How I Use “Grill With Docs” to Understand Why I Procrastinate

#devjournal #mentalhealth #productivity

When we talk about procrastination, I think it is not always about laziness. Sometimes, it is about fear.

The problem is, often we do not really know what we are afraid of. It can be so many things, right? Because of that, we sometimes need someone to help us see the pattern behind our procrastination.

Recently, I came across a skill from Matt Pocock called Grill With Docs. From my understanding, this skill will ask you a lot of questions. It will interview you relentlessly to understand further what you actually want, what you need to do, and what is still unclear.

Then it made me think, what if I use this same idea to understand why I procrastinate?

Sometimes, I know that I am procrastinating, but I do not fully understand the reason. So instead of asking AI to complete the task for me, I asked the AI to keep questioning me until we could find the actual root cause.

I changed the skill slightly from “Grill With Docs” into something like Root Cause Procrastination. The goal is to understand why I keep avoiding a certain task.

One example is writing a document.

Sometimes, I take a long time to start writing. At first, I thought the problem was that I did not know what to write. But after the AI kept asking me questions, I realised that the underlying issue was that I was not confident enough to write it.

The conversation could look something like this:

AI: Why are you avoiding writing the document?
Me: I am not sure what I should write.
AI: Why does that stop you from starting?
Me: Because I am afraid that my ideas will not sound clear.
AI: Does the first draft need to be clear immediately?
Me: Not really. I can improve it after I write it.

The thing I was most afraid of was that my ideas would sound unclear and that writing the document would be difficult.

The AI can then give some reasoning about why I should not care too much about that fear. For example, the first draft does not need to be perfect. Sometimes, the ideas only become clearer after we start writing them down.

For me, this method really works because it can pinpoint the reason why I procrastinate.

Instead of immediately calling myself lazy, I can ask more questions and understand what I am actually afraid of.