I'm not going to read that link until I get home in the evening. Because irony.
How much are you supposed to like yourself? Seriously, the delusional extremes of self-hate and narcissism that inhibit normal function provide obvious feeedback. But inbetween, not so easy to say too much or not enough.
How much are you supposed to like yourself?
If you don't like yourself at all, you shouldn't masturbate. You have to have standards.
Unfogged is all about procrastination and a decent chunk of the people here are pretty hard on themselves.
I don't like the way that I procrastinate on unfogged, but I also value having gotten "to know" people here, some of whom I've even met in real life.
How much are you supposed to like yourself?
Depends on how likable you are.
But seriously, I think there is (might be?) a difference between liking yourself and forgiving yourself.
I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it people like me. I just have higher standards than most.
Moby is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
I usually assume that people who procrastinate are perfectionists. Also that procrastination is domain-specific, eg I procrastinate mightily on laundry and tidying (but not out of perfectionism. More because they're hamster wheel tasks, and so the less often you do them, maybe you get some economy of scale, and at least you won't have to deal with it so often.)
Areas where I don't procrastinate at all are where delaying would give me anxiety. I hate feeling anxious enough that I usually preemptively do the thing.
But seriously, I think there is (might be?) a difference between liking yourself and forgiving yourself.
That's a nice distinction (in both senses). I like myself fine, in the sense of finding myself appealing; I could say nice things about myself all day. On the other hand, boy am I not living up to any reasonable minimal standard of how people ought to behave.
That I persist in loving myself may be my most unforgivable trait.
My procrastination is in no way linked to perfectionism.
Yeah, me neither. I still think it about other people though.
Perfectionism seems like it's pointing at the right thing for some of my procrastination (there's another, distinct form of procrastination that kicks in for minor bureaucratic tasks that don't need to be done well, they just need to be done), but it seems like a bad name for it. I'm not putting off starting things because I'm afraid they won't turn out spectacularly, I'm putting off starting things because I'm afraid they won't turn out adequately.
My procrastination has it's roots in just not feeling like working right now. Also I do better with an impending deadline, preferably with horrible consequences if it's not met.
Way way back when I was writing papers for school, my procrastination did seem to be linked to perfectionism. Back then I had a vivid fantasy that I was destined to be a great novelist, and having to face my actual limitations as a writer was a horrible buzzkill.
Now when I procrastinate, it's just because I'm lazy, and prefer the pleasant to the unpleasant.
Come on, people, the interview is short, and addresses a lot of these points.
16: The interview is good. The question is how much time am I going to spend procrastinating by reading the literature on procrastination. Which book should I read? I need to pick just one.
which see it as a problem of mood and emotion, more than one of poor time management
This seems obvious to me. Procrastination is deliberately avoiding doing work. It's not running out of time to do work.
17: No, it's not. The whole project is ridiculous. People procrastinate for a variety of reasons.
I've been putting off choosing a casket, ceremony music, and a caterer as part of prepaying those expenses at very reasonable rates for some reason, having a hard time putting my finger on it. Possibly there's an emotional component.
They missed a giant category of procrastination in the article: those things where if you stall long enough, it might go away or someone else might do it.
21: If it's for someone else, they might take it the wrong way.
One of the stories I tell myself about procrastination is that sometimes when I feel reluctant to work on something it's because I'm approaching it from the wrong angle. Sometimes tasks become much easier when approached from a different viewpoint. So procrastination sometimes gives the subconscious time to figure out the easy solution to a problem when diving right in would turn out to be a bad use of time.
I think this has been true in, I don't know, 1% of the times that I've ever procrastinated, but as a story to tell myself to feel better it works wonders.
Come on, people, the interview is short, and addresses a lot of these points.
I found the interview annoying. I kept thinking it might be interesting, and then it just ended up seeming banal.
For example, this is an interesting teaser:
But psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism, as an emotion-focused coping strategy. [People who procrastinate are] using avoidance to cope with emotions, and many of them are non-conscious emotions.
But the paraphrase makes it pointless.
I can simplify that and say that psychologists recognize we all have a six-year-old running the ship. And the six-year-old is saying, "I don't want to! I don't feel like it!"
Or this, as the "most surprising thing"
I think the most surprising thing that I'm still grappling with is that for many people, the experience of procrastination doesn't match the definition that most of us are working with: a voluntary delay of an intended action despite knowing you're going to be worse off for the delay.
If you speak to people, they'll tell you that it doesn't feel voluntary: "I feel like I have no control over it." For some people, it feels totally involuntary, like they can't help themselves.
That's surprising? Of course it doesn't feel voluntary. Certainly, for myself, I would always have described my experience of procrastination as, "for some reason I can't get myself to do this."
Or the final answer
I guess I'm a living case. When I was an undergraduate, I procrastinated a lot. And now that I understand procrastination, I just have no room to wiggle.
...
I really like my life, and I like to make time for the things that are important to me. [Robert] Pozen, who's written a book on extreme productivity, has the OHIO rule: only handle it once. And I'm like that with email. I look at that email and say "I can reply to it now, or I can throw it out," but there's not much of a middle ground. I'm not going to save it for a while.
And so if I can deal with it in two minutes -- this is David Allen's work -- I deal with it.
I used to procrastinate, and now I don't because I got all these wicked strategies. And it's every level: some of it's behavioral, some of it's emotional, some of it's cognitive. And now my biggest challenge is how do I teach my kids this. That's really hard.
The solution is, "wicked strategies" like "only handle it once"?!
The article lacks a comprehensive list of strategies and tactics for curbing or containing procrastination, but was inspirational enough that I'm hopefully out of here for this morning!
Yo dawg, I heard you like procrastinating, so I posted a piece about procrastination so you could read about procrastinating while you procrastinate.
20: I'm not putting it off any longer -- I'm becoming the bitter opinionated old man I've always known I was destined to be.
OHIO rule: only handle it once.
Snap judgements are good occasionally, but definitely not always. This is idiotic.
Rapid escalation of aggression is also sometimes useful, maybe I could combine the two and become either the hulk or Lloyd Blankfein, possibly both simultaneously.
In my personal life, including student work that no one else depends on, I haven't generally seen much benefit in not procrastinating, as long as I get just enough done. At work or doing things other people rely on, I tend to do better.
now my biggest challenge is how do I teach my kids this. That's really hard
Maybe try putting it off for a while? They'll understand better when they're older.
If you're looking for the stuff he talks about in terms of concrete strategies, this article (with helpful drawings!) is better. The dude also has a book, but I haven't read it.
If you need a concrete strategy to procrastinate, you're overthinking it.
A couple of things mentioned in this thread are clearly not right.
--Perfectionism: if this were the real reason, you'd give yourself more, not less, time to do a task. To put it another way, maybe you're afraid it won't be perfect, or you'll fail, or whatever, but turning away from the task, as opposed to giving yourself more time, or seeking help, etc., is a specific response that only seems "natural" to us because we're procrastinators.
--"prefer the pleasant to the unpleasant" This is only apparently true: putting things off is itself unpleasant, and often has very unpleasant consequences. You're preferring a very specific kind of pleasant; one that prioritizes leisure and the present, over accomplishment and the future.
I strongly suspect that part of my procrastinating habits come from some masochistic tendency to create anxiety.
Preferring the pleasant to the unpleasant is also just a bad description of what procrastination is often like -- I can very easily get myself in a state where I'm not procrastinating in favor of doing something I enjoy more than working, I'm procrastinating by doing almost literally nothing (clicking around things on the Internet I've already read, making chains of paper clips, and so on.)
making chains of paper clips
This thread is giving me so many ideas.
You can make chains of binder clips also, but it harder and less satisfying.
I'm procrastinating by doing almost literally nothing
Yes. You described doing "just one more thing" before you start to work, and I do exactly that same thing.
A lot of my procrastination is selfishness; I'm unwilling, or at least unable to work up the energy to do my future self a favor. Presumably, if I'm procrastinating by doing something dull or unpleasant it's because fuck that guy.
Perfectionism: if this were the real reason, you'd give yourself more, not less, time to do a task.
It's more complicated than that. Perfectionism can lead you down myriad paths on quests for exact details, and frequently those paths go far enough that you end up disconnected from your ostensible task and they become satisfying diversions in themselves. But I'd agree that perfectionism isn't the sole reason, as perfectionist procrastination combines neatly with fear of failure once you put off something for so long that you're forced to do a last-minute slap-dash job, the poor quality of which you can blame on a deadline.
A fair amount of it is also overwhelming myself by thinking through all the steps I need to do to finish a task. Paper clip chains don't require this planning facility.
22: Clearly the writer wasn't perfectionist about it. She probably should have procrastinated on the article more.
Perfectionism doesn't sound like my usual reason for procrastination, although it describes other aspects of my life. It sure as hell seems to be a problem for a lawyer co-worker of mine. This dude has been working on his part of the project for literally a year. Our bosses are getting really, really serious about the deadlines. Me and my peer reviewers have a week to do our review of it. According to the current schedule, that was supposed to start today, and the current schedule is itself the result of that co-worker missing deadlines more than two months ago. As far as I and everyone but the lawyer can tell, it's ready, he just won't commit to being done with it.
It didn't start today. Maybe it'll start tomorrow, though!
I'm home today recovering from this stupid sinus infection etc. and also the party and also because I wanted to use one of my vacation days on a time no one would be home and I'm procrastinating getting lunch, which is probably not a great idea since I didn't really have breakfast. And yet I'd need shoes and probably a bra and to get out of bed if I wanted to eat anything other than leftovers, and I don't want leftovers. I may have just talked myself into staying in bed and listening to the annoying machine that's outside the house.
38: No, binder clips are much better than paper clips, because you can make branching structures out of them (with moving parts!). I used to make things out of binder clips when I was in private practice and had lots of binder clips. In the public sector, they're scarcer, so I don't have enough to make anything fun.
Clipping binder clips together is great, but that isn't really a chain. To make a chain, you have to take off the handles, put one inside the other, and put it back on. Hurts my fingers.
Procrastination is deliberately avoiding doing work. It's not running out of time to do work.
One does sometimes lead to the other, though.
One of the stories I tell myself about procrastination is that sometimes when I feel reluctant to work on something it's because I'm approaching it from the wrong angle. Sometimes tasks become much easier when approached from a different viewpoint. So procrastination sometimes gives the subconscious time to figure out the easy solution to a problem when diving right in would turn out to be a bad use of time.
I've never really thought about procrastination as being useful in this way (and I'm honestly not sure if ever has been useful in this way, for me), but the general statement of the problem rings entirely true: For me, procrastination is mostly about not knowing what to do, and very often in contexts in which it feels like moving forward without a clear understanding will likely result in a lot of wasted effort or inefficiency. So instead I sit, doing nothing.
When I know exactly what I need to do, I'm usually able to do it.
(There is some procrastination of a different sort that comes from having to do things that I do not perceive any value in doing, but that's less of an issue for me.)
You can make chains of binder clips also, but it harder and less satisfying.
Other things you can do with binder clips are harder and more satisfying.
I think my procrastination stems from something like Eggplant's 42 -- when I have a lot of things to do, or there are a lot of steps I need to accomplish in order to complete a task, I get too overwhelmed to start.
Another problem I have is that I'm super indecisive -- I get paralyzed with the fear that I might make the wrong (or even just suboptimal) choice. So anything that involves making decisions becomes really hard, and it seems better to put it off for another day when I might be better informed about my choices. This happens all the time, for everything -- I can't start saving money in my 401K because it's too overwhelming to learn about my options, I can't buy a kitchen gadget that I need because what if I get the wrong one, I can't tidy up the living room because I can't decide if these papers should go in the recycling or not, etc.
Before I got to that point, I think I'd be procrastinating on my binder-clip art by doing data analysis.
34.1 is wrong: the perfectionist thing works by putting such fear in the person that they delay until the last minute. Then they get it done in a last minute cram session, which itself becomes their excuse as to why it wasn't up to their (inobtainable) standards. So it gets done, but with an asterisk, which allows them to excuse the imperfections. I've got two close friends who do this constantly. Hearing them describe it makes me hyperventilate.
this six-clip exercise in which the clips are positioned along the positive and negative XYZ axes and are each held open by the loops in the handles of their neighbors
Okay, the shapes are nice, but that's an absurd way to describe this design. It's not wrong, but it's a needlessly mathematical description of the shape. It's like describing a christian cross as being in the form of a Cartesian plane.
50 is exactly the sort of thing I'm describing in 47.
And they do it on stuff that matters! Job applications, paper deadlines, tenure applications, etc. I really do find it stressful just to hear about.
I can claim one great triumph of constructive procrastination. My current funded project (just published in PNAS, woohoo!) grew out of goofing off in order to avoid writing a grant application for a different project.
Trying to build the first shape linked in 48 is a lot noisier than I would have anticipated.
48: I learned about those just last week at the art fair at my daughters' school. Longish story, but while the girls were selling modular origami ornaments and earrings that they'd made, and I was struggling with a 30-piece icosahedron made out of 30-inch squares of Kraft paper, a friend from school appeared whom I hadn't seen in ages. He told me that when his father died four years ago, he worked through his depression by getting into elaborate modular constructions, first with paper and more recently with binder clips. He now does these enormous pieces involving upwards of a thousand clips and modules of his own design; the one that I saw (he was also selling at the fair) was this amazing open thing like the second construction in the linked piece but way bigger.
I've never gotten as ambitious as the link in 48, but I do recall making animals out of paper clips and erasers.
52: Is correct for one N I've lived with. Crazymaking it is.
I can't tidy up the living room because I can't decide if these papers should go in the recycling or not
I saw the phrase "clutter is deferred decisions" somewhere. That seems right to me.
62: Why close html tags now when you can put it off for later?
Heebie, don't try to explain my folkways to me. I do that exact wait till last moment, cram, done with asterisk thing, and do it with everything and anything, but saying that's due to "perfectionism" is just incorrect.
62 seems so right to me. My lovely wife, who has a big struggle with this (which I perceive to be more of a struggle than she perceives it to be, because it bothers me to no end but doesn't really bother her much), has an terrible habit (my words not hers) of not leaving out things that she needs to deal with, instead of putting them away somewhere, because if she puts them away she'll forget about them and leaving them out where she will see them she will remember them, which sounds ok in theory except she doesn't actually remember them--after a few hours they just blend into the background for her so now every place in our entire house that something could be "left" to be dealt with later is covered in things that are months or years old, and it's just endless clutter everywhere.
I think the perfectionism thing is self-justifying bullshit.
I actually do think of all sorts of alternate angles in the run up to filing something, and so procrastinating is usually to the good. The countervailing force is that I like to file stuff early when the other side's response date is based on mine. It annoys them by messing with their scheduling expectations (most lawyers assume that everyone is going to wait until the deadline).
Is it just like that Night Gallery episode with John Astin?
Conference call from hell.
Say hi to Richard Nixon. Ask him what was on the missing 18 minutes of those tapes.
Maybe it's not always perfectionism! I don't do it.
Also jms's description above is exactly the type of thing that is stressful for me just to read. It makes me want to swoop in and start dictating choices.
I'm a good-enoughist, which is like being a perfectionist with lower standards. I still procrastinate.
You know, maybe we've all died in car crashes, and Unfogged is the John Astin hell. Watch the episode and decide for yourself.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/58800
It's 9 minutes of high quality 60's Hollywood procrastination.
You know, maybe we've all died in car crashes
This would leave me with the problem of which car crash was the one I died in. Would you expect to be in different car crashes, in your hellmind, after the one that killed you? If not, than the most recent which should have killed you, except that after everything stopped, it started again, is the one.
That one, the morning after the OKC bombing on '95 was the most ridiculous and therefore the most likely. Wonder if my wife remarried?
I am currently paralyzed with fear about a bunch of things.
I am procrastinating on certain aspects of wedding planning, because part of me is not really looking forward to the day. I want to get married but trying to seat people is such a hassle. There are a bunch of people that I have to invite and mostly I just don't want to deal with my parents.
Also, I am terrified of the prices for caterers.
Don't worry. Caterers are more afraid of you than you are of them.
48
Tie-fighter, under-construction Death Star, Death Star.
I don't have any binder clips any more, and the gift shop office supplies doesn't either.
From the link in 48: "At the triangular openings (corresponding to the eight corners of a sphere)..."
...eight corners of a sphere...
My brain locked up here, and now I can't think of anything else.
76.---is it too late simply to run off to City Hall? You'd be just as married!
In patrol you have the procrastination thing taken out of your hands. You're responding to calls and all your reports have to be in by end of shift. So maybe you delay a report for a little while to help with a big call or something but every night you send those reports off and go home and every shift starts as a clean slate. It's glorious.
80: FMIL cares about family above all else. (It is so painful to her that FSIL and I aren't best friends.) I would be in big trouble.
82: The answer is right there -- she cares about family above all, so she'd be upset at first, but she'd forgive you very soon.
I feel comfortable writing that, just because I'm certain you won't take my advice.
I am ready to declare the first shape linked in 48 impossible to build without some sort of special equipment.
Maybe some sort of positioning jig or one of those clamps like they use for tying flies?
That would work. I think you could also do it if you had six separate stacks of paper, each thick enough to hold open a binder clip open that was clamped onto it.
The point is just trying to strongarm it won't work. It seems like it should--they're just binder clips--but it won't.
I think I procrastinate for exactly the reasons mentioned in that interview: I procrastinate thinking it will put me in a better mood and thereby help me get started on real work, but instead it just makes me feel ashamed and ineffective, so repeat.
But I think that on some subconscious level I also don't really like people who don't procrastinate, because those are the sorts of people who would never have time in their lives for a semi-smart-but-aimless person like me. So procrastination may in fact be one of the few things I like about myself.