Procrastinators Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from chronic procrastination.

why do you procrastinate?

I'm going to attempt to split off the branch about this in the day thread by manually editing the database. It may not work. In fact, I may screw things up royally. We'll see!

oh wow - it worked!

I feel very clever. :P

iamworkingharder - CI 11:58

Good morning to you all.

I hope you all work well today and overcome your own procrastination.
It seems to me that we each proscratinate for different reasons.
I would be interested to here each person explaining how they discovered their main reasons for procrastinating.

Yesterday, I didn't do anything on website1.
I dealt with the staff here all day. May be my escuse not do deal with website1 and today back to squarre0!!!!

Thinking of it, I think I am dreading finishing my bit because the
last meeting we had with the customer: he was very very critical
of everything... It didn't occur to me till I relisten and reread
the notes and tapes about the meeting. I think I am procrastinating
to avoid critism and to have to deal again with them. I didn't realise I avoided it to avoid criticism and also I proscrastinate when I feel it is going to be hard ( time , ...)!!!! self-knowledge?

it is just making things worse as I am realising we have to recontact
them and I don't want to.
I know what I am going to do: finish the work and get someone else
to recontact them? or recontact them myself (no).

I'll get someone else to recontact them. I think that is better.
Now I feel better about the whole thing. My aim is to finish website1 and 2 for friday. contact them on friday and pass someone else to them after that. The other thing is we need to say to the salesguy to select the customers better. OK we were desperate, but I think we have to start rating customers.

- website 1
- website 2
- put in contacts for website3 and 4
- put in contacts for website5

different reasons at different times

I've found that I procrastinate for different reasons at different times. Demand resistance is a big one for me. Also, feeling bad about myself (I make this a self-fulfilling prophesy by not doing what I should be doing, then feeling even worse about myself), or simple self-indulgence.

I have come to realize and admit, recently, what I've never wanted to admit before. I'm lazy. If there's something to do that's more fun in the short term, I tend to do that. A lot of my procrastination is simple self-indulgence - the same "wanna feel good" urge that underlies any addictive behavior.

question for another board

I wish I could move your message out of the day thread and to the Questions board. It will get lost here.

I guess I could do it with cut and paste. This forum software is very limited so I can't split off a message (or branch) and create a new thread with it.

moved

I was able to edit the database directly to move this thread to the Questions board. I'm very happy to have found a way to do that.

Just a the rumblings of a hoarded mind

1) I hope you will go see the customer again. I think that is the only way to practice not taking the rejection of your products personally. Wild your product my be like your baby and you love it, your product is not you. Coding is what you do not who you are. Sometime we have to look at things differently. We have to separate who we are from what we do. Separate the product from the product maker. Separate the line of code from the lines of your soul.

2) Can we talk about the customers The sales people don't have to rate the customer as much as manage expectation of the customer. The problem as i see(please remember i am nobody) is we live in a visual world with constant visual stimuli and there is no relationship between what we see and what it takes to create what we see. To the customer
believes it is a plug and play world. I say what I want and you pick out the already done code and plug it in and voila, almost like magic. There is no respect for what it takes to create a thing.

3) The sales force- what they have to be trained in is not ranking a customer but educating them. Education manages expectations(unless of course you are dealing with morons) Expectations need to be managed graphically it can be done in other ways but is more successful in the
form of the original stimuli. The other thing that is helpful is to train sales people to from the door to graphically align customer expectation to finacial renumeration. This I find lowers customer drastically expectation like nothing else.

4) my reason I procrastinate is fear. Many times unrealistic fear. I am
currently tring to cultivate a culture of how do you say it "be afraid but do it anyway!.

anywho on to my late morning routine


HOUSERECLAIMER

why I procrastinate

Sometimes because I am bored, lonely, depressed or I feel like nobody else really cares about what I am doing.

Sometimes because I am fearful that I won't be able to do it or at least won't be able to do it "right".

Sometimes because I disagree with the tasks I am given to work on or they aren't really aligned with my own goals.

How did I discover this? Mainly by reading about why other people procrastinate and watching myself to see what situations I do it in.

oh yeah

... and sometimes because I am really just plain tired and need a break or more sleep.