Procrastination, in general, results from the task being either “meaningless” or too difficult or vague that it is hard to take the initial step. Another reason obviously is being lazy, which is not the focus of this page.

Lead to stress

Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over.

- Jeff Bezos

Procrastination will cause stress on a subconscious level. You don't even realize it. It results from ignoring the things you should do.

“Meaningless” task

In my own experience, most procrastination happens when I don’t understand the importance of working on such a task. For example, in the past, I heard and know it’s important to learn investment. But I didn’t put much effort until one of the stocks has a floating profit that takes a significant portion of the income of the year. Then I realized that it’s important to give my time and energy to it. I started investing in it to learn the investment framework and develop my own investment strategy.

Another example is that when reading books, I tend to finish reading the book that is related to my current work faster than the book seems useful in the long term. I guess the difference is whether I can relate the book to my current situation and help my current situation. I find it helpful to address my current urgent problem. I feel like it’s of much importance comparing the one that I can benefit in the long term. In general, there’s some sort of procrastination for long term tasks. I need some extra effort to keep myself in front of the desk to get to work on those tasks.

One trick I use for myself when dealing with it is that I try to write down a page about this task, and try to find the reasons why I need to do it even though I might not like it, map it forward so I know I can benefit by doing it. Once I find it really important, I will commit to it.

In the past, when the manager gave me a task, I procrastinated about it because I didn't know why it’s important. But still I had to get the job done. But only after a sufficiently long period of time, did I realize I did a really good job and realized the importance of the work by hindsight. The lesson I learned here is when I try to delegate some of the tasks or have others to help to work on something, I provide very detailed reasoning why it’s important and why the other should do it. Sometimes I even feel like I get annoyed by myself, because even if people might know the reasoning, I still explain it with details. I just want to convey the details clearly so they don’t procrastinate or even are excited to work on it.

Now, I try to find the meaning of the task, if not, I still try to work on it, just in case I have blind spot and lack experience so that I don’t understand the importance.

Difficult or vague task

Too difficult or vague of a task is another major reason for procrastination. Least effort seems like a law of nature. Sometimes you don’t even know where to start, or don’t know how much effort is needed to get it done, and don’t even know if the result is good or bad.

Treat it like puzzle

There’s some clue when you try to solve a puzzle. The difficult task is alike. There’s always something you can do. For example, you can always start Google or find related resources about it. Once you collect some sort of resource, you might connect the dots and solve the initial step of the task. Or maybe a simple inquiry to a coworker or friend for some resources or suggestions by sending out an email or slack message. Once you have the initial move, now you stand on top of it, you can see things further. Do your Googling and research, most of the problems are solved unless you’re a Ph.D. or research scientist working on something new. In that field, that's a similar but different approach which is not the topic of this page.

Take the initial step

Reduce stress. “I find as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call or send off the first email message or whatever it is that we’re going to do, start to address that situation even if it’s not solved. The mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it. “ ¹

Get help from others or the subconscious. Since you have to do it, it's better to take some action on it.

Do your research to collect resources
Connect all the dots together
Do what other things you can do, e.g.
- When writing a topic, you can write down the high-level outline and some resource and reference
- For a presentation, you can try to create a presentation, putting all the bullet points in each slide.

Let the subconscious do the work

Once you collect some resources and write the outline or initial idea, and you think there’s much you can do here, then just switch your focus to other things. Let the subconscious help to figure it out.

“Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, ‘creativity comes out of your subconscious.” Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you’re aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer. For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.” ²

Challenge accepted

In graduate school, I had to take 8000 level courses, 4000 level for undergraduate, to demonstrate whatever graduate student level of problem-solving or research skills. One of the courses in Computer Vision. I know it's one of the most difficult classes in the CS department from many of my classmates. I took that class just for challenging myself, this is another story I might get to on a separate page. Here I want to deal with difficult tasks. It’s using OpenCV and assumes the students in the class are proficient in C++. I don’t know any programming language if you don’t count Matlab as a programming language, let alone C++. I had to learn C++ by myself and at the same time work on the project. It’s super hard for me. I didn’t even know if I could do it. But there’s nothing I can do except to learn it starting from printing “Hello World”. I had to understand each line code from the example online, so I had to print out the result line by line, input, and output in a method. I haven’t touched on the majority of work that is to understand all the related algorithms. Again, read carefully about the algorithm description, understand thoroughly about each line of pseudo-code, implemented it and failed many times, struggled some many times.

But in the end, I survived. I didn’t fail the class. And I never met any challenge like that difficult from then.

What to do

Find the reason why you are procrastinating, either task is meaningless or too difficult.
- If you cannot find the meaning of the task but you have to, try to force yourself to write down three bullet points why the task you don’t want to do, to find some sort of meaning.
Take the initial step.

Footnotes

Jeff Bezos about Stress ↩
You and Your Research by Richard Hamming ↩