202106221122 Procrastination is triggered by emotional aversions

To accomplish a task we must go through the stages of inception, planning, action, and termination. We decide to do something, plan out how to do it, do it, and decide when it's done. We sabotage our progress through these stages because of emotional aversions.¹

One strategy that's particularly effective against most of these aversions is to 202108191029 Measure what you do. By measuring your progress, and building measurements into the tasks, we can see that we are in fact making progress and accomplishing something.

Eight Aversions

• Boring — It's not intellectually stimulating enough and we're just not interested in doing it.
• Frustrating — For example, you may be using a tool that is difficult and inefficient and get frustrated with it. This could cause you to stop doing it or not start doing similar tasks in the future.
• Difficult — Challenging tasks take time and effort so we often work on simpler things first and put off the big tasks. This can be a killer of 202106221146 Leverage causing us to stay stuck on a treadmill of repeatable low-value tasks.
• Stressful — Stress is a huge emotional aversion. There are strong psycho-physiological consequences of experiencing stress. Stress typically delays our starting of the task and often is met with a less stressful reality once the task is being done.
• Ambiguous — We have to have a clear idea of what we need to do. 202106221151 Define done, 202106221152 Define success. If we don't know where we're headed it's much harder (or impossible) to start getting there. Ambiguity of decisions — along with stress, difficulty, and being unstructured — is a major driver or 202109090909 Decision paralysis.
• Unstructured — If we know where we want to go but we don't know how to get there, we're unlikely to make start, make progress, or finish our tasks.
• Unrewarding — We simply don't want to do things that won't return on our effort. This doesn't have to be external either: we might not want to read a book that isn't entertaining or enlightening.
• Meaningless — What is meaningful may vary widely across people and even day to day, but if we don't find a task meaningful we're unlikely to do it.