If you want to force yourself to spend less time on a project, just start it closer to its hard deadline.
But if you underestimate how long it’ll take you, you’ll risk burning yourself out by working fifteen hours a day during the last two days before the deadline.
True, but it might be worth the risk if it’s the kind of project that will expand to fill whatever time you allow for it and yet it’s not that important to you. In other words, it’s worth the pain of the two fifteen-hour days because starting it sooner means a lot more total time spent on it.
This is the solution to procrastination I finally settled on during my senior year of college, when I was deepest in its throes. My biggest hurdle was that I no longer cared about the work, and rather than try to fight the apathy, I embraced it. I said to myself, the reason I don’t want to work on this lab report is because it’s a stupid assignment and I don’t care about it, so what sense does it make trying to force myself to work on it for hours and hours? Instead, I think it’s worth, at most, 4 hours of my time, and it’s due at 1:30 on Tuesday afternoon, so I will purposefully not start it until 9:30 Tuesday morning, and—and this was the crucial step—not feel in the least bad about the fact that I haven’t started it yet up until that point. And whaddaya know, I still graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
Is this an ideal long-term solution? Presumably not, though maybe for some people. And it wouldn’t work on a task that legitimately required a hundred hours to complete. But it was a great solution for me in that context, when the desirable end-goal of the diploma was in sight, and I just needed to keep handing in my homework long enough to get there.
But if you underestimate how long it’ll take you, you’ll risk burning yourself out by working fifteen hours a day during the last two days before the deadline.
True, but it might be worth the risk if it’s the kind of project that will expand to fill whatever time you allow for it and yet it’s not that important to you. In other words, it’s worth the pain of the two fifteen-hour days because starting it sooner means a lot more total time spent on it.
This is the solution to procrastination I finally settled on during my senior year of college, when I was deepest in its throes. My biggest hurdle was that I no longer cared about the work, and rather than try to fight the apathy, I embraced it. I said to myself, the reason I don’t want to work on this lab report is because it’s a stupid assignment and I don’t care about it, so what sense does it make trying to force myself to work on it for hours and hours? Instead, I think it’s worth, at most, 4 hours of my time, and it’s due at 1:30 on Tuesday afternoon, so I will purposefully not start it until 9:30 Tuesday morning, and—and this was the crucial step—not feel in the least bad about the fact that I haven’t started it yet up until that point. And whaddaya know, I still graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
Is this an ideal long-term solution? Presumably not, though maybe for some people. And it wouldn’t work on a task that legitimately required a hundred hours to complete. But it was a great solution for me in that context, when the desirable end-goal of the diploma was in sight, and I just needed to keep handing in my homework long enough to get there.
Or risk missing my deadline by a couple of days.
Which usually turns out not to be a big deal.
Knowing (more precisely, alieving) that missing the deadline won’t be a big deal completely stops dreeves’ mindhack from working for me.