Giving repeating neg patterns wrt procrastination / not getting into action, a silly name helps in defeating the pattern (rather than beating yourself up over it I suppose).

Why is it that so many of Americans' gut reactions is to "kick the can down the road" rather than to solve the underlying problems?

Het gaat hierbij om de grote sprong. Leap of faith. The answer to how is yes.

How to beat procrastination?

07.00 Clear goals — goals that focus on the action, not the outcome. (Very specific)

See GTD on next-actions that make a distinction between outcomes (projects) and clear goals (Next-Actions)

"This keeps your brain from wondering, what is the first step?"

10.00 Challenge-skill balance. Find sweet spot where challenge is slightly more than your skill level. Too much challenge is anxiety, too little is boredom. How to tune it? (1) Lower the hurdle. (2) Compress time for a given task. (3) Define scope (What needs to be done? Why? How long?)

14.00 Bypassing/response inhibition. Engaging in a task as soon as you are committed. Don't waver. Sleep to flow is an example.

17.30 Flow payoff — have long blocks of focus, where the struggle to get into flow is actually worth it.

• We don't have everything we need, e.g., information, resources, etc.

• We're tired, overwhelmed, frustrated, and/or burnt out.

• We're waiting until we have more motivation. Future me will be brimming with motivation and get so much done

• We lack urgency. This can wait until tomorrow.

• We lack a big enough why. Why does this project even matter?

• We've hit the project's boring/tedious/difficult bits.

• We're surrounded by tantalizing distractions

• We struggle to get started because we'll just be interrupted in a few minutes, breaking our flow.

• We feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the project.

• We struggle with perfectionism

• We get sucked into distraction spirals. A 5-minute Reddit break turns into two hours.

• We do many urgent but unimportant tasks, so there's no time/energy for the important stuff.

• We seek distractions to quiet the monkey brain. (If we could snap our fingers and silence the mental chatter, we'd be more productive.)

• We dream of creating something amazing and perfect. Once we start the work, the ability to create something perfect disappears. As long as we don't start, perfection feels possible.

• We talk about projects and daydream a lot. These feel good and feel like progress. But these good feelings diminish our motivation to actually get started.

• We dream of doing so many things. It's hard to commit to one project because it means saying No to a dozen others. Not starting on a project means we're keeping our options open.

• We seek out distractions to soothe negative emotions.

• We fear judgment and criticism.

• We fear making mistakes.

• We fear failing

• We have imposter syndrome.

• We have too many concurrent projects/responsibilities. This causes us to constantly switch contexts and/or feel overwhelmed. This kills any chance of getting into a flow state.

• We feel like other people don't have to work as hard, and it's not fair that things take so much effort for us.

• We don't have anyone to cheer us on, celebrate tiny wins and small victories, etc

• We don't have anyone holding us accountable.

• We're surrounded by people who procrastinate, so it feels normal to put things off. Who wants to be the only person not procrastinating?

• We feel lonely, so it's hard to find the motivation to do stuff.

via u/clumsyAmeba on https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/121pe2x/ive_identified_27_causes_of_procrastinationwhich/

Stop Procrastinating With Note-Taking Apps Like Obsidian, Roam, Logseq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baKCC2uTbRc by Sam Matla

sophisticated procrastination - tweaking one's system(s) or workflow with the anticipation it will help them in the long run when it is generally almost always make-work which helps them feel smart and/or productive. Having measurable results which can be used against specific goals will help weed this problem out.

optimization-procrastination trap is related to shiny object syndrome - the idea of tweaking one's system constantly

perfect tool trap - guess what? there isn't one

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-do-you-manage-pornographic-productivity-in-obsidian/15906

While writing notes into a daily note page may be useful to give them a quick place to live, a note that isn't revisited is likely one that shouldn't have been made at all.

Tools for thought need to do a better job of staging ideas for follow and additional work. Leaving notes orphaned on a daily notes page may help in the quick capture process, but one needs reminders about them, means of finding them, and potential means of improving them.

If they're swept away continuously, then they only serve the sort of functionality of cleaning out of ideas that morning pages do. It's bad enough to have a massive scrap heap that looks and feels like work, but it's even worse to have it spread out among hundreds or thousands of separate files.

Does digital search fix this issue entirely? Or does it just push off the work to later when it won't be done either.

When working on a project, to stave off potential procrastination on finishing, one should focus on the minimum viable version and finish that. They can then progressively enhance portions and add on addition pieces which may be beneficial or even nice to have.

Spending too much time on the things that sound nice or that one "might want to have" in the future will be the death of the thing.

link to: - you ain't gonna need it - bikeshedding for procrastination

questions: - Does the misinterpreted-effort hypothesis play a role in creating our procrastination and/or lead to decision fatigue?

Steven Johnson's "blank page problem" isn't as prosaic as Ernest Hemingway's "white bull", but is an encapsulation of the same problem writers face.

How to Take Smart Notes was a procrastination project.

Saint Monday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Monday

I've frequently heard people say they hate Mondays, but I've never heard of the cultural phenomenon of Saint Monday.

The Intermediate Packet approach make big projects less intimidating.

Big projects feel risky because the time you spend on it feels like a waste if you don't succeed. Intermediate Packets allow you to finish smaller chunks. You can use this to trick yourself to get started on bigger things.

I was going through my Firefox bookmarks and I found article. I had read this article two years back and had commented that I found it to be useful. I read it back in May 2018. As of now, November 2020, my programming skills are still novice-level. I haven't implemented the ideas or followed suggestions given here.

It has been 2 years and 5 months since I found this article to be relevant and it baffles me that I haven't taken action by making use of the knowledge given in this article. Two long years flew by. I guess reviewing my bookmarks is something that I will do more often.

The article was posted on May 23, 2018 and I had stumbled on it the next day itself, i.e., May 24, 2018. This gets me thinking that we could finds solutions for problems(latest ones in this case) once we identify it, articulate it, hit the search button and just read stuff. I could presume that what happened next was that I misunderstood "finding a solution" to "realizing the solution", and perhaps became complacent or maybe there were more problems that didn't come to my awareness to identify and further find solutions. I'm not quite sure. Should I have identified my problems and googled more so that I could have learned C and C++ sooner?

I wonder what held me back from taking action to accomplish and master something that usually takes not more that 5-6 months maximum.

Usher, E., Golding, J. M., Han, J., Griffiths, C. S., McGavran, M. B., Brown, C. S., Sheehan, E. A. (2020). Psychology Students’ Motivation and Learning in Response to the Shift to Remote Instruction During COVID-19. [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. 10.31234/osf.io/xwhpm

How to procrastinate

This popular explanation, and more importantly, Wikipedia, seem to suggest otherwise - though a nod is given to this hypothesis in the wiki article.