Beating Procrastination with Self-Imposed Deadlines

castironwok writes "Procrastination attracts us because of hyperbolic time discounting: the immediate (guilty) rewards are disproportionally more compelling than the greater delayed cost. Procrastination is the reward itself. An MIT professor found that when he allowed his students to give themselves their own homework deadlines, they would artificially restrict themselves to counter procrastination. However, they did not set deadlines for optimal effectiveness. I am personally a huge procrastinator and it's always a pull between rational logic (giving yourself the most time by choosing end dates as the deadline), and your past experience saying you will put it off so force yourself to start early."

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Try a 10+2 dash to beat procrastination

[software_trainer]

Or any of the other techniques from 43folders.com http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/15/recap-procrast ination-hacks-email-overload-kinkless-gtd-and-a-vi sit-from-the-word-spy/ [43folders.com] .

Re:Anxiety

[MyIS]

Meh. I don't think that that addresses all types of procrastination.

I have a huge hierarchical TODO list (that serves as a note-book at the same time due to the tree-like nature). I think that the above reasoning is very spot-on in the sense that because I record every little thought and proceeding about any one of the tasks and sub-tasks I feel very organized and able to focus on tasks better.

But at the same time the procrastination remains. It is still the anxiety of taking on a specific task - the anxiety of having to deal with a frustrating and arduous task, even filtered out from others. That's why some TODO items still sit there for days and weeks, even though they are pretty well documented.

Re:Divide and conquer

[all_the_names_are_ta]

The trick is to break the hard stuff up into lots of little tasks that collectively take care of the hard stuff.

Re:Anxiety

[Scarblac]

GTD is great, but Allen sometimes says things like "assume for a moment we are not putting off this task out of procrastination...", which is often not the case. Also, you don't use GTD for doing a thesis that requires a thousand hours of concentrated work. GTD is very biased towards a work style of little things to do next.

I use his book together with "The Now Habit" by Neil Fiore, it is concerned with procrastination related problems. Basically, he encourages to focus on _starting_ on something, not on finishing, since the finish will always seem intimidatingly far away; but starting is easy. Be really fanatic about planning your week - that is, with recreation, fun, meetings, anything that _isn't_ productive work; the fun is most important, you need to be able to reward yourself after work.

Then, do the work in focussed 30 minute chunks. They don't seem daunting, you can actually get something pretty good done in 30 minutes, you can reward yourself afterwards, and they're so short that your brain isn't going to demand perfection from one chunk of 30 minutes.

I use GTD to keep track of all the open loops and little things that need doing in the current context, but the Now Habit's "Unschedule" for planning fun, and for those huge projects that are a few hundred hours of concentrated work.

Re:Anxiety

[telepilot]

So, what he's suggesting is . . . you take your larger goals, and then you break them up into a sequence of smaller subgoals?

Sort of like a hierarchy?

Well... kinda. As pyite wrote above, the main idea behind Allens framework is that you should not have to think about a project or thing you want accomplished more than necessary. By making sure that your subgoals are actual physical actions that you need to do to move the project further along you dont have to "rethink" this step every time you read your todo-list, instead you just "do".

Say for instance that you have a ToDo-list with an item such as "plan new-years party", with the first subgoal being "find location". This is not a physical action, and everytime you see the list you now need to rethink how you are going to decide on one. Instead, Allen wants you to write something like "Call Bob to get ideas for party locations". Now when you look at your list (sorted under @phone so that you can do all phone-related stuff at the same time) you know exactly what to do next. Think hard once is the general idea.

Re:It's inefficient to start early

[misanthrope101]

It's just a fact, if we have six months to do a job, we'll finish in exactly six months. If we're given 12 months to do the same job, we'll finish in exactly 12 months.

Then why not set up a deadline of 24 hours and be done with it? I was going to suggest 30 seconds, but the email server may be slow, and you have to plan for that. Work actually does take real-world time, and putting everyone in perpetual panic mode isn't going to help you. Here's another maxim for government service--the work will expand to fill the time you have. If you finish the project early, more work will just surface to fill up the time. You'll just carry more weight for the same money, and you'll get no more thanks for it. Doing the job well while providing a little padding to ingratiate the little people to you will help you more than running them into the ground in permanent emergency mode.

Agreed!

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Letting stuff mature in your head on the backburner saves upfront effort. I tend to think of a problem for a while before I start prototyping or implementing. That way, I'll get a clearer picture of potential unintended consequences and implementation cost.

Some procrastination is good, too much procrastination is bad. Finding that sweet spot is kinda difficult, though.