Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length

 
Advanced search

1411283 Posts in 69325 Topics- by 58380 Members - Latest Member: bob1029

March 29, 2024, 07:35:27 AM

Need hosting? Check out Digital Ocean
(more details in this thread)
TIGSource ForumsPlayerGeneralProcrastination: A battle of time and regret
Pages: [1]
Print
Author Topic: Procrastination: A battle of time and regret  (Read 907 times)
absolute8
Level 5
*****


WTF, some aggressive nerd... (•̀ω•́)و ̑̑


View Profile WWW
« on: December 16, 2016, 03:13:27 PM »

Procrastination, that age old battle of Man against his/her idle or distracted self.

Man, who does not understand that time marches on towards an unknown destination from which he won't return.

You want to know why you procrastinate? Possibly because you don't consider regret in an active matter.

We tend to only consider regret from a reactionary standpoint.

i.e. Something bad happened and I regret it.

For someone looking to overcome procrastination, this is highly ineffective because it only kicks in after the fact; after the binge; after the marathon; after the 12 hour nap.

Well now, you're probably wondering, does this strange online nerd hold the answer to defeating my procrastination?

Being that procrastination is the battle of one's self against one's self, no, I don't have the answer. You are the answer.

What I have for you is an effective weapon for you to use in practice.

Ask yourself, whenever you encounter something of distracting interest or habit, ask:

"If I don't indulge in this right now, will I regret it later?"

Unless you're highly efficient at lying to yourself, your answer will likely be no most of the time.

Practice asking yourself this before any time consuming or non-constructive activity and you'll be practicing enough "active regret" to keep yourself on track to what really matters to you.

You've only got a limited time so you may as well spend it doing what truly satisfies you, right?  Beer!

-----------------------------

Side note: What are some of your techniques for defeating procrastination? What worked? What failed? What was the loss and gain?




Logged

b∀ kkusa
Global Moderator
Level 10
******



View Profile
« Reply #1 on: December 16, 2016, 03:34:54 PM »

it helps me not procrastinating by working outside (out of my pajama, out of my house) in either a workplace with people working on stuff or a coffee shop. 

When staying home, i put clothes i'd put outside to set a mood for activity. Not that effective though.

Logged
absolute8
Level 5
*****


WTF, some aggressive nerd... (•̀ω•́)و ̑̑


View Profile WWW
« Reply #2 on: December 17, 2016, 04:40:33 PM »

To add to the mix, I find the following:

1. Intentional Intelligent/Creative work requires silence. Your activity during this process should be enough to keep you both focused and entertained. If it doesn't, then the sh*t is boring and you need to consider why you're doing it. The end result will probably suck too.

2. Repetitive/ redundant work requires music.Rhythm, groove, mojo, whatever - if it can move a viking ship it can certainly move you to finish categorizing those arrays or spreadsheet.

3. It's important to take breaks in sporadic spurts, generally when you find too much tension building or fatigue settling in. This is prime time to dip into those previous interruptions that would usually lead to procrastination - but only a little!
« Last Edit: December 17, 2016, 04:52:55 PM by absolute8 » Logged

absolute8
Level 5
*****


WTF, some aggressive nerd... (•̀ω•́)و ̑̑


View Profile WWW
« Reply #3 on: December 17, 2016, 04:42:37 PM »

it helps me not procrastinating by working outside (out of my pajama, out of my house) in either a workplace with people working on stuff or a coffee shop. 

When staying home, i put clothes i'd put outside to set a mood for activity. Not that effective though.



I've heard many people remark about how hard it is to work at home, specifically in your bedroom. I guess it's a psychological thing.
Logged

Pfotegeist
Guest
« Reply #4 on: December 17, 2016, 08:45:43 PM »

It's possible to focus on a given task for a short amount of time. Then the willpower for lack of better term, is used up. At that point your brain, getting technical, fights to re-polarize the weakened related areas. Stronger, energetic nerves fire which stir up distracting thoughts/ memories because they are ready to give their energy away, less technical more metaphor.

If I'm, not doing something actively creative I try to "store" the creative work by thinking about the next step, it is the thing at the back of my mind until I've given the energy back, doing whatever. Think of it like simile, gently squeezing a stress-ball, grip gets stronger until you squeeze hard enough it takes your focus, then grip weakens. If I don't do two things at once, I'm using up my focus, and if I'm not thinking about my creative work, I'm thinking randomly. Sorting this can become a task in itself. That was anecdotal, I don't know if this would work the same for everyone.
Logged
Winnie the Pooh
Level 0
*


View Profile
« Reply #5 on: January 11, 2017, 02:11:37 AM »

Hate to work at home Mock Anger! Absolutely impossible to concentrate your brain activity whether you’re in the bedroom or in the sitting room. I’d rather go to the office even if having a headache or a high temperature.
Logged
eyeliner
Level 10
*****


I'm afraid of americans...


View Profile
« Reply #6 on: January 11, 2017, 06:47:05 AM »

Go somewhere public. Like a shopping center, coffee house and position so that everyone sees your screen.

You'll cut out pornography/hentai or whatever the hell you like.

Profit.
Logged

Yeah.
nu_muso
Level 1
*


View Profile
« Reply #7 on: January 15, 2017, 10:53:19 PM »

I find it helpful to write a very short list of the tasks I want to accomplish. I tick these off as I go along. I'm a little OCD about it so it helps motivate me Tongue
Logged
JWK5
Level 9
****

A fool with a tool is an artist.


View Profile
« Reply #8 on: January 16, 2017, 06:14:54 AM »

It's actually been shown that your "future self" (i.e. the version of you that exists in some imagined future timeline in your head) actually registers in the parts of the brain that registers other people rather than in the parts of the brain that registers as the self, so we see our future selves as another person altogether. We generally procrastinate because we operate under the assumption that our future self has got it covered (i.e. we'll be able to get to it "later"). It gives us a false sense of security and causes us to underestimate workloads and time frames because often we attribute this future self much more capability than we ourselves actually possess.

What is actually pretty amusing about our "future selves" is that they are based entirely on past experiences we've had so though we assume we are referring to "me at a later time" what we are actually referring to is essentially a Hollywood "true story" movie, you know where all the details are fudged to make things more exciting despite conflicting with the actual events its based around and the main character is nothing like the person it is supposed to be representing.

After having read many studies on it and really got at least a general idea of what might be going on behind the scenes with my own procrastination I've had some luck curbing my procrastinating behavior a bit by dis-identifying with the future, basically refuting any possibility that a future self will be dealing with the situation and putting my current self in a "now or never" state. Only in this case the movie is about events that haven't even happened yet but somehow the writers have blindly assumed how it would all turn out.



tl;dr: Don't trust your future self, they suck at playing your role and they never get shit done like they've led you to believe they would.





EDIT: There are more articles on the subject out there, but here's a quick excerpt of one:

Hershfield and a team at Stanford University published a neuroimaging study that helps illustrate the way the brain makes this distinction between current and future you. While the study volunteers were inside an fMRI machine, the researchers asked them to first think about themselves, then to think about another person — either Matt Damon or Natalie Portman (who, presumably, the subjects had never met). Finally, they were asked, “Please think about yourself ten years from now.” In most of the participants, the brain activity that was measured when they were imagining their future selves resulted in a similar pattern to the activity measured when they were thinking of the celebrities.

In a way, this makes intuitive sense, notes Emily Pronin, a Princeton University psychologist who has also published work in this area. One of the defining differences between you and someone else is the way you experience your own thoughts and emotions versus someone else’s. “We experience our own [thoughts and emotions] internally. We can look inward,” Pronin said. “Whereas, for other people, we only know what their thoughts or emotions might be through their actions. So the future self — and in that same way, the past self — are more like another person than they are like the self, because we can’t experience the feelings of a past and future self like we can with the present self.”

On another note, the past is just a series of old experience configurations we refer to as not being the current experience configuration and the future is just a guess we have about what the next configurations might be like. We're actually pretty terrible at remembering the past (as the mind tends to fudge things and shortcut past minor details for efficiency's sake) and most of us are equally pretty terrible about predicting the future (as our emotions can steer us into irrational expectations). Your past and your future erode in truth the farther out you look (which in terms of far off deadlines can be brutal where procrastination is concerned). I find more and more that keeping your head in the present and letting go of your assumptions about the past or the future is the best way to save yourself from agony (and it keeps you very adaptive).
« Last Edit: January 16, 2017, 06:31:08 AM by JWK5 » Logged

My Art Tutorials:
 Here

"Today is victory over yourself of yesterday, tomorrow is victory over lesser men." - Miyamoto Musashi
Pages: [1]
Print
Jump to:  

Theme orange-lt created by panic