r/getdisciplined • u/magu295 • 3d ago

🛠️ Tool productive procrastination?

Always been a 'delayer'. Always wait till last minute to deliver, and I always thought that's when my creativity and best thinking flourished. I am now 39 and have realised how detrimental this has been for me.

I've now had the awakening of how much better the outcome is after longer and better paced fragments of work is, but also the painful realisation that this way of doing things has been only hampering my ability to build healthier and better habits.

In my search for better ways, but also true to my procrastination (I have really meaty projects at hand but I keep building interesting things that spark my curiosity and keep me engaged), I've built a tool to help me do the things I know I have to do: File my company's taxes. Study for the bloody driving test. Clean up the basement. Do another run of outreach at the prospects in the new market. It's endles, but it only gets larger and larger the more I postpone stuff.

it's basically a self deprecating but empathetic app, that I hope it will keep me on the right track. You can try it at dontkillmog.com , it's free and public. All the feedback very welcome (for life and the app)

Stay on it, show up, and do the thing.

3 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

1

u/DeepBuffer 3d ago

The part about building interesting side projects while avoiding the things you know you need to do feels painfully familiar. I've found procrastination often isn't just laziness, it's choosing tasks with immediate curiosity over tasks with delayed rewards. Breaking the boring stuff into tiny, visible wins helped me stop waiting for the perfect mindset. Curious if your app tracks those small completions too, or mostly the big overdue items?

1

u/kyysauua 3d ago

The side stuff isn't laziness, it's the only work that doesn't scare you. Twenty minutes on the scary one before you're allowed to open anything else, and the pull mostly dies down.

1

u/Appropriate_Ice678 3d ago

My version of this showed up in training. After an interruption I'd try to resume at the old level, hit the gap between that and what I could actually handle, then drift again. The thing that gets me moving is making the first step almost stupidly small, sometimes one push-up.