Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control) | Hacker News Reader

Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control)

nytimes.com

Is this article a joke? It's essentially saying that procrastination doesn't have anything to do with self-control, it's irrational self-harm caused by an inability to manage bad moods about a task. The article ends with saying that the solution to procrastination is to manage emotions differently.

These are all things related to self-control.

Meh. I’ll read it later.

You need self control to the proportion that your emotions get in the way.

More anxiety (or whatever your emotional block is) around work, more self control required to get yourself to do it.

If you deal with the anxiety (on top of continuing to use your existing self control) you'll find that you need less and less self control to get things done.

That being said, self control can absolutely be trained and it is a part of learning to deal with your emotions. It's not an either or.

Personally I find it to be a mixture of anxiety & poorly defined tasks with unclear objectives/acceptance criteria and poorly coached "constructive feedback".

This comes out mostly with my boss who is famous for wanting "plans" but will trash the first N versions delivered for any number of unpredictable reasons, while questioning your competence for having provided something so bad. Often he often casually admits to having completely changed directions in between plan iterations. Never comes to a conclusion. Eventually devs just write up some tickets to work on the obvious & urgent work and get to it.

Yes. A better way to put it might be "it is related to self-control, but in a more complicated way than you imagine."

It is oversimplistic too, ignoring many reasons to want to postpone tasks. And it's from 2019. I clicked it without noticing that, read for a while, then realized I had seen it before.

For me, fear of failure seems to be a big blocker to doing things, especially if there is a creative component to them. What if I can’t do it? What if I hate the result? It definitely leans me to only trying safe things that I know I can complete successfully.

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