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Two Harvard Professors Reveal Why We Procrastinate
In a normal situation, you might choose to eat a cookie rather than eat vegetables. What if the cookie wasn’t there to begin with? It is much easier to make the right choice if you’re surrounded by better choices. Remove the distractions from your environment and create a space with better choice architecture. - James Clear
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20% of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. For them, procrastination is a lifestyle, albeit a maladaptive one.
It cuts across all domains of their lives...
There may be more of it in the U.S. than in other countries because we are so nice; we don't call people on their excuses ("my grandmother died last week") even when we don't believe them.
Procrastinators are not different in their ability to estimate time, although they are more optimistic than others.
Telling someone who procrastinates to buy a weekly planner is like telling someone with chronic depression to just cheer up.
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Key Ideas
Procrastination is fundamentally an emotional reaction to what you have to do. The more aversive a task is to you, the more you’ll resist it, and the more likely you are to procrastinate.
When you notice yourself procrastinating, use your procrastination as a trigger to examine a task’s characteristics and think about what you should change.
By breaking down exactly which attributes an aversive task has (boring, frustrating, difficult, meaningless, ambiguous, unstructured), you can take those qualities and turn them around to make the task more appealing to you.
... people have when they procrastinate:
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