Motivation vs Procrastination

Dieser Text hätte vor knapp zwei Jahren erscheinen sollen. Zeit genug hatte ich, aber das ist das Problem mit genug Zeit: Man hat sie auch noch am nächsten Tag. Und dann kommt das Leben dazwischen, der beste Freund im Krankenhaus, der Bruder wird Vater, und die besten Saugroboter googeln sich nicht von alleine.

Try writing about why the work is important, or spend some time reflecting on times in the past where you’ve felt most connected to it.

“Many people (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of "productivity debt", which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes. Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I'm falling behind, and need to

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by

Manchmal frage ich mich, ob ich ohne diese Prokrastinationsspiralen produktiver wäre. Erfolgreicher. Ausgeglichener. Oder ob gerade dieses Hadern, dieses ewige Ringen mit mir selbst, nicht auch eine Form von Qualitätskontrolle ist. Ob nicht gerade die Deadline – dieser Sonnenuntergang der Arbeitswelt – eine Art kreatives Momentum erzeugt, das

Deadlines really help human beings get things done. The only way that I've written books is because I set myself a challenging, but not impossible, schedule with the publisher. This contract of external accountability keeps the fire going through the long slog, and it forces me to make clear-cut decisions about what to include, what to leave out,

The limitations we’re trying to avoid when we engage in this self-defeating sort of procrastination frequently don’t have anything to do with how much we’ll be able to get done in the time available; usually, it’s a matter of worrying that we won’t have the talent to produce work of sufficient quality, or that others won’t respond to it as we’d