Anyone else unable to take action?
I'm not really sure where to post this but as a developer who is literally at this moment procrastinating not doing the thing I should be doing, I thought this was a relevant question to ask other devs.
TLDR: How do you prevent and correct self-sabatoge from ultra-procrastination? How do you FORCE yourself to do the thing you NEED to do but don't WANT to EVER do?
I am a father, a F/T web developer, and a want-repeneur. I am continuously dreaming about building a European travel tool to help other plan their trips to Europe. Have been doing so for 20+ years. Started building Eurotripr.com YEARS ago (not 20, but a while ago) and have started/stopped that ALOT. I am really hoping my current iteration is the one I see to completion.
I "work" full time as a web developer for a remote agency. It is a great job, my employer and co-workers are awesome. I suck. I find it hard to "motivate" myself to actually do the VERY simple work until the last possible moment when I am at risk of being found out and then trying too force myself to rush to completion...usually pulling all nighters to do so. I'm 44. All nighters are something I find much more difficult to recover from than even a year or 2 ago.
I don't have ANYONE in my personal life (family /friends / colleagues) that want to hear any of this, nor think I should pursue a side hustle since I can't point to income from it.
My current dillemma is that I literally can't bring myself to do the work required for my 9-5 then i put myself so far behind then I get super stressed and feel like the failure who is letting the company down / stealing from the company.
I'm not looking for reassurance, nor a "get out jail free" pass to alleviate my guilt. I am asking
HOW DO YOU KEEP MOVING FORWARD ON THINGS THAT YOU HAVE ZERO INTEREST IN DOING BUT STILL HAVE TO DO?
It's a maturity thing and a responsibility thing. Motivation can't bring you all the way. But how do others avoid getting themselves into this trap? Why am I literally avoiding the things I need to do?
I do this with Eurotripr and other home projects recently too.
Do others find themselves avoiding the tasks you know (even sometimes WANT) to do? How do get out of this rut? I am literally sabatoging myself. Future Craig ALWAYS hates past Craig. Present Craig ALWAYS promises to break the "useless cycle" but never does.
How do you snap out of this? I mean I already logically know that I "just need to do it and stfu about it.", but this is so much easier said than done. I'm literally writing a post about it right now......wtf.
What are you doing when you're not working? I was in this loop for a long time, but found myself constantly engaging in instant gratification outside of work to ignore this constant stress of not being motivated to do the things that will genuinely cause progress in my life. Our brains compare what we're doing to what it remembers doing recently. So if it's working on a startup or scrolling on social media for 3 hours, you can guess the rest.
Anyway what I did was a bit extreme but don't regret it a bit. I (mostly) stopped doing anything more stimulating than work in my life. Unless it was genuinely good, like reading books, watching podcasts, talking to real people. All of a sudden, work was the most stimulating thing to do all morning, and I learned to enjoy it. It takes discipline to do this, and it takes weeks or even months for it to become a normal way of life. But I have never felt better.
I hope my experiences helped you at least a bit. A YouTube channel named "Better Ideas" has a lot of videos that also might interest you.
Thanks for this. I will give this a try. But my non-work time is filled with spending time with family / kids' sports/activities, and not starting/completing the house chores/projects I need to.
THis inaction isn't just around work and working on my digital projects, it seems like it's everything.
When I finally do a thing - because i am about to "get in trouble" for not doing it - I find the thing was SUPER easy and had I just done it it would have taken much less time and effort than the worry and stress I caused myself instead. Logically I know this up front, but I just have started to be unable to take that first step to "just do the thing for 15 minutes" even and am getting nothing completed...
I will find myself doing 'busy' work but still never really completing anything.
But I will try what you reccommend. Thanks!
Perhaps try writing down the project you're working on, divide it into tasks, and break off a chunk that doesn't seem overwhelming in the moment. There's no "one size fits all" strategy, but showing up to work with a clear, manageable objective has been a game changer when there's always 100 things to do.
I procrastinated my way through college and showed up to the workforce with a similar problem. Anxiety/punishment was my only way to perform, but it is really horrible for mental health and performance at work.
There's a million solutions to a million unique circumstances, so I wish you the best in this very common struggle.
I think a lot of people find themselves in this situation but aren't willing to be as frank as you have been. Probably the biggest thing holding you back is the cycle of self-loathing: hating past you creates a loop where you don't trust current you to do anything worthwhile. The loop goes like this: since you don't trust yourself with your commitments, you also don't trust that you'll achieve your goals, which means you'll never get to the rewards when those goals are completed . Your brain sees this loop and decides it's better to do whatever you want now, because you're not going to get the rewards from your goals. So you procrastinate, but you know it's a cop-out, so you feel guilty. The end result is you can't enjoy your procrastination either.
There's a great book that helped me break this cycle: The Now Habit by Neil Fiore. The book has a few different strategies for breaking procrastination habits. An easy one is putting things you like to do on your calendar without any preconditions so that you know you have committed time to them and can enjoy them guilt-free. Another is to commit to working on the dreaded thing for ONLY 45 minutes a day and then immediately stopping so that you know you won't be stuck on a task without an end in sight. The book lays out a whole framework that I found incredibly liberating.
Hopefully you find this helpful and I wish you success!
Thanks for this. I will definitely check out this book - i mean JUST BOUGHT - this book. Hope I get the same results rom it you did.
I appreciate the feedback, and can 100% agree that you nailed the 'dread loop' spot on: I never think I am going to finish something so I ALWAYS reward myself first because I know if I don't, I'm never getting the reward then feel super guilty I didn't do the thing and never enjoy the reward.
Thanks again! .... as I go back to doing the thing I've been putting off and have spent 12 hours today trying to finish knowing
Present me is certainly loathing past me right now.