I spent about a third of 2021 more or less consumed by this phenomenon. In my case it was triggered by job searching: I quit my existing position, intending to do a leisurely search over a few months... and then avoided nearly everything related to the job search for over four months. (While still experiencing a ton of stress as a result of constant anxiety and guilt about it.) Once I actually started, I landed an amazing new position within two months.
The thing that made the difference for me was directly and consistently involving my girlfriend. All she did most of the time was sit in the same room as me, working on her own stuff, but some combination of being unable to completely avoid working while she was there, having her there to vent anxiety to, and being able to make commitments to her rather than myself made an enormous amount of difference.
I'm not thrilled with myself for the procrastination I did in the first place, but I'm taking it as a hard-won lesson: doing difficult things can be vastly easier if you have someone you trust as support and confidant.
What really gets me is that if I push stuff off and then finally get around to it how little time it usually takes to deal with the thing I've been putting off. I'm quite capable of spending 3 days to avoid 10 minutes of concentrated hard work. Very frustrating.
I discovered this in my early 20s and it has been the key to my rarely if ever dealing with with issues with procrastination. When I think of something I don’t want to do immediately, one of the first things that pops into my head is both how quickly it will get done and how good it will feel to have it done, and so I do it right then and there.
The satisfaction of knocking off something you didn’t want to do is the corollary to the negative feelings holding you back, and it’s the key to establishing a positive feedback loop in place of the painful one you’re experiencing.
For that to work you need to be able to frame the problem as something that can be done immediately. If the problem has a blocking step, like "fill out this form, then in two weeks, check back to see if it worked," I find it much harder to see the joy in completing the task.
I normally approach that mentally as advancing the task towards completion, and as a matter of framing I try to remember that larger tasks feel better to complete than bite-sized ones. The regular practice of this approach gives one reinforcing feedback loop of ‘momentum’ and a mental image of oneself as a person who gets things done, which reduces the feeling of inertia that contributes to the sort of shame spirals we’re talking about.
That's an interesting observation: yes, I do get stuff done, in the end. But the path to it is usually long, torturous and leads along many places that weren't the destination along the way and plenty of that could be avoided. And quite a few of my achievements are probably the result of procrastinating on something else!
I wonder how the real achievers (Fabrice Bellard?) deal with these sort of things.
And also: what I need to do makes all the difference. Work on my bike: Present! Work on the company VAT reporting? Oh, I think I need to go play some piano. Hm, interesting bug in pianojacq, I should fix that. Hm, even more interesting, this allows me to refactor that bit. Then, on the 29th of the month I will work on the VAT filing.
I can relate to this a lot. The one silver lining of the shameful, interminable hell that is procrastination is the random skills that come out of it.
I was so dysfunctional at my last job during covid-induced WFH I found time to completely redo my backyard, which included tasks like "research sod options, schedule a delivery, learn how to install it and lay it before it dies" which if someone officially assigned me to do I never would have been able to get myself to complete.
This feels very relatable to me. Looking back, I'm pretty sure a few large projects spawned out of procrastinating on some other project I was supposed to be doing.
One was installing a tile floor in the kitchen, including lots of research, sistering joists, ripping up the old floor, etc etc. And replacing the kitchen range, which required a range hood, which required some cabinet mods. Lots of interesting new DIY skills learned in that project.
And then last year, building a video editor, instead of recording some videos for a course.
Pay someone to do the VAT filing for you. There are people that actually likes to play with that stuff so why don't you do the things you enjoy doing? Ok, I have no idea how much work the VAT stuff is, I'm not from US. But in general, remove the unneeded stress from life and enjoy it instead. Don't try to be a success, it's OK to just get along with life and family. Live on one salary if you can, split the time 50/50 between the two of you and just live cheap instead. Spend the extra time together with family doing things you enjoy.
I do. But even that requires me to hunt up all the receipts, send in all invoices received and all invoices sent. So there is always at least half a days' worth of work in there.
This is interesting since it reminds me of the dynamic I have with my boyfriend as well. We seem to be opposites in this regard.
I work better alone. Having someone else there, even if they aren't purposefully distracting me, just adds another tiny bit of awareness: Is he hungry? Is he bored? Does he want coffee? We haven't had lunch - should I cook? I should tidy. I feel like when there's a guest in my house I need to take care of them somehow, and make the place (and myself) presentable. When I'm by myself I can just focus on work, forget to eat for a day, and not bother cleaning my house and nobody will give a crap.
Even when I know he is totally fine fasting all day with me if that's what it takes while we focus, I still get concerned with starving the poor guy while I'm in "the zone". And often he cooks for us as well, which is nice and very appreciated, but then I'm distracted by eating and then thinking about how I should return the favor that evening by preparing dinner. But what if I was going to work through the evening?! You get the idea... I much prefer to be selfishly alone and not think about anyone else's presence.
But my boyfriend seems to be the opposite, and closer to what you're describing. He sometimes likes coming over specifically to work. He says my focus on work during the day helps him focus and stop procrastinating, too. In the end, we compromise. I find a way to still be productive and focus when he's here, and accept that I'll just feel a little bit bad about not paying attention to my visitor.
I'm a non-eater (24-hr faster, usually this goes along with other manic, focused, driven episodes where I'm really being the best I can be at what I do). I lived for 10 yrs with my ex-gf (still my business partner and best friend) who used to have these worries about me, even though we were both working together. I was like don't worry about me, I'm fine -it was always she who needed to eat. She kind of put it onto me. Eventually, she'd get up and cook herself food. But she was more like me. She was driven to work too.
Now I'm with a woman who's the opposite. She'll come over for the weekend and sit there quietly for 8 hours while I work and the whole time I know she's starving or bored and I feel like a shitty boyfriend. She'll be reading a book or texting her friends and in the back of my mind I'm like, uh, why are you in my house? Like, you could have this much fun in a dentist's waiting room. You think you're not experiencing aloneness but you don't know how to be alone with someone else so we're in this situation where I have a knot in my stomach because all I want to do is work, and you have a knot because you're waiting for me to say something to you. This is not how it was with my ex.
I think maybe if I read way between the lines, you and your bf haven't quite established how to truly be alone together and take care of your own needs (or he hasn't).
On the other hand, this is what it's like to have a pet. The more expensive the pet, the more care it requires. If you're a true nihilist and you don't even enjoy the company, maybe you just enjoy that extra little bit of stress it brings you to have to deal with their problems.
It's true that when my gf or my ex ever had problems, they lit a fire under me and gave me a reason to care; my work became more stressful, but it was in service to something that I finished it. Because there's some other, imminent problem in my life, in the form of another human being who needs my attention. People with children can probably attest to this, although, thank God, I'm not one of them. They say it makes your life seem more meaningful. Occasionally that might be true.
Thanks for sharing. I think in my case it's mostly like you and your ex-gf. I just have trouble internalizing the fact that I don't need to think about him while we're working. My boyfriend says he's totally fine sitting there not getting any attention when he knows we are in work mode. He _does_ have a higher requirement than what I was used to for spending quality time with each other in general, but it does not extend to work-time (according to him). It's just that on weekdays, my entire day late into the night could be work-time. I think knowing quality time is important to him is partly what makes me feel this need to pay attention to him, or feed him, or something while he's here for work. But that is a me-problem vs a he-problem.
He regularly tells me that he is fine eating one meal a day or not at all, but I still feel the compulsion to make snacks all the time when he's here. He is a big person and needs way more calories than I do to maintain his desired weight. Even though he says he's fine with not eating I see him shoveling down three times as much food as I normally do when we do eat, and then making more rice or popcorn later to top up. It makes me think "Holy crap, poor guy hasn't eaten all day and now he's starved." Which is silly, because of course he can get up and get his own food while we work if he's hungry.
I also have pets, and do enjoy their company. They are quite high maintenance, but they're cats. They come over and lick my head when they want attention and then go back to napping nearby. I could not handle children and am in awe of those who do.
I mean, maybe it's not really a problem. It can be really hard to work and live with someone, and there's always a balance; we perceive that it might be rude to switch into work mode and ignore someone who we know wants to spend quality time, but we only care that it might be rude because we do want to spend quality time. We want these people in our life but we want them on certain terms, and that's okay. The boundaries always shift back and forth a little. As long as you're happy with the time you do give them, I think it's natural.
With my ex, we lived together; my current gf and I have separate places. But we quarantined together through most of 2020, and she was out of work. The pandemic really forced a lot of people who might not be so compatible in terms of their expectations for attention, work habits, sleeping and eating habits, into constant close quarters. Almost all of the unmarried couples I knew split up from 2020 to now (some more than once). I think my relationship has survived this long because we're both very aware of each other's needs - including the need for alone-time and boundaries.
Anyway, it's interesting to hear someone talk about it this way. I don't know too many people in parallel work-from-home/relationship situations. I guess it's really just about communication, and it sounds like you do have that in your relationship.
> He sometimes likes coming over specifically to work. He says my focus on work during the day helps him focus and stop procrastinating, too. In the end, we compromise
FYI: That's an ADHD trait, and what you are describing is a common technique to combat executive dysfunction called body doubling[1].
One trait isn't an indication of anything, but a dozen could be; maybe show him this- I wrote up my experience here: https://romankogan.net/adhd
I have a similar issue. Its hard for me to get work done when there are other people around whether its at my place or someone else's. Just the fact that another person is there can be super distracting to me and it makes it difficult to get into a flow state. This is a problem I don't know how to deal with honestly, besides just not working on important stuff when around other people. It does impact me a little at work but luckily I'm pretty solo 90% of the time when I'm there
The mere awareness of stuff happening around in the office is enough to prevent me from focusing on anything. At home, the main source of distraction is the endless queue of undone household chores all around me.
Over half of my committed code has been written at work after hours in complete silence.
If you work freelance with someone who's also your lover, I highly recommend going to a cafe where you can sit across the table and literally only talk about (1) work or (2) a brief, funny thing you saw on the internet, which I don't want to bother you with but it's so good you have to stop for 30 seconds and see it. During your work hours. And where you can otherwise ignore each other, or go on a walk alone, or read a book, and there are servers to bring you coffee or food so you don't have to do it for yourself or each other. And then you finish and you don't take the work home with you. Tip your waiter well.
[edit] This presumes you are really good at working with random conversation happening around you. To me, it actually helps me focus if there's chatter going on. But it really helps if the chatter is in a language I don't understand well.
I'm curious how long you've been dating your boyfriend. I've been with my girlfriend for a little under three years, and I think I would have felt much more pressure to attend to her like you're describing if we were only, say, a year in. (Although I don't actually know, because at that point we were in a long-distance relationship, so all the time we spent together in person was intensive relationship time.)
The other factor for me is that job searching is not like coding: it's a series of separate tasks/decisions/evaluations, rather than me trying to immerse myself in a problem or system, so interruptions or distractions aren't nearly as costly; I'm not going to go into flow state from job searching. And a lot of the difficulty comes from the emotional aspect, so I found having someone to talk/vent to about it very useful.
It's been three years, but a very weird three years (as is probably the case for most people) because of the pandemic. He was unable to self isolate due to his job, and was around hundreds of people daily. I worked from home and self isolated for about a year and a half. There was maybe a handful of times where we could work out ways to spend time together for a few days to a week at a time safely over that year and a half, but for the most part we barely saw each other except in video calls. So I don't think that three years of real time really amounted to three years of relationship time.
Good point about job searching vs coding, I think you're right.
A lot of my guilt around my job search is failing the trad "male provider" role and seemingly inherent status anxiety around being a man.
I would feel fine working at 711 and coming home to grind on code. I'm not an atom though. My wife can't pay the rent alone forever and my dog needs to seemingly eat every day. I've gone through this cycle previously before pursuing coding professionally, and this time I at least have the consolation of knowing my next salary will more than make up for my many strings of resigned couch tending.
I'm also now thoroughly convinced that our behavior can be chemically diverted. I don't feel like a piece of shit when I feel sad or unmotivated anymore, just more like a puzzle that's temporarily missing some neuromolecular pieces.
I can relate to working with others. So far in the WFH pandemic I've been mostly all right, but I work so much better in a team, with someone actually telling me what to do, what they expect, instead of me having that responsibility myself.
I'm guessing it's a 'subservient' personality trait of sorts. Others are 'natural' leaders, good at keeping an overview of what needs to be done and distributing that. Others are self-motivated and driven and make amazing things all on their own. And all of those probably fit in a venn diagram.
I don't think you're subservient, you just prefer to be part of a tribe which is normal. Even the self-motivated, natural leaders have strong supports to ensure that the tribe around them keeps them sane.
It's much more difficult to proliferate culture at home and I think people are having to compensate by forcing themselves to work, without any of the cues they normally get in the office.
I really like my current company because it's small but people have well-defined wheelhouses. I don't really have to think too hard except when I need to defer to more experienced engineers.
The level of pessimism here seems a bit gratuitous. Working with my partner worked well for me, but I've seen people in similar situations achieve a lot of success through participating in supportive online communities (e.g. a Slack group for alumni of a coding bootcamp), or coworking with friends (whether or not everybody is working on the same stuff). Therapy can also be helpful, both in addressing the roots of the problem and in providing some external accountability. And there are doubtless many other options if you look around a little.
i read an article about how we should all form squads, that is turn your main memetic friendgroup into a economical and carework selfhelp squad... or something, i have since lost the link to the article though...
nah. you can have non-romantic accountability partners.
in fact, i'd say it's more the norm than the exception. (and often sort of emergent and far from the phrase "accountability partner", which is a bit formal)
If you landed a good job afterwards, I’d say those four months were necessary and even beneficial. Sometimes your body/mind will simply force you to stop, and procrastination can be one of their tricks to convince you to do it.
I'm quite sure that they were not: anxiety-driven avoidance is far more stressful and exhausting for me than any fruitful work. And having a constant feeling that you ought to be making up for lost time is a serious bar to genuine relaxation.
I did need a break after my last job, and it's very possible that contributed to the problems I had, but this was definitely a bug, not a feature.
Exactly. It's not a way to relax, it's more like spinning your wheels in place and having the engine overheat from all the wheel spinning. You just feel worse and worse the longer you stay in that state.
Would you believe me if I told you I’d explained this with that exact metaphor to someone relatively recently? I literally mean with those same words in that exact order. This feels matrix-y :)
I was going to mention doing things in pairs really helps, or maybe just mentioning plans to others.
Me and my fiancee are both slackers in general, but when we start even discussing doing a project aorund the house or similar which is in any way together we always give it 100%.
Ugh I feel you, had same situation, except I can’t live with my gf due all the border closures and lockdowns so it was extra hard for me. You should consider yourself very lucky and privileged.
I do - and I sympathize, because I was living 600 miles away from my girlfriend before the pandemic, and it was everything going remote that let me move to be near her.
I don't think it is totally straightforward what to take away from that experience. I mean one option is to tackle everything that has to be done eventually right on instead of postponing it. But on the other hand how about learning to relax and have some trust in yourself and that things will work out. This is what I would strive to learn. And I am saying as somebody suffering from the same ailment. I experienced what you describe myself. Why so anxious, so worried all the time - I'll die eventually anyway most likely from cancer like all of us - but I cannot even relax a few months? I'm not even financially stressed.
Been battling with this mindset shift myself. When I get annoyed with myself for delaying a task I try to remember the concept of "last responsible moment" from the Agile methodology books; after all I've never missed an important deadline so far, so clearly my effort-estimate calibration isn't far off.
I've been dealing with overcoming some severe procrastination issues again. I was doing some "Spring" cleaning over the last few weeks and came across several books I had bought and read in the past. I picked up, The Now Habit[0], and opened it to page 103 (of my version/copy).
Below is a bit of a wall of text with I assume several typos. Please forgive me, I read the following excerpt out loud and used speech to text to get in here.
--Excerpt Begin--
Worrying can warn you of danger and evoke action to prepare for that danger. Respect your ability to worry as a means to alert you to potential danger. But the rapid flow of frightening thoughts characteristic of most counterproductive worrying simply creates more threats - you think, "it would be awful if that happened. I couldn't stand it. I have to do well or else." Stopping there, with simply the frightening aspect of worrying, is like screaming "Danger!" Without knowing what to do or where to run. In effect, your screen has caused a lot of disturbance in people but has not told them what they can do to escape the danger. By alerting yourself to a potential danger without establishing a plan for how you will cope, you have done only half of the job of worrying. You've left out the positive work of worrying - developing an action plan.
Once a threat is raised it must be dealt with to avoid worry and anxiety - that trap energy that can't be used productively now. Until you reach a solution or cancel the threat, worrying can operate like a recurrent nightmare that repeats a puzzle or problem. Plans, action, and solutions are required to direct the energy and complete the work of worrying.
Procrastination is an ineffective way to cope with worrying because it stalls action and simply piles up more worries. The worry that accompanies procrastination is usually learned very early in life. Parents, bosses, and teachers often use threats and images of disaster to motivate us to achieve goals they have chosen. This belief that vinegar can motivate better than honey is so prevalent among those in charge of our schools, factories, and offices that most of us suffer from some form of fear of failure and worry about being unacceptable because of our imperfection.
Familiar examples are the boss who stingly withholds compliments for the work completed while freely criticizing what is unfinished and imperfect, saying, "You'll have to do a lot better than this.. there's a lot more to do and I need this as soon as possible." Or the parent or teacher who tries to motivate by saying, "So what if you got three A's, why did you only get a B in math?"
This terrible training - that your work is never good enough - leads to the belief that you are never good enough to satisfy a parent or a boss. Feeling ineffectual regardless of how hard you try is very depressing and damaging to yourself work. Without an established sense of worth that bounces back from criticism in the face of normal mistakes, it is extremely difficult to step into the work arena, where some failures can be anticipated and where the longed-for praise for hard work and progress is seldom forthcoming. Eventually the risks seem too great to take and the threats lose their ability to motivate you.
This syndrome is particularly sad when people with talent will not risk trying for fear of being less than number one. At its worst, their perfectionism and fear of failure ( failure being defined as being less than perfect ( cause them to let their own talents atrophy rather than complete a task and risk being found second best. The more common solution for individuals raised on threats is to use their own threatening self-talk in an effort to win approval by mimicking their critical mentors. Rather than helping them to face their fears, such threats will only contribute to the procrastination cycle: threatening self-talk leads to anxiety, then to resistance, resulting in procrastination. Procrastination May temporarily lessen the tension of facing a challenging project and the risk of failing, but it cannot help you escape worry.
. . .
For 10 years Judith, a bright young accountant, suffered from worries about losing her job because of her continual procrastination. Judith continued to push herself to work in an insurance firm that others had left years before because of the cold and pressured atmosphere. After all, she had learned at an early age that she was lazy and inadequate, that there was always more that could be done, and that she needed constant reminding and pressure from those who said they cared about her.
In Judith's family individual progress was seldom acknowledge unless it was compared well with what others were doing. This pressure to do the best was constant whether the arena was school, sports, or musical talent. So it it did not surprise Judith when her boss turned out to be someone who provided a similar scarcity of praise and in abundance of pressure. From the boss's point of view, Judas motivation was supposed to come from her salary and the pressure and threats he used so frequently.
But for Judith, her working conditions only verified insecurities learned much earlier. She felt that she didn't deserve much, and fear both failure and success. She said: "I might do something wrong, and they'll think I'm dumb. I feel that people are constantly judging me and that I keep coming up short. But I know, if they were to say I'm smart or talented, I'd still feel anxious because then I'd have to be that way all the time."
The constant fear of being criticized or fired kept Judith in stress and poor health most of the time. But it was her procrastination and her fear of doing increasingly poor work that motivated her to seek help. Like most procrastinators, Judith was a good worker. She wasn't lazy. It was the pressure and the fear of failure that began to block her ability to work. As the stress of anticipated criticism for inadequate work increased and the praised dwindled, Judith's motivation and self-confidence began to dry up. More and more she relied on procrastination as a way to escape and to express her resentment.
It didn't take much for Judith to see that her boss's threats and withholding of praise recreated her family environment. And when Judith recognized that her family environment had taught her low self-esteem, victimhood, resistance and then destructive coping strategies such as procrastination, she was eager to change her current environment.
Even before I discussed the work of worrying as a way to reduce her stress, Judith on her own had begun to consider "what is the worst happened." She realized that though it would be extremely embarrassing and difficult for her, she could face being fired and that, in some ways it would be a welcome relief. In fact, given her timidity and low self-esteem, it was hard to imagine how she would ever be motivated to look for a better job unless she was fired.
But Judas had decided she wanted more. She wanted to be freely acknowledged for her work and her talents. Judith was determined to find people who could appreciate her for who she was and what she could do, rather than seeking out those who always demanded that she be something different. She no longer wanted to work under conditions that lowered her self-esteem. Having face the worst that could happen - being fired - Judas has prepared herself with safety nets of compassionate self-talk and concrete alternatives that would help her cope while looking for a new job.
Judith had started the first step of a six-step process for facing fears and creating safety. These steps take you beyond "what if" and direct the block energy of anxiety towards constructive preparation for potential danger. When you are continually worried about failing on a project or losing a job, ask yourself these six questions as part of your work of worrying:
One. What is the worst that could happen? Too. What would I do if the worst really happened? Three. How would I lessen the pain and get on with as much happiness as possible if the worst did occur? Four. What alternatives would I have? Five. What can I do now to lessen the probability of this dreaded event occurring? Six. Is there anything I can do now to increase my chances of achieving my goal?
By using the work of worrying, creating safety, and using the language of the producer, you are establishing skills for maintaining genuine self-confidence. Most people wish for an illusory confidence that says, "I must know that I will win; I should have a guarantee that nothing will go wrong." This leaves you at a severe disadvantage because you haven't considered "what will I do if something does go wrong?" Trying to control things so they go just as you imagine them takes enormous energy, keeps you blind to what could go wrong, keeps you from planning for a strategic retreat, and drains you the energy necessary for bouncing back.
True confidence is knowing that whether you're calm or anxious, whether you succeed or fail, you'll do your best and, if necessary, be ready to pick yourself up to carry on and try again. True confidence is the ability to say, "I am prepared for the worst, now I can focus on the work that will lead to the best."
The thing that made the difference for me was directly and consistently involving my girlfriend. All she did most of the time was sit in the same room as me, working on her own stuff, but some combination of being unable to completely avoid working while she was there, having her there to vent anxiety to, and being able to make commitments to her rather than myself made an enormous amount of difference.
I'm not thrilled with myself for the procrastination I did in the first place, but I'm taking it as a hard-won lesson: doing difficult things can be vastly easier if you have someone you trust as support and confidant.