Re:Simple Tips for Overcoming Procrastination
by danShumway on Thursday August 26, 2021 @04:08PM
(#28319975)
The biggest thing I've learned wrestling with ADHD is that people procrastinate for different reasons, and there really aren't a set of universal strategies (other than unhelpfully broad advice like "do it now so you won't have to do it later") that can be universally applied to everyone.
You have to understand yourself and understand your motivations before you can even begin tackling this problem.
Some of the techniques I use to deal with ADHD would be not only unhelpful, but actively harmful for other people: I struggle heavily with time blindness, so "stop looking at the clock" is terrible advice for me, I have gotten large improvements out of heavily utilizing timers, getting a watch that beeps every hour, setting tons of alarms, etc... For other people that can be really harmful, it can be something that is constantly interrupting you and removing you from flow. Having a buzzer go off on your wrist every 4 minutes while you cook is genuinely bad advice for some people.
Even motivation/anxiety plays into this. One big breakthrough for me was finding out that I don't get motivated by rewards -- telling myself "you can have some ice cream when you're done with cleaning" is not going to make me more likely to clean. I've met other people who are the complete opposite, and they are highly motivated by getting those positive feelings when a task gets done. They feel good after they do things, and I don't.
So beyond very general tips like "find out what motivates you", trying to figure out universal strategies is unhelpful; especially when you find out that it's not just reward structures or stress triggers that differ between different people, it's how they respond to rewards and stress in the first place.
This article is really broad, to the point of being almost useless and containing very little actionable advice -- but it's still not broad enough to avoid making some generalizations that aren't universally true. The article ends by saying, "when things are easy your mind tends to those first then anything else." This is just not true for someone who has my particular brand of ADHD, I gravitate towards difficult tasks and lose interest in them once they become easy.
Figuring out how to stop procrastination is very hard, and I spent a long time thinking I could come up with universal rules, and I don't think that's possible any more. There are no quick tips for overcoming procrastination that don't start with doing a lot of introspection into how your own brain works -- and I think that's true regardless of whether you are or aren't neurotypical.
To people who are reading these articles and getting frustrated, it's because they're not useful: they're not scientific and they're not individualized and they're never going to be able to do anything other than give you more ideas about other things you can personally try and evaluate to see if they address your problems -- because you don't know how much you do or don't overlap with author's target audience.
Instead, what you want to do is ask much more targeted questions:
----
- Are you aware of the passage of time?
- How easily are you distracted?
- Do you naturally jump between tasks or do you naturally stay on one task until it's completed? Is it easier for you to start a task than to finish it?
- Are you a perfectionist, or do you naturally want to leave tasks when they're "good enough"?
- What types of tasks do you gravitate towards and enjoy?
- Do you suffer from anxiety, or alternatively do you find that you have trouble internalizing risk?
- How are you motivated (not what motivates you)?
- Do you prefer hard problems or easy ones?
- Do you prefer novelty or routine? Does that preference change depending on your circumstances?
- Do schedules cause you stress?
As well as physical questions like:
- How much sleep are you getting a night?
- What are you eating?
- How stressful is your day-to-day life?
- How much time do you spend around other people?
- What external stimuli do you have?
And so on and so on.
And as you start to answer those questions, then you can start to look for strategies that specifically address your problems. You can start asking for advice online about how to solve specific issues.
But without that kind of background, it's like writing an article that gives tips on how to write good code without asking anything about what languages you're working with or what the context is or what problems your applications are trying to solve or how many people are working on the same codebase.
People experiment until they find techniques that work for them, and when they do their takeaway is that they finally found the magic solution that everyone else should follow. Usually, they're wrong.
You have to understand yourself and understand your motivations before you can even begin tackling this problem.
Some of the techniques I use to deal with ADHD would be not only unhelpful, but actively harmful for other people: I struggle heavily with time blindness, so "stop looking at the clock" is terrible advice for me, I have gotten large improvements out of heavily utilizing timers, getting a watch that beeps every hour, setting tons of alarms, etc... For other people that can be really harmful, it can be something that is constantly interrupting you and removing you from flow. Having a buzzer go off on your wrist every 4 minutes while you cook is genuinely bad advice for some people.
Even motivation/anxiety plays into this. One big breakthrough for me was finding out that I don't get motivated by rewards -- telling myself "you can have some ice cream when you're done with cleaning" is not going to make me more likely to clean. I've met other people who are the complete opposite, and they are highly motivated by getting those positive feelings when a task gets done. They feel good after they do things, and I don't.
So beyond very general tips like "find out what motivates you", trying to figure out universal strategies is unhelpful; especially when you find out that it's not just reward structures or stress triggers that differ between different people, it's how they respond to rewards and stress in the first place.
This article is really broad, to the point of being almost useless and containing very little actionable advice -- but it's still not broad enough to avoid making some generalizations that aren't universally true. The article ends by saying, "when things are easy your mind tends to those first then anything else." This is just not true for someone who has my particular brand of ADHD, I gravitate towards difficult tasks and lose interest in them once they become easy.
Figuring out how to stop procrastination is very hard, and I spent a long time thinking I could come up with universal rules, and I don't think that's possible any more. There are no quick tips for overcoming procrastination that don't start with doing a lot of introspection into how your own brain works -- and I think that's true regardless of whether you are or aren't neurotypical.
To people who are reading these articles and getting frustrated, it's because they're not useful: they're not scientific and they're not individualized and they're never going to be able to do anything other than give you more ideas about other things you can personally try and evaluate to see if they address your problems -- because you don't know how much you do or don't overlap with author's target audience.
Instead, what you want to do is ask much more targeted questions:
----
- Are you aware of the passage of time?
- How easily are you distracted?
- Do you naturally jump between tasks or do you naturally stay on one task until it's completed? Is it easier for you to start a task than to finish it?
- Are you a perfectionist, or do you naturally want to leave tasks when they're "good enough"?
- What types of tasks do you gravitate towards and enjoy?
- Do you suffer from anxiety, or alternatively do you find that you have trouble internalizing risk?
- How are you motivated (not what motivates you)?
- Do you prefer hard problems or easy ones?
- Do you prefer novelty or routine? Does that preference change depending on your circumstances?
- Do schedules cause you stress?
As well as physical questions like:
- How much sleep are you getting a night?
- What are you eating?
- How stressful is your day-to-day life?
- How much time do you spend around other people?
- What external stimuli do you have?
And so on and so on.
And as you start to answer those questions, then you can start to look for strategies that specifically address your problems. You can start asking for advice online about how to solve specific issues.
But without that kind of background, it's like writing an article that gives tips on how to write good code without asking anything about what languages you're working with or what the context is or what problems your applications are trying to solve or how many people are working on the same codebase.
People experiment until they find techniques that work for them, and when they do their takeaway is that they finally found the magic solution that everyone else should follow. Usually, they're wrong.