Structured Procrastination

You are a prime candidate for Structured Procrastination (https://structuredprocrastination.com/) Some of my best work was done while procrastinating on my main hobby project!

> It can be actually good if you do "structured procrastination" This is actually what John Perry, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford calls it. There is even an essay (and a whole website) called "Structured Procrastination" [1]: > Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done. [1] https://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

Whenever I see anything about procrastination I always go back to the classic: https://structuredprocrastination.com/

Highly recommend reading about "Structured Procrastination": http://structuredprocrastination.com/

You could use philosopher John Perry's method. Put every activity on a To Do list, ordered by importance. Procrastination is doing lower-down items instead of higher-up items. Perry has the top of his list filled with so many awesome items that even things lower down are still well worth doing. So, it sounds like you could add more awesome things to do to the top of your list, until your procrastination becomes things like..watching Sublime tutorials. He explains his method in detail on this page: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

I love that he calls [1] the incredibly useful tools he built a product of structured procrastination [2]. [1] https://johnmacfarlane.net/tools [2] http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

There are three tricks I've found work best to stop procrastinating. 1. Ovsiankina effect. The effect states that an interrupted task, even without incentive, values as a "quasi-need". It creates intrusive thoughts, aimed at taking up the task again. [1] 2. Structured procrastination. [2] 3. Concentrating on the steps to complete the task, not your feelings and emotions about completing it. Action vs. state orientation. [3][4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovsiankina_effect [2] http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ [3] https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_1668041 [4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12140

Also worth reading on the same topic and written by the philosopher/logician John Perry: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

When you realize you are wasting time call it a day off or go for a walk. Sitting in front of the computer trying to find the strength does not help. Follow habits: e.g: if I a work from home I still get dressed as if I was going to work. If you are a procrastinator, don't fight your inner instincts, you are going to lose the battle. Instead, try to use it in your favor. See http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ by Stanford professor John Perry. When you read that the first time you have an epiphany.

If I followed this advice, my new full-time, ex-procrastination activity would transform into hard work, and I would seek relief in procrastination - probably doing exactly the thing I just got away from. See also John Perry's seminal essay on "Structured Procrastination": http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

I'm more of a supine organizer, myself. Incidentally, I followed a link to Perry's other essays, which led me here: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ to which I'm compelled to respond, Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

I think that if people followed your advice academia would essentially be deserted and not only by students but by teachers as well. :) I don't procrastinate because I don't care, I procrastinate because there are multiple things I care about. A few of those happens to be playing games, reading hacker news, having a god awful many feeds in my newsreader, drinking beer and having more then one project at any time. Although I have the personality type that does things at the end of a deadline and I know people who aren't like that think of us as lazy and unstructured but it's not like that at all. I found this to be extremely insightful once: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ I also doubt there are many (if any) that has a job that's interesting all the time. :)

Sounds like a case for structured procrastination: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ I suspect it is best to focus first on the task you most feel like doing.

1) http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ is amazing when done properly. It should not be confused with productive procrastination which is closely related but much less useful. So the idea of structured procrastination is you put at the top some task that is very important but at the same time could possibly be delayed or dealt at the very last minute. Your tasks 2-5 are where the gains lie. This is where you put your writing a book, writing that documentation for your project, writing that game, polishing that UI for your visualization. Recent anecdata: I had to grade 90 algorithms exams, which I had foolishly allowed to submitted in about 10 different languages without an auto-grader. So I was getting PHP, Java,Rust, TS for Deno etc etc. Instead I procrastinated for a few days writing a number of Jupyter Notebooks for munging some data which I had put off for about 4 months. As soon as I received 10 bachelor thesis to review I moved those to the top of my list and I graded the 90 algorithms exams with time to spare. So productive procrastination is the less useful cousin of structured procrastination. In productive procrastination you put in slots 2-5 tasks that seem productive but rapidly reach diminishing returns. So if my slot 2 was going over 40 points on chess Puzzle Rush, it would be better than playing 30 second bullet chess but still not really that productive... So polishing UI could not be that productive at some point, or running 1000 AB tests.

I disagree with labeling work on less-imporant tasks as procrastination. I think it's often (but not always) more effective to breeze through less important tasks that you're itching to do instead of slowly trudging along the highest priority task that you detest. The unpleasant topmost task becomes much less daunting once you've built momentum with a few easy wins and can see yourself as a producer instead of a procrastinator. There's also the idea of structured procrastination, [1] which turns procrastination into a productivity tool. It's based on the insight that an unpleasant task may become attractive when seen as a way to procrastinate on something even more unpleasant. For a true procrastinator it means working productively on tasks #2..n instead of reading Hacker News thinking "one last article and then I'll start working on task #1". It's an excellent way to avoid getting stuck in a vicious cycle of procrastination, and calling it "hidden procrastination" is unnecessarily negative. http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

See structured procrastination for a slightly different approach. https://structuredprocrastination.com/

> I hadn't realized there was a name for this! (i thought it's just procrastinating) Related: https://structuredprocrastination.com

How does this interact with Structured Procrastination? Im a huge fan and avid strut-castinator. This is an entirely different approach to accomplishing goals though, as I'm frugal and hate to waste money. https://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

> as my favorite joke says in the punch line “what do you call someone who only knows one language… uni-lingual… jk: American” "Another thing to keep in mind, when you get to feeling bad about being monolingual, is that the fair question is not 'how many languages do you know?' It is, 'of the languages spoken by five million people or more within a thousand miles or so of where you live, what percentage do you know?'" https://structuredprocrastination.com/light/biling.php

Compare https://structuredprocrastination.com/ > ``. . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley, in Chips off the Old Benchley, 1949

You need to shift into structured procrastination [1]. Play your tasks off of one another. Beware that sometimes you are avoiding doing truly important tasks, but you'd likely be avoiding those anyway so you may as well make use of their existence. [1] http://www.structuredprocrastination.com

I have since given this a name: springboard procrastination. This is a nice name for it, but it also seems very close to what has elsewhere been called structured procrastination: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

This technique by John Perry (Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Stanford) actually makes sense: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ The idea is that we'd rather be doing something else. For example, currently, I am postponing grading. So I don't mind doing a peer review of a paper. When that's the thing that's due, I'd rather be doing something else, and so on. You get work done by rearranging stuff :)

> The alternative is to tackle something even harder that includes the thing you want to make as a special case. This is the main operating principle of http://www.structuredprocrastination.com

Somewhat "tongue in cheek" however: I find I get a lot of work done trying to avoid working on another unrelated task.. See also: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

Obligatory link, via pmarca archive: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

I think the blue bar is from http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/, archive has it's own bar with capture date selection, that can be closed.

Very similar to the highly effective Structured Procrastination method - http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

For those who would rather try to use procrastination to their advantage than fight against it: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

I think you might be referring to John Perry :) http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ [0] I really liked his book "The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing". I read a lot about procrastination, as a form of procrastination. It's not all bad, of course. But it can be a problem. These professors writing about it clearly has managed to make it work for them somehow. I guess the grass seems greener on the other side of the procrastination spectrum. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10151481