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by akoumjian
3528 days ago
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I've found that methods like this don't actually help me avoid procrastinating. The key for me is to remove the psychological barriers to starting a particular task. I think Getting Things Done has a good approach by dedicating time to figuring out what the Next Actions are for any given task / project. The idea is that it is way easier to start on a task if what's listed is a concrete action. For example, you might add an item to your Inbox like: "Add better search for project X". You might avoid a task like this indefinitely. With GTD, you take regular time out of your day (it's how I start every morning), and you take your Inbox items like above and figure out what the literal next step should be to achieve the goal. So the above item might become: "Search google for adding search to a django project" There is something about taking the mental task of figuring out what the Next Actions are, and putting it into its own process that removes a lot of the hurdles for me. |
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Agreed. And one solution is, as you say, writing down a concrete action. The task is suddenly something you can hold in your head, and easily completely mentally.
Procrastination, at least for me, happens whenever I can't see an end to the task, usually because I haven't properly defined the task. As soon as there is a well defined set of steps to take, it suddenly becomes much easier to not procrastinate.
Procrastination is my brain's way of telling me it's not happy with the plan I've made, and that the goals I've set need to be re-written to be more achievable (in particular, more SMART [1]).
That said, projects like this are great, and definitely help with enumerating and planning!
[1] https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/smart-goals.php