"Math is hard, let's go shopping"...

I find that when I have something difficult, or new, to do I want to read HN and other sites more frequently. However, once I start on those hard / new tasks they are invariably engaging enough to keep me focused. It's just that initial hump.

One trick to help get started is to make it just annoying enough to switch to the distracting task that you don't bother. Editing your hosts file which you then have reverse before surfing the distracting stuff, creating a separate login for the distracting stuff, closing your laptop lid on every task switch[1], etc.

[1] http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-corre... This works surprisingly well

Thank you for that; I recently tried to find out how he implemented his 30 second distraction-delay but I had misattributed the quote and so my search was unsuccessful. I think that the delay is a powerful idea.

The approach I'm experimenting with is a "productivity mode" toggle in a tiling windows manager which disables most of the windows manager commands, leaving me mostly stuck in whatever application(s) were already visible until I toggle it off. The toggle off function has a 30 second delay.

That might be procrastination but remember that the brain keeps working on different levels. While you're doing something else you might come up with the solution you were looking for.

So far I found out that procrastination brings me some benefits, namely:

- I have a better high-level overview of software development - this way I can keep in my head lots of things that I wouldn't usually think about.

- I have lots of ideas on how to solve everyone's problems :). This is actually very important for me, as my relationship with some of my friends looks like this: they come with a problem, and I throw solutions at them until one sticks, and we're all happy.

- I have lots of ideas for hobby projects that I usually don't have time to pursue :( (e.g. idea for nyan-mode was a result of procrastination and office jokes).

However, all those benefits come at the cost of me not doing things I'm supposed to be doing at the moment. When I encounter a hard-but-not-too-hard problem at work, I might procrastinate for a minute or two, but then I sit down with a piece of paper and just solve it. However, if the problem is really hard for me, procrastination becomes a way to escape from it; I might read HN indefinetly and I still wouldn't solve it. Not to mention that there's a threshold point, after which every minute spent on procrastination makes me more tired.