Why I procrastinate

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Get Out of Your Own Way

The Easy Button Culture

Having been through this issue my whole life, and finding it can get worse, not better, with age, I did the same thing you seem to be doing--analyze it for its roots to try to find a logical way to overcome it. For me, that went only so far. The desire to avoid experiences I anticipated as painful has proven very powerful. But as I've gotten older, I've become impatient with certain types of self indulgence. What a horrendous waste of time and life itself, to tie yourself up in knots avoiding doing what has to be done, flirting with real disaster in the not doing. It's insane. It leaves you with a half-lived life, much like someone who's managing a drug addiction in secret. And like junkies of all degrees and stripes, slackers (I count myself one) can guarantee themselves steadily accruing deficits with time. Lack of growth. Lack of advancement. Ability to cope and resilience undeveloped. As long as we're mired in this juvenile reaction to improperly administered authority from our youth (my favorite theory about the "cause"), we're mired in a sort of perptual infancy.

I think you have to get impatient with this nonsense and see it for what it is to get beyond it. The objective is to stop having issues with these must-dos, right? Work to minimize their importance. In my experience, none of them has proven as painful as I've anticipated, and I think a lot of people have that experience. "I don't know what the big deal was, once I did it, it was nothing." Forget about root cause, because you can't "fix" that anyway. Even if you saw it in a brilliant, blinding flash, the cathartic effect you probably anticipate wiping the dysfunction away would not be strong enough to work against years of ingrained habitual avoidance and slacker behavior. You just have to damn the demons, and get down to work to overcome it.

You've gotten a lot of good suggestions on the problem in this thread. I've used just about all of them to advantage in shoring up my resolve to deal with it. Cringebusting is a great concept and the blog entry on it a great read. The tricks people have given you to help you get started, the initial hurdle, are also excellent. Sustaining momentum can be as simple--and difficult--as starting. You just start again, and again, and again.

Pull in every insight you have about yourself and why you do this if it helps you to move toward productivity and peace. I realized I was a big baby and just wanted to play. Then I realized that I don't find dilettantes and self-indulgent twits very appealing playmates. I like people in motion. People who think and do, people who accomplish, people who don't sit in front of a mountain saying, "Oh god, it's so big, I better get used to sitting in its shadows, I just can't deal with it," but climb over or tunnel through to the other side. Life strews plenty of difficulties in your path. It doesn't make sense to allow some dysfunctional aspect of yourself to have the upper hand and create more. Get out of your own way, and the blocks and mountains themselves will start to erode. But decide to do it, don't study it, waiting for a magic answer or panacea. That's must more dilatory churning. There is no easy button, but hard is hardest when you're avoiding the work. IMO, of course.

Arduinna
 
Arduinna said:
There is no easy button, but hard is hardest when you're avoiding the work. IMO, of course.

Arduinna
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I loved reading your post. I'm curious though, have you found GTD, and all the time it takes to read, do and tweak the system, to help with procrastination? Or do you find it to be one more, pie-in-the sky attempt at doing what you claim many are guilty of...a childish fantasy that this book, or that system, will help us do what we're avoiding.

In other words...do you use it?
 
GTD will not cure you of procrastination.

GTD will not cure you of procrastination. It can help to improve your productivity but only when you have developed the strong vision of the successful outcomes.

The procrastination is closely related to the internal honesty and ability to keep promises (agreements with yourself). You are not honest with you when you say "I will do it today" and then begin to procrastinate and look for excuses.

First decide what you want to achieve and then there are no excuses - just the hard work towards the goal.
 
As long as we're mired in this juvenile reaction to improperly administered authority from our youth (my favorite theory about the "cause"), we're mired in a sort of perptual infancy.
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And this is true for much of why we self-sabatoge w/o any apparent concious reason for doing so. And that's partly why self-help/business books do so well. Then answers offer hope, but alas, they're usually one more attempt to purchase a quick fix.

I think you have to get impatient with this nonsense and see it for what it is to get beyond it.
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My experience exactly. Either a very big carrot, or a painful stick gets me moving.

wiping the dysfunction away would not be strong enough to work against years of ingrained habitual avoidance and slacker behavior.
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So very, very true. And if you genogram your family, I'll be you find similar patterns going back many generations.

Get out of your own way, and the blocks and mountains themselves will start to erode.
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:-? How have you done this?

There is no easy button
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I'd take a complex button if it worked.
 
avrum68 said:
I loved reading your post. I'm curious though, have you found GTD, and all the time it takes to read, do and tweak the system, to help with procrastination? Or do you find it to be one more, pie-in-the sky attempt at doing what you claim many are guilty of...a childish fantasy that this book, or that system, will help us do what we're avoiding.

In other words...do you use it?
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Oh, I don't think it's a childish fantasy to think that a book or a system can help us do what we're avoiding. I was characterizing my behavior as childish. I'd tried intellectualizing the whys and wheretofores to arrive at an equation that could conclude in a solution, and while great things were going on in my head, the translation to motor activity didn't happen.

As Tes Teq says, "GTD will not cure you of procrastination. It can help to improve your productivity but only when you have developed the strong vision of the successful outcomes." GTD does give you a great structure for organizing the activity that constitutes movement, productivity. Those of us who live in the twilight state of purpose-avoidance won't plug into it if we remain committed to stasis. Tes Tec's advice, "decide what you want to achieve and then there are no excuses - just the hard work towards the goal," is the core of the solution. On this board, we spend a lot of time discussing the mechanics of GTD--filing setups, trusted systems, weekly reviews--and a lot less on the business of deciding what we want to achieve. But as Tes Teq suggests, that is key to GTD. More than just "getting things done," I think it's vital to achieving perpetual, self-renewing motivation and inspiration.

I also think that it's the most difficult aspect of the entire deal. It's why the weekly review is avoided by so many. It requires looking at the scope of your desiderata, and in a world in which people define themselves by what they do, that means running a constant appraisal of ourselves. It means seeing, for example, that most of the focus in our lives may be on maintenance--just keeping going--with too little devoted to changing our reality. It means recognizing the limitations on our lives, that we may be living in response to someone else's needs and demands, and completely out of touch with the reason we're on the planet. Facing unpleasant facts and finding the resources to change are the kind of inimical challenges generated by a attempting full implementation of GTD. For me, they kicked in well before I got anywhere near "full." So I stalled, stopped, stomped, walked out of the room, came back in and flopped on the sofa, looked at GTD again, pouted, paced..... you get it. Anything but actually doing it. But I kept trying, and something's taken hold, is taking off. I am finding that, with this more cold-eyed view of myself and the consequences of my behavior, I'm moving toward making the system work for me. I have tweaked with nearly every aspect of it to suit my personal tastes and certain habits I'd already had that worked, like using hanging files instead of having a manilla mess sliding around in a drawer. I remain trained on what I see as the objective of GTD, to increase accomplishment and personal productivity in a way that becomes nearly effortless.

To answer the question about removing obstacles, the GTD device of breaking projects down into NAs is quite effective. "Mountains" are seemingly imponderable or overwhelming tasks; the GTD focus breaks them down into a series of doable actions. In that respect, it melts mountains. The slacker's high of frenzied deadline-meeting is supplanted by a sense of fluidity of events, which to me suggests DA's "mind like water" metaphor. It feels much better, replacing the constant fear and panic of procrastination with the pleasure of being in the here and now. All I can say is, keep trying and don't give up. It's worth the struggle.

Arduinna
 
Arduinna...

You've got a book in you, and it'd be a nice companion to GTD. I'll buy it :wink:

Curious...when you've got a mountain, say "job search" or "design web page", besides throwing it into a "project" category, how to do you discern you NA from a mountain. What do you folks do to take that first step?
 
I find breaking a big project mountain into doable NA molehills (or even doable NA anthills) can be an iterative process.

Project: Write book NA: Plan outline of book
Project: Write Chapter 1
Subproject: Research Chapter 1 NA: Web search Chapter 1 topic
smaller NA: Read IEEE review paper on Ch 1 topic
even smaller NA: Renew IEEE online subscription

And so forth.

The key, at least for me, is to keep breaking it down instead of letting myself get paralyzed by a task that is too big.

Katherine
 
More examples of morphing mountains - hills - pebbles etc, would be appreciated. Not looking for the whole the process...just the first couple of breakdowns.
 
What are we really putting off?

Arduinna,

Would you agree that what we are really procrastinating about is not the weekly review, the next action, or the project, but defining and pursuing our purpose in life?
 
What I feel is not the cause of my procrastination.

What I feel is simply the experience that I am in touch with during the procrastinaiton. But. There is something deeper. Something deeper that happens before the feeling. Before the procrastination.

I know that procrastination is not fear, or lack of organization, or being overwhelmed, or not having a clear picture of the desired outcome, or not having the project broken down into small enough parts.

I know that when I experience procrastination that those things may be present.

But I know that those things are not procrastination. Or the things that drive my procrastination.

In addition, because there are things that I do not procrastinate on, I am my own science experiment. I am my own study subject.

I can be at work, in my office, with a clean desk, with all my action items identified, with all my support material at hand, having made all my phone calls and tracked down all my required support material. And still experience procrastination.

But then I can go home, and in the middle of my messy apartment I can find the music chart I want to work on in the messy stack on my music table and find the song somewhere on my hard drive and get my computer and my microwave and my DVD and my Xbox going all at the same time.

And then I put on my lab coat and sit and think. Gosh. In one situation, I have done everything that this thread discusses that one should do to cure procrastination, yet I am procrastinating. And in the other situation, I am in the middle of having done everything "wrong", everything that one would believe would lead to procrastination, yet I am thriving on multiple tasks.

In my work situation I am completly organized and have a very clear picture of the desired outcome and want very much to do what I need to do, but I am stuck.

In the other, I am basically disorganized, in the middle of a bunch of different items of equipment or stacks of stuff, and I am not just doing one thing, I am thriving on doing multiple things all at the same time.

I realize that you are now thinking of typing some type of reply describing what you feel is the difference between my work stuff and my personal stuff.

One is a commitment to others, one is a commitment to myself.

One is not enjoyable, the other is fun.

One is something I have to do for others, the other is something that I want to do for myself.

Stop. What is the point of your describing to me the differences that I of course can also clearly distinguish on the surface, and what is the point of stating observable results as if they are somehow related to the actual cause?

No. There is something deeper.

And another thing. I realize that on the things that I procrastinate on, that as the deadline approaches, the pressure on me increases past a balance point where I then start working in a very efficent manner. Therefore some would say a ha! We must increase the feeling of pressure on Tim so that he stops procrastinating. But that is just a magic trick to get me working, it is not a real solution to the actual cause of the procrastination.

If you find yourself running out of gas often, one solution is to carry extra cans of gas around, another is to learn to look at the gas gauge everytime you start the car or everytime you see a gas station. To carry extra gas cans is like a bandaid. Like a hack. Like treating the result. To pay more attention to the gas gauge is to fix the actual cause of running out of gas often.

I desire to understand better the actual cause of my personal procrastination and to somehow solve it.

I admit that I am jealous of rich actors that go into rehab to stop using drugs. They have time and money and a problem that is visible and a problem that they can STOP doing. I remember hearing someone with an eating disorder talking about being envious of people with drug problems, because people with drug problems can quit, but people with food disorders still have to eat. Take that the next step. 12 step programs for chemicals are designed to get people to stop taking chemicals, 12 step programs for eating are designed to get people to control or regulate their food intake. What would a 12 step program for procrastination be like?

Hello. This is Fred your procrastination anonomus sponsor.

Yea. This is Tim.

Hey Tim. What are you doing?

Nothing.

Nothing? Oh no. You have to stop that right now.

.
 
There seems to be some disagreement as to what causes procrastination, in general. According to David Allen, it's either the lack of knowledge of what to do next, or the lack of motivation / excitement.
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One can know exaclty what needs to be done next and still procrastinate. One can be motivated to get something done and still procrastinate.

GTD will not cure you of procrastination. It can help to improve your productivity but only when you have developed the strong vision of the successful outcomes.
Click to expand...
One can have a strong vision of the successful outcome and still procrastinate.

The procrastination is closely related to the internal honesty and ability to keep promises (agreements with yourself). You are not honest with you when you say "I will do it today" and then begin to procrastinate and look for excuses.
Click to expand...
One can be honest when they commit to do something and still procrastinate enough for it to not get done.

First decide what you want to achieve and then there are no excuses - just the hard work towards the goal.
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One can decide exactly on what one wants and needs and has commited to achieve and still procrastinate. One can put ones self in the position where there is no excuse and still procrastinate.

.
 
Maybe the cause for procrastination does not matter.

Maybe a bandaid or a hack is the best that we can hope for.

Maybe the same perfectionism that causes my personal procrastination causes me to criticize others for the way they discuss procrastination. And maybe I do not add to the discussion but instead become part of the problem.

Maybe even if we could determine the root cause of procrastination the best that we could do with that information is to raise our kids differently so that they do not experience the same things we do. Maybe we could not use that information to help us with our situation.

Maybe the best I can do is apply the recomencations here and elsewhere and stop trying to understand the deeper causes of my procrastination. Maybe I am procrastinating on solving my procrastinating by looking for the cause instead of working harder on some solutions that others have found useful.

But I do know that for some people procrastination is is simply a slightly difficult experience, while for others procrastination is a huge stumbling block. And I just do not feel that the suggestions of what procrastination is or how to solve it that apply to those who have the slightly difficult experience apply to those who experience procrastination as a huge stumbling block.

.
 
Based on the time stamps on your posts, I'm guessing you spent about half an hour thinking and writing about your procrastination problem. As your Procrastinators Anonymous sponsor, I've got to tell you that's a bad sign...

My two favorite quotes about writing are:
"I never get writer's block, I just lower my standards." and
"There is no writing, however terrible, that cannot be improved, but a blank page is just a blank page."

Or, if you like physical metaphors better, one of the things we tell beginners in aikido is to keep moving. Don't worry about doing the perfect thing, just do *something.* Then you can decide why it isn't perfect, and improve it.

The point of all of this being to say that no matter what the underlying cause of your procrastination might be, the fact remains that you aren't getting stuff done. Any hack that helps you get stuff done will be an improvement, whether it addresses the underlying cause or not.

Now, to an outside observer, it looks like the problem is actually pretty simple: you don't like your job. The solution is therefore equally simple: get a different one. Few people have to beat themselves over the head to do work they enjoy.

Katherine
 
Watching TV, playing computer games etc.

kewms said:
Now, to an outside observer, it looks like the problem is actually pretty simple: you don't like your job. The solution is therefore equally simple: get a different one. Few people have to beat themselves over the head to do work they enjoy.
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It is not easy in many cases because for many people the preferred job is watching TV, playing computer games etc.
 
TesTeq said:
It is not easy in many cases because for many people the preferred job is watching TV, playing computer games etc.
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I don't think that's actually true. When people have the opportunity to watch TV or play computer games for 40 hours a week -- say when they're on vacation -- they usually get bored and move on to other things after a while. And jobs that do involve watching TV for 40 hours a week -- like TV critics -- don't seem to be completely overrun with applicants.

Katherine
 
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