Someone with a strong predisposition to procrastinate who managed to eventually beat it here.

As a teenager, I heard someone say "never let a piece of paper cross your desk twice" and took it to heart. Took a while to make it a habit, but now I can apply it to most meetings and emails -- I read, action then archive right there. So I hardly maintain a todo list of any sort. I make a list in the morning and finish/scratch off its items by the evening. Doing that daily, my mind is always refreshed about recurring or long term tasks. It seems to work for me.

The other thing I found useful is that procrastination, or the getting-started-barrier is proportional to size/complexity of task. I keep breaking the task down to smaller units until I get to something that doesn't fill me with loathing when I think of it. And then I do it. That effectively starts the task.

> I read, action then archive right there.

The problem with responding to an e-mail immediately, is that often you will get an e-mail back immediately, making this habit ineffective.

(I just wish there was an option in my e-mail reader to send an email with a delay.)

Thanks for the link, but $5 a month for adding a simple delay to my e-mail? I find that a bit too expensive.

Instead, I just answer my e-mails in the morning and ignore any new incoming e-mails the rest of the day.

One thing that helped me get a better mental model for procrastination was Wait But Why's articles on the topic.

It might seem silly, but just thinking in terms of the rational decision maker and the instant gratification monkey makes it more concrete in my mind and easier to resist.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastin...

Best short essay I know on this subject:

http://markmanson.net/procrastination

I've had to struggle with procrastination since highschool (now 10+ yrs in the workforce). A couple of things I've noticed about myself and the teams I've worked with:

- We always find time to do things we love doing. So the trick is to simply fill your bucket with things you genuinely enjoy.

- Always have a backlog. It might be a note or a sheet on Excel - but always have a list of things that need to get done. Keep adding the new stuff into this as they come, and spend a couple of hours once a week running through this.

- Get in the flow. Plan your backlog so you have a mix of high, medium and low complexity stuff on your plate.

- Figure out your "in-the-zone" time. For me, I've noticed that I'm most charged up for creative work later in the evening. Make sure you don't have any meetings or distractions lined up during and at least an hour before your zone time.

- Get your temple. Everybody needs a place where they can go, zone in and get work done.

- Have a daily standup where you discuss what you planned to do yesterday, what you did, and what you plan to do today. Do this EVERY SINGLE DAY.

I've noticed most organized/ disciplined folks just do this automatically. For us procrastinators, it's like starting a workout routine after your BMI has hit the ceiling - you need a system, and you need a system that you'd actually enjoy if you want to stick to it!

I'm battling procrastination for 15 years now. The three only things that really worked (as in "having effects beyond a few months") for me:

- Accepting procrastination as part of you & forgiving yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10267564

- Tackling only one important task per day: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2013/11/03/productivity-hacks/

- Tiny Habits: http://tinyhabits.com/

I'm trying a reverse strategy. The basic idea is to learn to do nothing at all. Really nothing, except breathing, eating, drinking water and sleeping.

The purpose is to filter out any activity that challenge breath, eat, drink and sleep. If one comes in any way, I just quickly put in the the trash.

That way when I reach a goal (if I had one at the time), I breathe better and so on... So step by step I create my world only on those 4 pillars.

There are so many things that trying to tweak those pillars, maybe the first one in your case is that battle against procrastination.

Avoid them and you will have so long to do who makes you breathe better...

Obviously posting on HN is an exception.

Sure! ;)

As a human being, share is not a priority but it's vital to mankind. I didn't say to be a hermit, we need to cross genes sometimes!

Beating procrastination is about changing a lot of small habits. The first change I'd recommend is to focus on one baby step at a time: http://www.maxims.us/take-baby-steps/

Once that becomes habitual, you may find the other Maxims on productivity to be relevant: http://www.maxims.us/topics/productivity/

I read those maxims and there is one that surprised me: "Hire a psychotherapist".

What? Ok... I bring one from another context who IMO fits well here:

"The point of public relations slogans like “Support our troops” is that they don’t mean anything… That’s the whole point of good propaganda.

You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for.

Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That’s the one you’re not allowed to talk about." Noam Chomsky

I think most people are not against hiring a psychotherapist, but at the same time many people don't actually do this. So it's not empty advice, in the same way that "get a good night's sleep" is excellent advice even if everyone agrees with it. Another one would be 'be a nice person'. The value is in the reminder, because clearly we often don't take it to heart. It reminds me a bit of the late David Foster Wallace's increasing emphasis on the value of 'basic truths' even if they seem cliche. They're still true, and we suck at living by them. So why not remind ourselves often of their value?

But perhaps your argument hinges on the assumption that 'hire a psychotherapist' is advice that diverts the attention from a more important issue. If that's the case, I'd like to hear what you think this might be.

Thanks for the David Foster Wallace, I doesn't know that guy, I will look deeper into it. Yep, I'm aware that those 'basic truths' are valuable and I don't say otherwise.

The Chomsky quote wasn't just about that psychotherapist maxim, it's that one that made me tilted.

These maxims sound to me like if the job is not done it's the worker who got a problem and need to change. I'm just trying to say that maybe it could be the nature of the work and how we see it.

For example I am one of those who have really a lot of never-ending-awesome-side-projects. I'm fine with it.

As soon as I realize that particular job is more fun 'not to be completed' but because it allows me to learn more, share with others, discover techniques and occasionally strange weird reasons (wage?)! The completion is just a social reward (and yeah maybe I often fear the 'what to do next' desert).

The path to completion is so much more valuable to me.

We need more maxims to realize all the small ignored ends on the ongoing projects. Sometimes an idea is cool because of one of those ends, which is already done, and it would be a shame (and a time loss) to force yourself to continue.

P.S: I don't preach a do-never-finish lifestyle, it needs personal balance.

GTD.

I can't understand why GTD is not anymore trendy (at least in HN) once it is the most efficient system I ever used. Since I implemented it, my life changed. If you ever get curious about GTD, besides reading the original book (Get Things Done by David Allen) you can have a look at my implementation (on my github), it might be a good starting point.

I've spent years applying GTD, but at some point I realized that 1) I failed at implementing it more often than not, and 2) it seems optimized for management-type situations, and doesn't work as well for, say, artists or even programmers.

If it works for you, of course that's great! And I think there are tons of individual elements in GTD that are valuable even if the whole system is not applied. But for me it didn't work as a whole, and it's significantly less useful if not applied completely (but also significantly more powerful when it is).

What seems to work best for me is a combination of two approaches:

1. choosing up to three tasks to focus on per day, usually one major task, and two lesser tasks. 2. using a simpler list of (usually) smaller or less important tasks for all the stuff that I can't dedicate a day or half-day to. I used Mark Forster's AutoFocus system for this for a while, and now I settled on the 'Final Version' that this evolved into: http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-final-...

I think a crucial part for me is that I need a certain fluidity in my approach. The more complex, 'factory-checklist-like' the system is, the better. The lack of complexity keeps me from constantly fiddling with the system, and the lack of a 'factory-like' approach keeps me from feeling like I'm a robot working through a checklist.

I've been reading the original book by David Allen and have slowly started to integrate GTD into my life the past couple of weeks using Omnifocus + Google Keep, and it has already made a considerable improvement in my productivity. I've had problems with procrastination as well, but with GTD I see myself wanting to do stuff.

It hasn't been "life changing" so far, but I almost know that it will change my life once I start practicing it rigorously.

Also, will definitely check out your setup.

Well, I've been down that road a lot. Countless times I found myself reading about ways out of procrastination, until noticing that this was procrastination in itself. Quite frankly, I've even felt ashamed by putting this out loud: I'm delaying work by reading about how to not delay work.

So, my never-ending work in progress solution: focus on discipline. No magic bullets, no special talent, no nothing. Just focus on being disciplined and have faith on us being creatures of habit (i.e. if you force yourself to do it, it will be easier in the future). A special talent to get things done is cool, as well as being motivated, but - really - you can't rely on those to get things done. Talent comes and goes, much like motivation. Discipline, on the other hand, you can rely on.

The only way out of procrastination is to deal with general levels of anxiety. Once you learn how to get around those feelings, then you can be more productive. Note: dealing with anxiety is a daily task but it can be done if you're mindful about it.

Source: former procrastinator

I think this goes to the heart of the problem. I've noticed that the root cause of my procrastination is usually fear/anxiety about failure. What do you find works for managing your daily anxiety levels?

Something people fail to recognize or accept is that procrastination is often a manifestation of a form of anxiety. It's an actual mental health disorder, and if you see a professional, you can actually get concrete help.

I too had the same problem, but not any more.

What worked for me is this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-ONE-Thing-Surprisingly-Extraordina....

I started getting things done when I ask this question to myself: 'What is the one thing I can do now so that everything becomes easier?' and then do that task.