Plus, 3 strategies to help you start beating procrastination now.
How to Beat Procrastination
Part 2. Where does a procrastinator go wrong and how can you actually improve your procrastination habits?
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.
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".
To Anyone Who Thinks They're Falling Behind In Life
You don't need more motivation. You don't need to be inspired to action. You don't need to read any more lists and posts about how you're not doing enough. There's a magic beyond us that works in ways we can't understand.
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.
How to Get Things Done When You Don’t Feel Like It: Five strategies for pushing through: Queue: Vol 16, No 4
If you want to be successful, then it serves you better to rise to the occasion no matter what. That means learning how to push through challenges and deliver valuable results.
Why time management is ruining our lives | Oliver Burkeman
The Long Read: All of our efforts to be more productive backfire – and only make us feel even busier and more stressed
Impatience: The Pitfall of Every Ambitious Person
Big splashes don’t happen. Overnight success doesn’t exist. We have to remind ourselves of that whenever we show impatience.
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.
Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead
Whether its our careers, health or relationships, we often set the bar too high and end up feeling disappointed when it doesn’t work out. Try this new way of thinking … and you may just see some real results
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.
It's getting harder to focus every day
I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing open source. And actually got stuff done. Doing all of those at the same time requires paying attention to what I wanted to do and ignore the noise.
This entire grift relies on convincing people that they don't know how to do the things they have always known how to do, and ironically, if it works, we will, in a very short amount of time, forget how to do all the things we have always known how to do.
More Perfect Union
Jimmy Fallon: "And do you use ChatGPT when raising your baby?" Sam Altman: "I cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT."
