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You can NOT and should NOT stop procrastinating

Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard on July 04, 2023

My career-related content is now open-source on GitHub. We are such in a hurry to "beat" procrastination that we don't realize it's our smart brai...
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fyodorio profile image
Fyodor

OMG this post is so freaky it’s beautiful πŸ‘ What happened there JM? πŸ˜… I’m a bit depressed these days, I also desperately need this kind of weed πŸ€

But I agree with the bottom line, procrastination is the sign you avoid something that freezes your ability to act. Finding what exactly is that and eliminating it is the key.

But it’s so gd hard…

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Hey glad you like it!

What happened is that I'm a lazy dev and for a while I tried too hard to follow the injonctions of others until I realized that's exactly how I should be. See here

Now that I'm fine with being myself, it's not that hard anymore.

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cubiclesocial

Procrastination has saved my bacon numerous times. As a recent example, an answer on StackOverflow that I needed did not exist two months ago. Had I not procrastinated on that very topic for several months, I would have been stuck. Someone else's answer saved me a ton of hair pulling and stress and was only made possible by procrastinating!

I wasn't idle though. I was just busy working on other useful things.

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EyeAmTheOne

I like this, treating procrastination as a tool to help you rather than an enemy is something I never would have thought of. Brilliant.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Think of procrastination like fever.
You have fever and it's unconvenient.
But fever is helpful symptom that something isn't right.
Fever is not the real issue, it's a symptom.
Procrastianation is not a real issue you should destroy, it's a symptom.

The real question:

In this particular case for this particular task, my procrastination is symptom of what underlying issue?

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Hassan Suhaib

Thank you for such an amazing post!

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San D.

Congrats! I just L O V E D this article! Very very cool!

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Muito obrigado San :)

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Daniel Rendox • Edited

Yep, we're underrating that monkey. It helps to direct your course in the right direction if listen to it attentively.

There is another good TED talk on this topic β€” The surprising habits of original thinkers | Adam Grant . It turns out that people somewhere in the middle between pre-crastinators and procrastinators benefit the most.

However, I think Oscar should implement the first and the most straightforward solution. Just set a small goal to become able to do some number of push-ups/pull-ups or ideally complete each exercise in the workout, etc. As long as this goal is achieved, move to the next one. In my experience, going with the flow without a concrete goal doesn't work. I actually wrote about this yesterday:

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

What if the reason I procrastinate is that I don't like exercising?
I have tried and find going to the gym boring.
Being "disciplined" in doing always the same thing is just not for me.
Instead I do sports that I actually like.