procrastination
What is Procrastination?
the avoidance of discomfort
uncomfortable feelings
- Failure
- Fear of failure
- emotions
flight fight freeze (the freeze part)
A failure of emotional regulation
- You are dealing with difficult emotions or something unresolved.
- When you are happy you rarely procrastinate - when it is happening you are not happy.
- Putting too much pressure on yourself
Procrastination is not laziness. Procrastination is the result of having high standards and putting a little too much pressure on yourself.
People who want you to stop procrastinating have never done anything of value themselves
(paraphrased)
Well Tarot
A desire to void time
- wanting to escape
Examples of procrastination
-
Holding your mobile phone in your hand
- Anything with live text chat
- Messing around in the vault
- plancrastination
- Checking your email over and over again
- making spotify playlists
- Looking at social media
- telegram
- aimless 'visual research' on pinterest
- Searching online for software you don’t really need
- Porn
- Shopping for shoes and clothes you don’t need
- Shopping for electrical items that you don’t really need
- Messing with automation
- arpeggiators not melody
- programming to solve problems that are not important
- tech for the sake of tech
- Spending too long on a task
- Putting aside a larger task to concentrate on small insignificant parts
- Putting aside a different task or different role when it is time to stop.
- repeating experiments already done
- toolmaker that builds things that have already been built
Patterns
The longer procrastination goes on for the worse it gets. This is because you are constantly re-enforcing the behaviour. Without even really trying, you will pretty much get better at everything you regularly do. If you procrastinate then you will improve your procrastination powers.
Causes
fear
- Procrastination comes because you have high expectations for the outcome
- If your sense of self worth is explicitly linked to your performance — it is a fear of failure.
- if you don't try then you cannot fail.
- It is easier to put something off than it is to do it.
stress
- Feeling bad because you’re not making money, then not doing anything that you want to do either because that also doesn’t make money
cognitive dissonance
Dissonance between the activities you are expected to complete, and the activities that you want to do. Somehow though you end up doing neither thing as you end up caught in the middle. You feel bad for not doing what you should be doing, and you feel bad because you are not doing what you want to do. It’s a lose-lose situation. Avoiding pain in the present stacks up pain for the future.
Solution
Correct action. Correct action builds tempo
OK but how
Reduce the difficulty
\
Simple method
- Make the task way easier
- If you don't look at it and think "That's easy" then it is too hard
Prompt yourself
- Make the task way easier
- Have a clear and well-timed prompt, so you actually remember to do it'
The prompt is not something vague like "Every day"
Example:
"When I sit down to eat I will write down the most important thing I have to do today"
In practice:
"When I do X I will do Y"
The task is something so easy that I can look at it and think "that’s easy". If it’s not that easy, try again
Timebox it!
- Set a timer
- concentration: only on that task or nothing
- Reward yourself with a closed ended reward
Let go
- To reduce procrastination, one must accept that things sometimes fail even if you try your best.
- Most of the time though, you don’t need to care about whatever it is that is worrying you. This is the simplest solution to many problems. No longer consider them problems. Ignore them until they go away.
- Don't be afraid to try - let go of your ego
- In order to move past the procrastination the underlying cause must be sufficiently addressed, or the pattern will repeat
Get Obsessed with something
It’s easy to procrastinate when you do not have obsession
Think about the future
- Think about my future self
- Think about SPIRE
Remember
If you are in free time then you are not procrastinating
What is it good for?
What is your north star? What is your reverse north? What are you really avoiding?
Procrastination is a north star. It tells you what you are interested in, and what you are not.
Time to make yourself feel alive!