Procrastination

This Will Make You a More Productive Procrastinator
Now, the title sounds a little bit ironic, namely the part about “Doing other stuff”, but I am dead serious.

It has been shown by research that just thinking about an activity you don’t want to do raises the activity in the insular cortex, a brain region involved in pain.

Now, in order to use procrastination in our advantage, we can try to set up a less “painful” task that is still productive. Instead of procrastinating and doing nothing productive, now we at least do something productive.

A very simple example of mine revolves around writing and reading. I like to write and read, but I absolutely dread to start such a process. Writing, however, seems to be more “dreadful” than reading, probably because it requires a lot more thinking and energy. So what do I do? I allow myself to procrastinate by doing something else: reading. Maybe not exactly what I have planned, but it’s still productive.

Again to clarify, starting a process usually is the most “painful” part. After a minute or so, the pain usually goes away."What are some things giving you the feeling of procrastination? And how can you use that to your advantage to do something else that’s also productive?"

Related

 * 1) "procrastination" is related to "DDoS"
 * 2) Putting off work on a major project by attending instead to various trivial matters can likewise be seen as “the hastening of subgoal completion”—which is another way of saying that procrastinators are acting (optimally!) to reduce as quickly as possible the number of outstanding tasks on their minds. It’s not that they have a bad strategy for getting things done; they have a great strategy for the wrong metric.