Learning to Say No: +8 aka figuring out what you really want and going after that instead of sticking to your default choices for fear of rocking the boat. Every other trick is just that, a trick.
The book which really changed my outlook, not just on procrastination but on work organization and ultimately my entire life was Mark Forster’s Get Everything Done (and Still Have Time to Play). The money quote from that book is the following: “The danger is that better techniques will lead to a bigger and better overwhelm.”
Getting Things Done (partial implementation): +6 It takes a little effort and thinking to really grasp the principles behind GTD, which is about more than “having a to-do list”. What really worked for me was the “Do, Defer, Delegate or Delete” mantra, and sorting my work stream into a small number of contexts. The most important context distinction is “how much focus/energy do I have right now”.
Cripple Your Internet: −1 I tried this once to break my addiction to blitz games on KGS. It had zero effect, and may even have had the perverse effect of making me crave the games more. Ultimately, what proved effective was simply to let the addiction run its course.
Pomodoro Technique: +2 This has gotten me out of one or two spots of trouble with “better overwhelm”, I recommend it but it’s more a crisis technique. The funny story is that the technique is popularized by Francesco Cirillo who I met at an Extreme Programming conference in 2002, and was originally formulated as a team discipline rather than a personal productivity technique.
Removing trivial inconveniences: +4 This is an everyday keeper. I used to have huge difficulties dealing with postal mail, for some reason. I still don’t look forward to it, at all. But it became a lot easier when I thought about why it would always take me (literally) weeks to send off a single letter, and resolved to take steps against it when it had become a matter of financial survival (when my income started to depend on sending out invoices).
I typically took a long time because buying the envelopes was a task in one context, buying stamps a task in another, and actually labeling the damn envelope a task in yet another. This all added up to multiple occasions for akrasia. So I bought a large stock of envelopes and stamps, and an inkpad with my name and address on it, and kept all this within hand’s reach on my desk. This drastically reduced the number of context switches needed to send postal mail, consequently the time and energy. Now I’m finding it easy. (For a while I considered buying a small label printer, but it turned out I never really needed that extra reduction of inconvenience.)
Learning to Say No: +8 aka figuring out what you really want and going after that instead of sticking to your default choices for fear of rocking the boat. Every other trick is just that, a trick.
The book which really changed my outlook, not just on procrastination but on work organization and ultimately my entire life was Mark Forster’s Get Everything Done (and Still Have Time to Play). The money quote from that book is the following: “The danger is that better techniques will lead to a bigger and better overwhelm.”
Getting Things Done (partial implementation): +6 It takes a little effort and thinking to really grasp the principles behind GTD, which is about more than “having a to-do list”. What really worked for me was the “Do, Defer, Delegate or Delete” mantra, and sorting my work stream into a small number of contexts. The most important context distinction is “how much focus/energy do I have right now”.
Cripple Your Internet: −1 I tried this once to break my addiction to blitz games on KGS. It had zero effect, and may even have had the perverse effect of making me crave the games more. Ultimately, what proved effective was simply to let the addiction run its course.
Pomodoro Technique: +2 This has gotten me out of one or two spots of trouble with “better overwhelm”, I recommend it but it’s more a crisis technique. The funny story is that the technique is popularized by Francesco Cirillo who I met at an Extreme Programming conference in 2002, and was originally formulated as a team discipline rather than a personal productivity technique.
Removing trivial inconveniences: +4 This is an everyday keeper. I used to have huge difficulties dealing with postal mail, for some reason. I still don’t look forward to it, at all. But it became a lot easier when I thought about why it would always take me (literally) weeks to send off a single letter, and resolved to take steps against it when it had become a matter of financial survival (when my income started to depend on sending out invoices).
I typically took a long time because buying the envelopes was a task in one context, buying stamps a task in another, and actually labeling the damn envelope a task in yet another. This all added up to multiple occasions for akrasia. So I bought a large stock of envelopes and stamps, and an inkpad with my name and address on it, and kept all this within hand’s reach on my desk. This drastically reduced the number of context switches needed to send postal mail, consequently the time and energy. Now I’m finding it easy. (For a while I considered buying a small label printer, but it turned out I never really needed that extra reduction of inconvenience.)