Fight Procrastination§

• Learn to recognize [[procrastination]] and its triggers in myself and my environment.
• Keep track of it.
• Reduce it to the point in which I have high confidence (0.8?) in most (80%?) of my estimates.

How to beat procrastination: first, you have to decide to beat it. To do this, you better research known methods first — then you’ll be able to beat it more effectively, and you’ll do what you have to do (the most important thing almost on your mind, the task not quite at hand) next.

Which you’ll do right after you finish your research. It turns out there are several methods to beat procrastination, including but not limited to:

• Organizational methods, like Getting Things Done. This one is promising, and that’s such a good title — that’s what you want, you want to do things. Like the things you need to do. Which you’ll do after digging a bit deeper.

You might as well download the ebook now, as it’s better to go straight to the source of things when researching. The Kindle version on Amazon seems a bit expensive — perhaps pirate it first then, test before you buy as they say, and libgen.io is so convenient — it’ll take a few minutes to get the right version that works on your Kindle, but then it’ll be smooth sailing, or perhaps you’ll have to fire off Calibre to convert an .epub to a .mobi (why did Amazon not include .mobi support?), but hold on, where is your Kindle again?

how to beat procrastination§

• a [[hypothesis]].
• an [[algorithm]].
• a [[short story]].

meditations on procrastination§

• Sometimes I definitely procrastinate because I don’t have my top level todo list handy. To fix this I consolidated things on [[do]], but then it got too large, so now I’m doing half paper planning (day/week) and half [[stoa]] in [[do]]. I think both are fine — I just have to make sure I have both on plain view while trying to do things.

Structured Procrastination§

Metadata§

• Author: [[John Perry]]
• Full Title: Structured Procrastination
• Category: #articles
• URL: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

Highlights§

• Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.
  • Tags: [[procrastination]]
• Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.
• The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?
  • Tags: [[procrastination]]