original incident. Learning to identify and resolve causes of fear can help you lower the barrier to doing your tasks. If we consider procrastination as a barrier preventing you from doing something, you can either up your will power, lower the barrier, or a combination of both. Good luck on your journey!

+1

I neglected this, thought that I could force myself to work, instead of seeking help. I did 100h weeks after all, I'd always get stuff done. I quit my job, started looking for more rewarding things to do, finally had time to do things right.

And, one day I ended up crying on the floor, hurting myself and spending 3 days on a task that was supposed to take 5-15 minutes. Then a simple coding exercise (2-3h) took me a week, because I couldn't focus, I couldn't accept any solutions because they weren't perfect. I ended up not sending my job application because I lost my shit, even speaking to the recruiter was too intimidating. The whole situation was ridiculous, surreal.

I felt embarrassed because I went throught some difficult (arguably waaay more stressful) situations when I was younger and just couldn't cope with the fact that at the age of 32 my brain gave up on a high school grade CS task. It still perplexes me.

> At the moment doing pomodoro and putting everything in kanban charts and devide&conquer seem to work somewhat. I don't really have any clever advice beyond that, it just sucks.

I'm not sure if you're the same but I used to hate routine. I'm learning to enjoy it now, because I realised that it allows me to deal with the previously neglected parts of my life (exercise, meditation, sleep, food) with less friction. I hate self-help books, but Atomic Habits was surprisingly helpful.

I'm still getting to the point where I enjoy things around me (instead of constantly solving problems), but I hope this will go when the lockdown ends.

I used to have much, much more control over myself. I feel that what I did to myself was reckless, because now keeping my emotional health at the level allowing me to work can be really hard.

I wish I was brought up to care about myself, because now even though I slowed down and made some changes in my life: 1) I don't feel like a better person 2) I'm not better to anyone around me. I'm just tired. I can find a nice 6-figure job, but can't guarantee that I'll be strong enough emotionally to support my partner. Please consider this a warning, so you don't end up like me. Making small changes and taking care of yourself is easier than damage control.

ADD/ADHD-PI is kind of a terrible name, but procrastination and a mind that never rests is a combination that while not unique, is quite uncommon outside "ADD type" brains/people.

It's not that a diagnosis is going to solve all problems instantly, but it can help avoid depression, burnout, and various secondary issues.

For me personally, I would say it brought me back to life. That's why I encourage others, because there was almost nothing left of me when I finally got the help I needed, and maybe I can help someone else take the same step someone once helped me take!

It's the only thing that seems to consistently work for me. When I was so emotionally overwhelmed I couldn't focus and it took me half a day to begin working, I would switch to doing pomodoros and rewarding myself for achieving a certain amount any given day. I tried punishing myself through not achieving too (via Beeminder), but that ended up worsening my emotional negative feedback loop, so I stopped.

Over the past decade, with tremendous help of my wife, I've managed to resolve some of my anxiety issues, so these days my main sources of work anxiety are: 1) trying to do a thing I have no first clue how to approach, and 2) the tension between spending time coding for money vs. doing hobby projects. If I do too much of the latter, I don't have money, but if I do too little, I burn out quickly. So I reward my work time with hobby project time. I keep a small pad on which I put a tally mark for each pomodoro spent on working. These tally marks represent pomodoros I can then spend on hobby projects (software on otherwise) guilt-free. This satisfies my emotional self, as I literally work to earn time to spend doing something else.

In practice, I end up buffering tally marks and then spending them in batches, this fits well with me being an independent contractor (I can work less today if I worked more yesterday), and also works well for the state of flow: if I have 10 pomodoros buffered up, I can let myself spend them all in 5 hours of continuous hacking.

I'd say the key thing here is getting rid of the guilt: I've agreed with myself that as long as I never exceed the accumulated pomodoro budget, I can spend it without feeling bad about not working.

(Well, the second big trick was to block HN on my router during work hours; this ensures I actually get to both earn and spend my pomodoros, instead of procrastinating here all day.)

(EDIT: Well, the third big trick, one which lets me keep anxiety down, is that I keep running journals - both personal and work - and I dump my train of thoughts straight into them whenever I start feeling even slightly anxious or confused. I almost never read them again, but the act of going through my thoughts in writing calms me down, and lets me pinpoint the sources of anxiety.)

Idea/suggestion: How about the old "delete all your emails" trick: Sell everything you have. Quit your job. Move to another place.

Having said/suggested that, I've done this email trick a couple of times and while it works wonders short term - I stop worrying about those highlighted emails I should do something about that are getting older and older - I tend to just end up in the same situation later.

But, having moved around a couple of times, it also does work wonders, as long as you keep focus on the "new you" while everything's fresh.

Nothing works.

I found BJ Fogg’s behavior model [0] useful. His model let’s you plot a behavior on a graph. If you create two plots for two behaviors, the one closest to the top-right corner is the one you will do.

Procrastination then is just choosing one behavior over another. Doing nothing over doing something. And you can plot it, and then figure out how you can position the levers (there are only 3) to make “something” the chosen behavior over “staring at the wall”.

His book Tiny Habits goes into more detail about how you might run this diagnostic process. Atomic Habits is also good here for the actionable changes, but I found Fogg’s simple model to be wickedly effective for wrangling my executive dysfunction.

Once you have a habit framework in place, you need a wholistic approach, which I would listen to the 1st question of this Q&A [1] (around 2min mark) for an example of a daily routine (which starts the night before), and in some cases professional help works wonders (therapy, medication, CBT).

In terms of rescue from the acute fog-of-anxiety, I use 3 meditation tools that, if I follow them, have never failed.

One is a general observe-and-dissipate meditation, something like Sam Harris’s course, to build awareness and the ability to pause life for a brief second so you can inject habit loop triggers.

Second is meditation for calm, using modified box breathing to mitigate acute anxiety. In each of the 4 parts of the breath (in, hold, out, hold), wait for the most pleasurable part, and repeat. Something out waiting for the moment of most pleasure is (a) mildly pleasurable and (b) very focusing.

Third is the same as the second, but taking a break after each box breath cycle to pause and acknowledge to yourself that you are moving in the right direction. I added this after hearing a neuroscientist talk about hacking the brain’s reward system using this approach: pick any goal (even if it’s short-term counterproductive), take the smallest possible physical step toward that goal, pause and acknowledge your effort toward moving in the right direction, and repeat. The pause-and-acknowledge step triggers a dopamine response, which he said has the effect of buffering or titrating adrenaline, meaning this cycle is energizing and can be sustained for a very long time compared to an acute adrenaline spike and subsequent crash. Once you get forward momentum you can redirect to a better goal, so the initial goal is rather unimportant. Just building the momentum in this dopamine reward cycle overcomes all of the crushing anxiety, negative self-talk, and so forth.

[0] https://www.behaviormodel.org/

[1] https://impacttheory.libsyn.com/ama-8121-190416-pod-for-post

- What is the the thing making me feel the worst at the moment? - What is the largest small thing I can do with my current energy to offset my biggest problem?

For example, one time when money was really bad and I knew I'd get some money from tax returns, I focused all my energy (to the exclusion of other things even work) on trying to get it done, which resulted in some money and reducing my pain. This allowed me to re-focus on the next small challenge that I felt I could tackle reasonably well.

Sometimes the spiral is so deep and the challenges so multidimensional that it's hard to pick on the right thread of the ball of yarn to start making progress, but it's possible.

Recognize that procrastination based on avoidance of difficult emotions is likely as unique as each individual's emotions.

I'm glad you found a solution for yourself, but please do remember how unique each person in the world is.

This is the main operating principle of http://www.structuredprocrastination.com

[1]: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/julia-donaldson/a-squas....

That's a really interesting observation, and I recently experienced it I think.

I am installing a new ECU in my car in order to tune it myself, something I'm really looking forward to but is honestly quite daunting and possibly expensive to fail at. The entire time the tuning has been on my mind, I've been learning and doing dozens of little things while installing the ECU. Things I'd normally be a bit worried about. Soldering, wiring, drilling and tapping. I've learned a bunch of new things along the way, none of them tuning. Now I'm at the point where I need to do the tuning and I'm so invigorated by the process of getting here that I feel much more prepared to do it.

Thank you for writing, this really jives with my experience. I would read HN or various articles or do "fun" work to get dopamine hits, but the reality my psychotherapist revealed was that I internalized a lot of external pressures/expectations to do X Y Z in my career. It led to me resigning my job as an SQL/R programmer in February...bright-eyed looking for the next position...

And now I'm unemployed, so things are going super.

Reminds me of one of my favorite books from childhood, Goose Goofs Off.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/967059.Goose_Goofs_Of...

That makes sense for some procrastination, but other procrastination is laziness.

Mopping the floor, taking out the garbage, mowing the lawn types of procrastination... those are under your own purview and don’t involve big emotions or decisions...

So I think it explains some kinds of procrastination but not all.

It's frustrating, because it's not like it's a solution to be tired all the time. If I'm sleeping better, I get less work done and more life done, feel happier and better, but get swamped by work later. If I'm exhausted, I get some work done and no life done, feel horrible and eventually dip back into depression, but I'm a little bit more on top of work.

Eventually I get too exhausted to even do that, so again it's no solution, but it is interesting none the less.

My interpretation is a little different, though: I think that a lot of my emotional struggle with procrastination is some fear of creating something less than perfect (or, for that matter, at least less than what I'm capable of). When exhaustion and/or stress over a very near deadline override that, I end up tossing something together.. and in the clear light of the next day, I usually find what whatever I did is at least a good start at whatever I need to do.

As a side note, I've also found that setting a next action helps - I usually take it a step further and make sure it's a simple and/or easy action, though. Very often, without intentionally making sure to save something easy, I'll knock out anything simple that's in line with what I've been doing. If something is complex enough to think "well, that will take a long time, this is a good stopping point" it's also a task that will be harder to get started whenever I come back to what I'm doing.

Therapists can also provide useful inputs for career and work optimization. They get treated as mental health problem solvers, but you may get more optimization out of therapy than attending a conference or doing something that's traditional for career development.

Finding the right therapist takes some effort. Don't expect it to help initially. Do some education on the kinds of things they treat and mental health in general. I suffer from anxiety, but I never made that connection before.

It's not like it's insensitive to say you are anxious about something minor when there exists people with more severe anxiety problems. It's just the name of a symptom.

At least for me, making a difficult decision that might have far-reaching consequences can be very uncomfortable if I don't have all the information. And it can be very easy to procrastinate because I tell myself that more information might be available in the future (even when that is clearly not true).

So, it's not so much that I search for an optimal strategy and more that I know there isn't one and I don't want to bite the bullet yet and make a decision.

For (2), I do indeed loathe retracing some task that's similar to something I've done in the past. One thing that sometimes helps is to find a way to put a new spin on it. Maybe use an unfamiliar language or data structure. Or optimize for something different. Or push 'git' to the max while working on it.

Yeah I gotta agree with this. Sometimes it's like you are trying to walk through a wall and it's just not working. Our subconscious tells us "this is not working, try something else". Now the dysfunctional reaction is to pass time waiting for the wall to collapse under its own weight. And the "correct" solution is to search for a door. But the tricky thingy is we may not realize on a conscious level that the wall is even there or that the wall is the reason we are passing time.

Have you ever had a test?

"Alt-tab" was a trigger to forget what I was doing, even if I was alt-tabbing to something I needed. I would alt-tab, instantly forget what I wanted to do, then start something else. Any window switch would trigger procrastination habits too.

So now my code, terminal, file manager, database etc are all in one tool in front of me all the time, and if I am at my workstation, that is what I'm doing. Most of the time.

However, I think there is a huge trap with the just get started trick. Often, what is driving you to get started is guilt. If your only promise to yourself is that you will start, then starting alleviates the guilt. And then the motivation disappears.

One possible way around that is to commit to a little bit more. Instead of committing to just getting started, commit to doing a small but significant piece of the work.

Another idea is to just be aware that, if you do the bare minimum that counts as getting started, you're not really applying the method in good faith. Essentially you're just wasting your time by trying to game the system that you yourself created.

As I understand it, you approach your work as if it were a prototype to be discarded soon. That actually makes sense if you have a natural tendency to fret about quality.

I had worked my heart out on a project that the business decided not to pursue. It killed me, all my time was wasted, business was fucking up, would have to re-do all this work in subpar tools etc. As I got moved onto a new project, it has been insanely hard to get motivated to work on it.

Just assuming that it will be a business failure again... it relieves a lot of pressure off me. And you are right - at this scale I have almost no say on whether the business decides to run with it or not, so why worry about it?

The part about conflating emotion and time (in the follow up) really gets to me. How he says mowing the lawn is "an all day project" simply because it's been built up to feel that way.

My default is to put everything off and do it in a batch right before (or after) it's due. But the past few years I've focused on doing batches way ahead of time. Less stressful and much more satisfying. Getting into Project Management certainly helped with that!

The piece also referred to his "final lecture," when it wasn't; the lecture was a part of series titled "Last Lectures" (note the capitalization).

I think it's quite a powerful idea. Questioning your knowledge can lead to positive introspection and growth, whereas questioning or doubting yourself will not.

Story time:

My dad used to work at Sainsbury's (big UK supermarket chain). One day the CEO (Lord Sainsbury I think he said it was) popped over to his desk.

"<Dad's name>, you do great work. I know I can always count on you."

"But... You spend so much effort on details that don't end up being important. The first 80% of your work takes as long as the last 20%."

"The thing is, that first 80% is more usually good enough for what we need. Why don't you try and hit 80% and then wait and see if we need that last 20% next time? It might save you some time."

Caveat - I may have made the name up. But it quite often works in practice.

Quoting some other post I've read on HN:

> Remember that you are going to die. Time flies, have you noticed? Is that status symbol that you are pursuing really that important? Is it ever going to make you happy?

> There is more wisdom in one of your cells than in all self-help and management books combined. Maybe you can't focus for a good reason? What could that reason be?

> Remember the last time you felt glad to be alive? Was it related to being productive?

Looks like you don't care that much about relearning C, or at least about doing it via those exercises. Look into your motivation for why you do it in the first place.

It is probably a poor defence of procrastination but it certainly does occasionally pay to put something on the back burner for a while to see if it actually needs doing.

I'm the sole developer on a new project now, it's giving me a lot more satisfaction. I do run into procrastination and analysis paralysis though.

That's probably not a reasonable assumption. Evolution doesn't work so fast. Procrastination might simply be an indication that we're not living under liveable conditions. Why do octopuses eat their own limbs under some conditions? Does it give them an evolutionary advantage?

The activities that people tend to procrastinate didn't exist until very recently...

The awful truth is that "doing nothing" or at least "waiting a bit" is quite often the right thing to do from a survival perspective.

(1) What's the desired outcome?

(2) What's the next action?