People who struggled with procrastination and have now stopped, what made you stop procrastinating? What do you think were the factors leading or contributing to your past procrastination and how did you stop or improve the situation?
Please don’t answer with the “I’ll tell you later” joke.
They’re not browsing lemmy I’ll tell you that for free
Well hello there fellow procrastinator.
Having less of the perfectionist mindset and more of the “80% quality”. Bad experiences from procrastinating helps you learn too.
This. It took a damn long time but I finally realized that at least doing something lackluster is better than doing nothing at all. “But if I start now I’ll never catch up” well, at least I can catch up a little instead of doing nothing.
Well, that, and actually failing a big life objective because of procastination.
Same boat. I decided shit does not have to be perfect but by doing so and getting down to the work, I think I am getting far more done and on average I am now coming out with end results that are often better then when I was striving for perfection.
ADHD meds and therapy. I tried a ton of different methods, but ultimately I was procrastinating for two reasons. 1) my brain finds the things I need to do under stimulating, which feels like pulling teeth, so it looks for stimulation elsewhere and draws me to a different task. ADHD meds give my brain the proper amount of stimulation/reward for doing things that need to be done. 2) for a variety of reasons, I had an underlying current of anxiety around the possibility of failure. Much easier to avoid failure if you avoid ever doing the task. Therapy helps me reason through the anxiety, and realize that I am essentially already failing by not trying, so trying involves a risk of success rather than a risk of failure.
Edit: I still procrastinate plenty, but significantly less than I used to. It no longer reaches a point of nearly ruining my life, now it is just an average level of procrastination compared to my peers. Instead of avoiding tasks for weeks, months, or years on end, I avoid them for a few hours, maybe days at most (if I have the luxury).
Same here.
Research suggests the combination of ADHD and anxiety leads to the worst type of procrastination.
ADHD meds and therapy allowed me to break the cycle and learn new habits.
Now I’m mostly off the meds and the habits I learned on the meds still help me a lot.
Likewise. Meds help me …but so did therapy. I still have to have the mindset right. If I do and I’m on meds then it actually works.
I totally believe (without any evidence but my own experience) that procrastination for me with ADHD is at least partly a response to prior unhappy experiences.
Now that I recognize some of the emotional components involved I can work through those directly and have a much better chance of getting motivated .
And also I still procrastinate plenty and I have come to avoid self judgement. Because beating myself up doesn’t help me get motivated. It does the opposite. I accept that this is a tendency but one that I continue to improve upon.
Lists. always lists. A hot sheet of 4 quarters, what I need to take care of soonest (top left), what can wait (top right), shit I forgot (bottom left), things that can keep in mind but have to be taken care of later/long term projects. Also, if I get to this list later in the morning and I have completed some items, I always write them down and then cross them off…it’s a trick to keep your mind progressing.
I started planning procrastination as a daily activity I need to do. And I don’t really wanna, so I stopped.
Doctors hate him! He baffled the medical world with this one simple trick to master procrastination. 🤫 #ProcrastinationPro
Starting the day with small achievable goals and building/keeping momentum. ADHD medication.
Things I find myself saying frequently, to spur me beyond inaction:
Don’t let perfection be an enemy of what’s good
The only way to find out is to do it. Or, only way to know is to try.
Done art my entire life, and have learned even when I produce failure, I learn from these mistakes, and over time improve.
I get so wrapped in my head, plan things to death, to inaction. Like 2 days ago, been wanting to make my own wound salve. I could’ve waited, kept researching, to death, but impulsively bought few ingredients on Amazon. Got the ball rolling way more quickly.
The only way to break out of a slump is to try something. I don’t know what will happen. But intellectually I know decisions, actions breed more possibilities, expanding one’s world.
Go big or go home. Play Sims, and have an idea to build a house with a huge tree in the living room? Do it, make bold choices, take risks. That’s the only way we can evolve.
Dan Harmon once responded in a similar way on an AMA. It was about writer’s block, but I feel it’s the same principle.
My best advice about writer’s block is: the reason you’re having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it’s the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from “writing well” to “writing badly,” you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don’t like to admit it, because we’re raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let’s just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that’s a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn’t going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it’s no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you’re an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft. Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn’t make abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester. Happy hunting and pecking!
This is great. Although…
when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it.
I wish! “Fix” is wayyyy too optimistic.But maybe, just maybe, I could make it suck a tiny bit less. Still left with utter garbage, of course. Okay, well didn’t you just say you could make it suck a tiny bit less? So do it again. And again, and…
Recognized that it was part of what makes me successful and learned to control it a little. For example, when I struggled with getting things done on time, I learned to set deadlines for myself and stuck to them. I realized that I work better when I know I’m a little up against the clock, so I kind of built that in for myself. The hard part is the not moving the deadline. You can’t view it as moveable or it doesn’t work.
I also ask myself “how long is it going to take” and most things if the answer is less than five minutes, I just try to force myself to do it and get it out of the way.
For other recurring things I do them on a schedule. So like, every weekend there are things around the house I need to do. It doesn’t matter when I do them but I have to get them done the day I say I will. That’s the deal Iake myself and it helps.
Those are some of my personal hacks. They don’t work for everyone but they work for me.
I still struggle with it, but one thing that I’ve been learning lately is that little improvements at a steady pace is way more impactful than it feels like in the moment.
I often find myself putting of large tasks because I think that they will take so long and there is no point in breaking them up into little pieces because it will take so long.
The irony is that if I had just done a little bit of work once a week on the project consitently, it would have been totally done long ago. But me putting off any work until I feel like I can get it all done at once is ultimately what causes it to never be done.
TL:DR, even if it’s 5-10 minutes once a week, do at least that on a large task or project. You’ll be surprised how fast that will get things done even though in the moment it feels like it’s not worth it.
This has been a godsend for me because my personal obstacle is always just getting started. So I give myself permission: I’m only going to do 15 minutes of this huge task today.
More often than not, once I get started I just keep going. But I give myself the freedom to stop and if I do, hey at least some of it got done!
Same!
Adderall
Sadly not available in my country, so concerta and rithaline !
Medication.
I got diagnosed with ADHD and started methylphenidate. That coupled with changing to my dream job things have improved immensely.
That said I’m still not really happy in down time but maybe I’m just never really fully happy.
When I got a job that was constant priorization of tasks I found that it carried over to my personal life. I would get home and bang out everything that needed doing then relax for the rest of the night.
I quit my job so now I have all the time in the world and I still only get 60-80% of the things done. And I really need to force myself to do it.
Momentum is huge for me too. Whenever I start my day with a meeting (aka forced to jumpstart work mode), the rest of my day is smooth. On days when I don’t have a morning meeting or reason to get started by X time, it just sliiiiiides until it’s 3pm and I’ve done nothing lol.
I think momentum does indeed play a role. I remember when I do things to “get my life back on track” such as cleaning the house, going to the meetings I am supposed to go to, doing some activities I tell myself I should be doing, then the next few days I’m very productive, but then at some point fall back to where I started.
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I stopped drinking.
I’ve been stuck in a procrastination spiral for a while now.
I want to pursue my dream career, but a fear of failure and worrying I won’t be able to learn what I need to means I keep putting it off. But then the act of putting it off makes me feel guilty.
