I have roughly two kinds of procrastination, too—reading whatever when I know I might have to attend to my kid at any moment (lots of time, yet not very pleasant due to the anticipation) and reading whatever when I could be working (also lots of time, but then I feel like I really have a choice.) The “oh, yeah, work” moment does occur once in a while (say, when I am called to prepare a set of chemicals for a demonstration or to wash up after one), but however long it takes, it passes at last…
On the other hand, when I tutor someone it feels wonderful, like work and leisure all at once; I forget that I want to read anything.
At the moments when you are happy with your life, the desire to escape from reality reduces dramatically. So I guess a high-level approach might be to optimize your life to be more happy, even if it seems like it would reduce your productivity, because you may get the side effect of procrastinating less.
This article was about the low-level approach, when your life already kinda sucks and you cannot fix it at the moment, only try to reduce the damage.
In your case, the obvious question seems to be: “Can you arrange things so you would tutor more, and do whatever is the other thing less? And perhaps hire some babysitter to help with the kid.” Alternatively, could you somehow optimize your environment (or more precisely, your kid’s environment) so that less of your attention is needed?
(My high-level approach is to change my frustrating job, and I am already doing some interviews. Also, some other frustrating things will go away in the future; unfortunately the changes take time that I can’t speed up, so it’s approximately two more months.)
At the moments when you are happy with your life, the desire to escape from reality reduces dramatically. So I guess a high-level approach might be to optimize your life to be more happy, even if it seems like it would reduce your productivity, because you may get the side effect of procrastinating less.
I think most of my own procrastination has always had more to do with the desire to escape, and feeling bad about low expectancy/value of the work at hand, rather than the procrastinating activity itself being highly entertaining.
Being productive can feel terrible because it is a constant reminder of not just what you want to achieve, but also of the fact that you have not achieved it, depressing stuff really.
Oh, it’s alright, really, about the kid, and I get helped a lot. And the job used to feel like a godsend when I had just left a PhD program. It is just—I’m thinking of procrastinating darning or mending, or listening to podcasts—when I feel more secure about having needles with me or not immediately hearing any change, I’ll try that.
I have roughly two kinds of procrastination, too—reading whatever when I know I might have to attend to my kid at any moment (lots of time, yet not very pleasant due to the anticipation) and reading whatever when I could be working (also lots of time, but then I feel like I really have a choice.) The “oh, yeah, work” moment does occur once in a while (say, when I am called to prepare a set of chemicals for a demonstration or to wash up after one), but however long it takes, it passes at last…
On the other hand, when I tutor someone it feels wonderful, like work and leisure all at once; I forget that I want to read anything.
At the moments when you are happy with your life, the desire to escape from reality reduces dramatically. So I guess a high-level approach might be to optimize your life to be more happy, even if it seems like it would reduce your productivity, because you may get the side effect of procrastinating less.
This article was about the low-level approach, when your life already kinda sucks and you cannot fix it at the moment, only try to reduce the damage.
In your case, the obvious question seems to be: “Can you arrange things so you would tutor more, and do whatever is the other thing less? And perhaps hire some babysitter to help with the kid.” Alternatively, could you somehow optimize your environment (or more precisely, your kid’s environment) so that less of your attention is needed?
(My high-level approach is to change my frustrating job, and I am already doing some interviews. Also, some other frustrating things will go away in the future; unfortunately the changes take time that I can’t speed up, so it’s approximately two more months.)
I think most of my own procrastination has always had more to do with the desire to escape, and feeling bad about low expectancy/value of the work at hand, rather than the procrastinating activity itself being highly entertaining.
Being productive can feel terrible because it is a constant reminder of not just what you want to achieve, but also of the fact that you have not achieved it, depressing stuff really.
Oh, it’s alright, really, about the kid, and I get helped a lot. And the job used to feel like a godsend when I had just left a PhD program. It is just—I’m thinking of procrastinating darning or mending, or listening to podcasts—when I feel more secure about having needles with me or not immediately hearing any change, I’ll try that.