Hey friends,

Did you hear the joke about procrastination?

...nevermind, I'll tell you later...

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

I've been thinking this week about procrastination. It's a dirty word. We all know it, we all hate it. We've come to associate it with another dirty word: laziness.

I think that procrastination is not laziness, but rather an inability to deal with how something makes us feel. Whether it's fear of failure, the perceived effort that something will take, or something else entirely—the thing you're procrastinating on makes you FEEL a way you don't like. And we're VERY good at avoiding negative feelings. (Well, at least if you're like me...)

So what do we do when our hummingbird brains encounter stuff that makes us feel a way we don't like?

The lie of procrastination is that it will be way worse than it actually is. The mental barrier is bigger than the actual task.

One thing that (usually) works for me is to take Thing A, the thing I'm procrastinating on, and then also grab something I love working on, Thing B, something that activates my freak energy. I set a timer for 20 minutes and tell myself, "Work on Thing A for 20 minutes and if it's truly, truly terrible, after 20 minutes reward yourself with Thing B".

Often, once I get started I realize that Thing A really isn't as bad as I thought. It's not as hard, not as boring, and my negative feelings were based on incorrect assumptions. Now I have MOMENTUM, and even though I've knowingly tricked myself, the effort to keep going is much easier... and finishing Thing A feels GOOD. You can scrape it off your shoulders and now you're not carrying it around anymore.

This is just one way to deal, but I'm curious, how do you deal with procrastination? I'd love to hear how others tackle this problem!

Interesting Web Bits 🍿

• Emil Kowalsky built a really nice React drawer component
• Evan You (creator of Vue and Vite) announced VoidZero: a next generation toolchain for JavaScript. Vite feels like it's EVERYWHERE, so it'll be interesting to watch this develop.
• A delightful comic about "Remind Me Later"... (I'd say more but I don't want to spoil any of it).
• The winners of the 2024 js13kGames have been announced. 🎮