How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model
It’s clearly not the case for everyone, but I struggled for an extended period of time with a few things in my personal and professional life:<p>1. Remarkable focus in topics which interest me and remarkable lack of focus in topics which do not.<p>2. Leaving “must do” tasks in areas of little interest until the very last moment, resulting in a predictable lack of excellence in execution.<p>3. Periodic deep dives into topics which go beyond the aforementioned “areas of interest”.<p>4. Driven by a motor in meetings: itching to get up and walk around as we talk, feeling more comfortable with any kind of low level motor action happening concurrently to my thinking and speaking. Also led to me leaping to the end of a person’s sentence and others experiencing me as highly impatient &#x2F; excitable at times.<p>5. The need to have a TV show or other media playing as I fall asleep. Ideally something I’ve seen before and which is enjoyable but not too engrossing. Almost like one of the cores in my processor couldn’t be idle — it actually made it hard to sleep. (Conversely I always fell asleep watching films with my partner.)<p>6. Various odd elements of disorganisation — never at work but eg. losing my keys and documents.<p>If you’re reading this and hearing elements of your own experience, and in particular if this is familiar to you from childhood (“Why can’t you apply yourself to X like you do Y?!”) then I would encourage you to speak to a serious psychiatrist about the possibility that you have ADHD.<p>Not everyone has it and I accept that many are probably misdiagnosed with it. My experience of clicking every link on HN with hacks for focusing and not procrastinating was actually a very sad one and I didn’t realise how profoundly it had affected me until I sat in the office of a psychiatrist and he rattled off a range of specific experiences he wagered I had had during my life.<p>It’s been a remarkable process for me of feeling emotional relief as well as receiving medication which improves my life.<p>Again if you’re looking for a productivity hack you do not need to consider that you have any sort of chemical disregulation, but I did not consider the possibility of a medical condition and found myself often in rabbit holes of productivity hacks feeling deeply unproductive.