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> Action leads to motivation, not the other way around.
I've found this to be very true. A trick I found that made this easier for me is to leave a trivial task to start tomorrow with, often with notes to remind myself what to do. Ideally the trivial task is on the way to something bigger, not finishing something. That gets me into my editor, gets me running the code / tests / etc., and gives me a trivially easy way to get moving. Then the motivation kicks in and I can start moving for real.
The same approach helps me with tasks outside of software development, and even outside of work.
That's Hemingway’s trick: “You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.”
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fi...
Yep.
When there are no clear tasks, I sometime leave a syntax error at the place work should continue tomorrow. This is quite effective. It can make the answer to the "Where was I?" question immediate instead of taking a few seconds and this is one fewer barrier.
I’ve heard this called “park facing downhill”
I remember being on a session with the pragmatic programmers (ie the people from the book) and they recommended making a compile error on purpose as the last thing one did before leaving work. The next day you compiled the code and get an error, fix this and they continue working. You are already doing work. This sets your mind on the right track from they day before. I gave used this a bit and it works pretty well.
It most definitely does work the other way around. The problem of course is that you can’t just wait for motivation to appear. But you can start an action.
I’m just stating the obvious, but I find it odd that the author states the opposite isn’t true.
Same, it's so much easier to quit just when you hit your limit and keep a 2 min window to bookmark your solution search and leave some potential follow ups. Makes restarting your job a lot easier.
It doesn't matter what I need to do, I start every day by building my code. It gets me typing commands in the terminal and more often than not there's a build error or warning I need to address
I disagree with the idea that getting past procrastination should (always) be the target.
Mostly because I don't think procrastination is inherently bad. There's a lot of stigma attached to procrastination as it's seen as being "unproductive". But I think procrastination can lead to great insights.
Your brain is telling you that it is not interested in the current task. The question is: Why? Overworked and needs a break? Much more interested in exploring something else? Protecting against the pain of failure?
Investigating the why instead of forcing "overcoming" is quite fruitful in my personal experience.
My guess is "action leads to motivation" might be helpful for solving one of the root causes (likely fear of failure/imposter syndrom) but not all of them.
To me, procrastination is the brain overestimating (or perhaps just estimating) the unpleasantness of a task in the future. The unpleasantness could come from general lack of pleasure in performing the task, anticipation of frustration or irritation due to a gap in the skills or resources required, anxiety about not being able to successfully complete the task, or the output of the task not meeting one's personal expectations.
One example for me is getting out of the house: I loathe the idea of getting dressed, getting into the car and driving, whenever I contemplate it, but once I'm behind the wheel, the thought always is "this isn't so bad". If I think about the getting dressed bit, that too, thought of in isolation, isn't so bad. It seems it is the anticipation of a seemingly complex sequence of tasks that tend to put the brain off.
"Across a decade working at hypergrowth tech companies like Meta and Pinterest, I constantly struggled with procrastination [...] I was not making progress on the things that mattered."
Maybe unless one can really convince themselves that their daily work matters (really matters and not just for their team/company metrics) one is bound to procrastinate as a symptom of some subconscious sense of pointlessness.
It is normal to struggle with procrastination from time to time but if is a regular occurrence you need to check the actual causes.
You might have ADHD.
And is is very important to know whether you have it or not because all that advice for neurotypical people will not work for you then. In fact it will harm you. It will make you feel as a failure.
You need to figure out how your brain works and only then you will finally manage to make lasting changes.
Some great comments in this thread and I agree, a lot of it comes down to understanding yourself.
In my case, not always, but often, procrastination shows up when fear is involved. Fear of failure, of not doing something perfectly, of the task being too big. What’s helped me is turning the task into a challenge, because I know that personally, I thrive on challenges. It re-frames the fear into something exciting, and once I get started, I follow all of the other advice such like breaking it down into small steps. Thanks for sharing.
> Across a decade working at hypergrowth tech companies like Meta and Pinterest, I constantly struggled with procrastination
I used to procrastinate a lot when I was a PhD student and later in academia. Sometimes, it was literally weeks of doing nothing and stressing out.
I eventually migrated to big tech and I now rarely procrastinate. We have pretty tangible goals, good results are rewarded and lack of results would raise concerns pretty quickly.
In my case, working in the right environment helped a lot with procrastination.
The older I get, the more I realize there's no point. I'll never be rich. I'll never have a family. I'll never go to space. I'll never take part in Olympics. Best I can do is beating a video game on medium. So I try to focus on that, instead of spending 80% of my life trying to make myself 20% more productive.
When stuck I do what I call "prepping". Don't try to do the task, just prep for it -- clean the room, the desk, close distracting websites, gather the materials.
It's lowering the activation energy so the reaction can happen more easily.
Related to taking tiny steps, I've set up a daily habit checklist with the lowest bar possible, even lower than the author's suggested log statement. When it comes to software dev, it's just "open my IDE and look at my notes for what to do next". This usually just takes 10 seconds, but it's the first step in starting and usually leads to me doing at least a bit more, so it's helpful when I'm at my lowest in terms of energy. And even if I do nothing else, I get some satisfaction that I at least completed my to-do and did a tiny bit more than nothing for the day.
I've found that sometimes the first action doesn't even have to involve directly working on the problem, just trying to write down a series of actions you need to take in a todo list can unblock you mentally.
Sometimes what one self-describes as procrastination is actually ADHD or values misalignment — sometimes one cannot work for reasons that are not personal failings.
I have found that “procrastination” is not a particularly helpful word because, for me, its meaning includes a shame component that can obfuscate causes.
I also found that I was most likely to procrastinate when the goal was too vague and the task was too big. So now I will break the task into super small steps, such as "open a file" or "run a test." It sounds a bit silly, but it really works. Maybe sometimes the brain does not need a motivational speech, but just a gentle push.
The article focuses more on procrastination at work, what about those who procrastinate outside of work instead?
The warrant for this claim: The smaller the action you ask from yourself, the easier it is to choose it over inaction.
But sometimes it's not inaction we're choosing against; it's discomfort.
In that case, this becomes simplistic.
There was one quote that helped me get past this, "self-discipline is a form of self-respect" and there's no way around that if you don't have any.
I've personally found LLMs to be particularly helpful to get started with something I have trouble with: surely, they'll most certainly get it wrong (unless it's something trivial), but it gives you enough momentum to keep going even if you end up discarding its original output completely
Lack of motivation isn't an issue, we procrastinate when we have lack of power to do the task.
The core point of the article is breaking down the task, which he made it look trivial but it's not that simple.
In my experience, higher expectations leads to trying to control the outcome which leads to perfectionism and procrastinating for "ideal" time. So the key is to reduce expectations, which is under our control.
Once I reduce expectation I can try random stuffs which usually lead to breakthrough and the flywheel mentioned in the article.
When beeing unemployed for some months, i got up every morning as if i had to go to work.
I cleande my apartment, did some paperwork and joined a social welfare project where poeple can maintain a structure.
That was working in a cafe or doing garden work. I received free coffee for that and met some people i sometimes meet.
The worst thing is to stay in a bubble of netflix series, social networks and rotting away.
I have suffered depression but i forced myself out of it by that.
In defence of procrastination, perhaps there are good reasons for failing to have enthusiasm for whatever-it-is. Perhaps trying to do something but being unable to muster the energy is an indication that this is not the thing you really ought to be doing. That the thing you believe to be a worthy goal is itself a false goal, and not where your heart is at, and that you need to take a second, deeper look.
Or maybe that is just another excuse :)
The "action precedes motivation" idea is underrated. I've definitely found that once I take that first tiny step (open the file, write the first test, whatever), things start to flow. It's weirdly easy to forget that when you're stuck in that doom-scroll-procrastinate spiral.
> Action leads to motivation, not the other way around.
For me, this sounds a bit tautological. Of course the opposite of procrastination is action.
It’s similar to saying, “If you want to lose weight, just eat less.” It’s certainly true on a meta level, but very difficult for some people to implement.
They say we procrastinate when we feel anxious about the task we are supposed to be doing.
Before coding on the actual problem I usually start with a tiny refactoring of something that's related. That's my warming up sports before tackling the actual exercise. Works 100% for me.
I don't know why prestigious institutions like IEEE and Nature all have blogs to post fluff and opinion pieces today. Why do they need page views?
Procrastination is not a problem. The problem is being unhappy with procrastination.
I accept it as part of my life, because I believe it is an intuitive process that protects me from doing bad work.
There are times when I really have to get something done, and then I need to put pressure on myself. But mostly I have learned to listen to and respect my procrastination.
Some people describe that as momentum preserving workflow.
I need something like that not for work... but for hobbies.
Maybe fighting it itself is a form of exercise. Maybe fighting it is an end in itself regardless if you got anything done. But not trying is the failure.
Make your own bed (?)
I like to have phone with 30min countdown, this helps me keep sense of time. Sort of like pomodoro, but for a different purpose.
I read this to Procrastinate of course...
I am terribly suicidal because of my procrastination combined with no conscientiousness.
It is correct on self-esteem and procrastination being bidirectionally linked
I'm not addicted to procrastination. I can start any time I want to!
My goodness, a FAANG coaster is founding a tech startup -_-
Don't forget folks, Always Be Productive!
"Procrastinate later — there's always tomorrow!"