Saturday, September 12, 2015

On procrastination, again.

Procrastination is when you avoid doing something important that you have to. Your brain doesn't like new or hard work. It likes things pleasant, fun, easy to do. It likes things it did many times before that it knows well.

Technically, it just tries to save energy: new things tend to take more brain time, because the brain has to learn how to do them. That's why it tries to "trick" you into not doing that important thing. And instead of getting ready to your next exam or tomorrow's meeting at work, you go read some interesting article on a blog or watch again an episode of your beloved series, surf the facebook or instagram (or, another blog on how to fight procrastination :) ).

As a result, in the beginning you feel yourself better - because you do what you like, not what you have to - but that's just for a short time. After some time, your brain (the same brain that made you procrastinate, remember?) now "whispers" into you the feeling of guilt, makes you unhappy you didn't do what you have to, that you're lazy. Now you end up with a not finished task and with a movie (blog post) that doesn't make you happy.

That sounds bad, but here are the good news - there's a way to make yourself into doing that important (but "unpleasant") task. And the trick is - simply start doing it.

It turns out (some scientists found out, if you want to learn more, you can search for it) shortly after starting doing the work, you forget about that fear and reluctance and do what's needed much better. You get a working mood and have a better concentration on the work, too. You get into the process. After some time of doing your work, you forget that feeling of fear and discomfort and work normally. So, the only thing left is to just start doing it.

One of the ways that may help you get into that working mood is by dividing your work time into periods, interleaving them with breaks. The length of a period is rather personal, I try to change it time to time, some times using 21 minute work periods, some times 44. You work for 21 minutes, than have short break, than again.

This is what this page about:




The post seems a bit cumbersome and not complete, but you have to forgive me - I'm neither professional psychologist nor professional personal trainer. Procrastination is one of my main problems, probably, thus I started writing the app - first of all to help myself do better and do more. If you google on the topic, you can find a lot of information and tools. I learned something from a course on Coursera called "Learning how to learn": https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn. It is a great  help to anyone  who wants to improve his learning, working skills. And it is free and easy to follow, take it - won't regret.

13 comments:

  1. Where is a tutorial for this app? The quick add actions are not intuitive. The plus sign does nothing!

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    Replies
    1. Hi, the plus sign issue has been fixed in the recent update. And we have no tutorials - our time is only enough to write the program and give some tips here. The main idea is shown in the Help within the app.

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    2. I agree. It would be super helpful to have a tutorial as the "help" section still leaves me baffled.

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    3. Andtek,

      I agree with people who want to use it effectively but dont know where to.get started. I am one ofthem too. I would suggest that you let people that use thus tool write the help / usage section and you need to moderate to make sure that it is accurate. Or even that can be taken over by someone else later.

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    4. Andtek,

      I agree with people who want to use it effectively but dont know where to.get started. I am one ofthem too. I would suggest that you let people that use thus tool write the help / usage section and you need to moderate to make sure that it is accurate. Or even that can be taken over by someone else later.

      Delete
  2. Thanks for fixes with navigation and fields editing in android 2.3x, thats great!

    But now there is one issue with Pomodoro (in android 2.3.6).
    On main page Pomodoro Section doesn't show, look at: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0_YnwVXHntIT2ZOZDJ1bksxeUE .
    You can duplicate reference to "Fignt Procrastination" page in menu?
    Thanks.

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    Replies
    1. Hi, thank you! Can you give your screen size and resolution? Or, just the phone model?

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  3. My small device (from family Samsung Galaxy Y Duos, such as GT-S6102) have: screen-size 3.14", resolution 320x240. Oldie, but works!

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  4. Could you please let me know if there is a way to set Recurrence to (a) 1st Sunday of each month? action example: clean fish tank once a month on a weekend. It seems that now I can only set it for once a month on a specific date, which doesn't work because that date will not fall on a weekend next month, (b) 5 days a week? action example: run 5 days per week. I don't want to set it for daily or for specific dates because it may rain for 2 days, but I don't know in advance what days, so having the app track number of days per week an action was performed would be helpful.
    Thank you.

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  5. Can you add the feature of airplane mode during work?

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  6. Hi,
    It will be extremely helpful if you will add a Google voice typing.
    I spend about three hours a day driving during my workday, a lot of things that i think about and i want to write'em but it's so unsafe while driving. Thanks

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  7. Hi it will be nice if i can turn the Alarm on vibrate (from germany)

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  8. As a person that suffers from procrastination a lot, this has helped me considerably! Keep up the good work because this app is great

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