I had a file called procrastination.txt for a long time in my notes, where I could write tips or insights about procrastination.
The underlying assumption was that one day I would drive my life with discipline and ease, having assembled an armory to beat the demon of procrastination into submission. I would have a collection of tools that allowed me to detect and bypass procrastination, and therefore achieve my goals with much greater consistency and certainty. The file was kind of pointless, though, because that whole idea turned out to be wrong.
In procrastination.txt I actually wrote "If I don't have insightful thoughts within a few months, I should probably just delete this". That's kind of funny to me, and I am deleting it.
I figured I could publish some final thoughts on the topic here, as a sort of eulogy.
Notes on Procrastination
For a long time, procrastination truly felt like the struggle of my life. I had no problem with work work (with a boss), but when it came to hobbies, projects, and any type of goal or discipline where I truly had no external accountability, I just felt like procrastination was the defining state of my existence. It was a war that I felt like I was always losing.
I spent a lot of time trying different approaches to fighting this war.
Over time I tended to have the experience that, beyond a number of straightforward strategies for understanding, detecting, and minimizing procrastination opportunities, I pretty much never successfully reduced procrastination by attacking it directly. There were times where I stopped procrastinating, but that always had more to do with hooking into strong systems of motivation and reward. So I kind of abandoned the idea of "mastering" procrastination and writing about it.
Fighting Procrastination Misses the Point
There is a vast literature on how to fight procrastination. At this point, it bores me. So I asked an LLM to write a guide in the style of Writing, Briefly:
Motivation follows action, not the other way around. Just start. If you can't, shrink the task until you can: open the document, write one bad sentence, put your shoes on. Use a timer; a finite commitment is less threatening than an infinite one. Decide the night before exactly what you'll do first. Keep next-actions concrete: "email John the draft," not "work on project." Eat the frog–do the dreaded task first–or start with a small win; figure out which person you are. Track every time you catch yourself procrastinating, what you did instead, what you were feeling; patterns emerge fast. Build streaks. Put tasks on your calendar, not just a list. Protect your peak hours for hard work. Take real breaks–walks, not your phone. Sleep and exercise matter more than any productivity system. Let yourself be bored sometimes; constant stimulation depletes your ability to find hard things engaging. Work next to someone, even silently. Make commitments public. When you do procrastinate, forgive yourself; guilt makes it worse. Most procrastination comes from ambiguity–clarify the task and the aversion often dissolves. Perfectionism is procrastination in a fancy hat. The task never gets worse but your feelings about it always do. Sometimes procrastination is a signal that the task doesn't matter; listen to that occasionally. If it's chronic and life-impairing, get evaluated for ADHD or depression. The goal is not to never procrastinate. The goal is to notice faster and recover sooner.
This is nothing to sniff at. If you are stuck in a fugue and only starting to become aware of how much you procrastinate, this can be useful. There's a lot to read and learn about "fighting procrastination". One book I personally liked is "The War of Art" by Stephen Pressfield. It's good even if you're not an artist.
But if you're like me, you will eventually realize that this is a dead end. You can't fight procrastination directly; you're fighting a negative. What even is procrastination? It's the act of not doing something. It's an absence. It's like proving a negative. See ironic process theory; your own psychology is against you.
I started understanding procrastination more intuitively when I became more mindful. I've meditated several hundred hours over the last year and a half, which has led to some changes in my cognition, focus, and presence.
To make a long story short, I'm much more aware when I procrastinate now. And crucially, that doesn't stop me from procrastinating. I can have a crystal clear knowledge that I'm procrastinating, and that I "should" probably go do something, and I can hold that in my mind with deep clarity for hours, but it actually doesn't matter. What matters is if I have something worth doing.
So… yeah. Optimizing to minimize procrastination was a dead end. Instead, forget about procrastination and focus on "building". That is how I ultimately ended up winning the war.
Focus on building something that matters to you, and building a sustainable, sticky habit. Focus on your motivation to be there every day. Focus on making sure your work has something in it to pull you back to it.
Or, hire a boss!
RIP procrastination.txt.