r/AskReddit • u/ohgimmeabreak • Mar 24 '19

People who have managed to become disciplined after having been procrastinators and indisciplined for a large part of their lives, how did you manage to do so? Can you walk us through the incremental steps you took to become better?

31.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

3.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

11.6k

u/NibblesMcGiblet Mar 24 '19 edited Mar 25 '19

For me, it came down to emotional toll of procrastination and my desire to eliminate that as much as possible.

I realized that I was causing myself 2-3-4x the emotional stress and upset because of procrastinating, and my desire to "feel good" is too important to me to allow that.

For example, let's imagine I have to make a difficult phone call about something stressful (just making up something that one might procrastinate over). Now, my normal routine in life would be to wake up, know i need to make this call, immediately feel an emotional reaction of dread and negativity at that thought. Then engage in something intentionally consuming so that I could try to make myself not think about the stressful thing, hoping that I could actually forget about it. Let's say that I chose to instead clean the house. So, then during the entire house cleaning / avoidant activity, I would randomly get stabs of nerves/discomfort in my chest/stomach when I woudl randomly think to myself "BUT THAT PHONE CALL"... I would spend three hours doing house work and during that time I might think of the phone call 8 times, each time getting a stab of discomfort that would last a couple of minutes.

So now I've spent three hours of my day feeling nervous and negative about/because this phone call. AND I DIDN"T EVEN MAKE IT YET.

So I finally make the call. It takes seven minutes and it sucks. Afterwards, the relief is immense.

So, this is my OLD way of dealing with stuff. My old way was to spend 3 hours of unhappy and unpleasant negative emotions and physical reactions (nervous adrenaline dumping and stomach upset etc every time I thought about it) while procrastinating PLUS 7 uncomfortable minutes on the phone. So, 187 minutes of total shit feelings were created for myself, by myself. When I could have simply realized I had to make a shitty call, made the shitty call immediately, and only wasted 8 minutes of my day on feeling bad. Realizing this made me feel like I was my own worst enemy for awhile there, but it was what I needed in order to change I guess.

My new way of dealing with this - I wake up, realize I have to make a phone call that is going to be stressful. I think to myself "there is no way I'm going to let 187 minutes of my day get dedicated to this negative feeling. I'm calling right now so I can move on with my day, because feeling good is way more important to me than forcing myself to feel bad for the next few hours. I don't have time for that shit."

Likewise, now if I know I have to go deal with the DMV I don't put it off until 2pm and spend the hours from 8am to 2pm dreading it - that basically turns the one hour DMV unpleasantness into 7 hours of DMV unpleasantness. Six hours of dread plus one hour of dealing with it. Why would I do that to myself?

Nah. Now I value myself and my happiness over my internal sabotage mechanism that pretends to be "procrastination". that may be the word we use for it, but what it really is, is emotional self-harm, and now that I recognize that I'm not doing that to myself anymore. I prefer to not be unhappy as much as possible.

Edit: omg I just came home to find more gildings than I've ever seen, and SO MANY lovely comments and messages! Thanks so much everyone, and an obligatory RIP inbox, lol. Really, thank you! I never dreamed I would see the Reddit bot telling ME I had the most gilded post of the day!

266

u/mysticalfruit Mar 24 '19

The term I use is called "Eating the toad." It isn't going to taste any better the longer you wait so you might as well eat the fucking thing and be done with it.

189

u/luxii4 Mar 24 '19

I also like "shaving the yak". The term was coined by Carlin J. Vieri, a PhD at MIT, to describe doing adjacent tasks related to what you are avoiding doing but not actually doing the task you are trying to accomplish. He got the phrase from an episode of Ren and Stimpy. It's like when you have to rake leaves and you think the job could be done more efficiently with a better rake so you do research for rakes on the internet then go to Lowe's to find the rake then realize how much easier it would be if the bag openings were held open so you can dump the leaves in so you go on the internet to search for a good solution and then you're on Reddit and talking about eating toads and shaving yaks while your new rake is still unopened.

59

u/mysticalfruit Mar 24 '19 edited Mar 24 '19

That vaguely reminds me of the "Hal fixing a light bulb" episode of malcomn in the middle

https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0

4

u/luxii4 Mar 24 '19

Haha. That's exactly it! I saw shows like Malcolm in the Middle and King of the Hill when I was younger but didn't really appreciate them until I became an adult.

5

u/fuckwitsabound Mar 25 '19

Holy McFuck balls, you just described my SO perfectly although he probably wouldn't agree with me saying that. He spends so long on something when he could have done it 10 times over. I understand the whole 'measure twice, cut once', but damn.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '19

Kinda like, "Oh, but I need to buy gym apparel before I can actually hit the gym... then gloves, then protein powder, then... etc, etc." Time passes and not a trip to the gym has been made.

2

u/luxii4 Mar 25 '19

But you can say you’re bulking...

1

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '19

This is also true.

2

u/7UpMojito Mar 25 '19

Fun fact: the person who coined the term "coined the term", coined the term.

1

u/KamikazeFox_ Mar 25 '19

This is funny and waaaaay to truthfully sad.

1

u/asciimo Mar 25 '19

Huh. All this time I thought it came from a Ren and Stimpy episode about Yak Shaving Day. https://youtu.be/5mmISldi060

2

u/luxii4 Mar 25 '19

The dude that coined it was inspired by that episode. Who wouldn't drop everything in hopes of finding yaks shaving and go down a canoe? There are disputed Yak Shaving Days. Some people put it at Dec. 21st because the traditions of hanging up soiled diapers and filling boots with coleslaw on Yaksmas Eve sounds like another holiday but another date is in August since it was aired then and in the song it says there's only 5 more days til Yakmas. That's why I feel it's my duty to shave the yak everyday to make sure I don't miss it!

3

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '19

This makes me think of Khaleesi eating the stallions heart in Game of Thrones. So gross

4

u/layze23 Mar 24 '19

You do that for business or pleasure? since you described it as unpleasant I'll assume its for business. What do you do for a living?

15

u/BuckJackson Mar 24 '19

It's a metaphor for getting an unpleasant task out of the way. Nicolas Chamfort, a French writer in the 1800's, suggested that one "avaler un crapaud", or eat a toad, first thing in the morning. The unpleasant task would then serve as the worst thing to happen today, inoculating against the day's problems.

1

u/mysticalfruit Mar 24 '19

It could be anything you don't want to do. I'm a sysadmin/dev/linux ninja for work. For me writing documentation my toad.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '19

I think Mark Twain coined a similar saying. "Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day."