How to Beat Procrastination
Part 2. Where does a procrastinator go wrong and how can you actually improve your procrastination habits?
Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control) (Published 2019)
If procrastination isn’t about laziness, then what is it about?
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.
Laziness Does Not Exist
Psychological research is clear: when people procrastinate, there's usually a good reason
Every productivity thought I've ever had, as concisely as possible - …
I combed through several years of my private notes and through everything I published on productivity before and tried to summarize all of it in this post. If you’re unproductive right now Here’s what you should do if you’ve been procrastinating for an entire day: Accept that you won’t do anything today and try not to get angry at yourself Set the alarm for the time you will be preparing to go to bed today No, really. Do it. It will take 20 seconds Procrastinate for the …
Why I Procrastinate
A look into me, my awful procrastination habit, and how I fixed it. (spoiler alert: it was ADHD)
The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do and What to Do About It
Plus, 3 strategies to help you start beating procrastination now.
Procrastination: It's pretty much all in the mind
Scans show differences in the brains of those who love to put things offs compared with the "doers".
How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model - Part 2.
In the previous post we covered the B J Fogg model of behavior: Behavior = Motivation * Ability * Prompt
How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model
B J Fogg is a Stanford professor who came up with a simple model of behavior that helps us understand why we take action or not take action at any given moment.
Self-Control and Optimal Goals: A Theoretical Analysis
Consumers set goals to achieve a variety of objectives such as losing weight, saving for retirement, and achieving better health. A large body of literature in psychology and consumer behavior shows that goals can help consumers achieve these objectives. However, there is almost no research that examines how we should set optimal goals. The purpose of this paper is to develop a parsimonious framework that examines how goals can help performance and how we should set optimal goals. We use the literature on hyperbolic discounting to model these issues. Our results show that goals can often increase performance but can also sometimes encourage procrastination. We show that some goals are worse than having no goals, even when the goals are achieved and the consumer exerts more effort because of the goal. We also find that the presence of goals can lead to myopic consumers behaving as if they were hyperopic. Our results also show that the most difficult goals should be assigned to consumers with moderate levels of motivation and self-control problems. We also find that it is sometimes optimal to set goals that are never achieved.
Getting Ahead By Being Inefficient
Inefficient does not mean ineffective, and it is certainly not the same as lazy. You get things done – just not in the most effective way possible. You’re a bit sloppy, and use more energy. But don’t feel bad about it. There is real value in not being the best.
Harnessing Frustration: Using LLMs to Overcome Activation Energy
One of my biggest weaknesses as a software engineer is procrastination when facing a new project. When the scope is unclear, I have a tendency to wait until I feel I’ve “felt out” the problem to start doing anything. I know I’ll feel better and work much faster when I get “stuck in” but I still struggle with that first step, overcoming the “activation energy” required to engage with the details. LLMs have been a game-changer for me in this respect: I can just throw a couple of sentences at them with the shape of the problem. This leads to one of two outcomes: The LLM comes up with a good solution, usually in a slightly different way than what I was thinking. I realize “oh wow the solution is much simpler than I thought”. Straight away I start thinking about the consequences of implementing and improving what the LLM suggested. The LLM comes up with a solution that I intuitively recognize as “wrong”. My immediate reaction is frustration (“How could it get it so wrong”) which leads me to go back and forth with the model, explaining to it why its solution could not possibly work. But in the process of arguing with the model, my brain is churning away and generating variations or different approaches that could work. After a while, even if the AI is still on the wrong track, the debate will trigger a moment of inspiration where suddenly the solution will come to me. I’ll excitedly start up a new conversation and start working through it with the model. The key is the emotional reaction I have immediately to the LLM’s response, either excitement or frustration. By harnessing this immediate feedback loop, I get my brain out of its passive, procrastination mode. It’s almost like a jolt: either I’m thrilled because it’s simpler than I thought, or I’m spurred to action by the urge to correct a perceived ‘wrong’ answer. This forces me to engage with the problem in a meaningful way.
Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking.
In order to get something done, maybe we need to think less.
Why efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better | Psyche Ideas
The urge to do everything faster and better is risky. Far wiser to do what’s good enough for the range of possible futures
