Microdosing Out of Procrastination
In late 2021 I started thinking about a new product. It would eventually become MJS Diagram. I began planning the feature set and experimenting with concepts in early 2022. And then came February 24th…
For a while working on a new JavaScript library seemed so unimportant it was completely out of my mind. In periods of distress having routine tasks and/or a regular job helps. But when you are working for yourself and have no externally mandated deadlines, you just fall apart.
For a few months, the new product didn’t even cross my mind but then it became clear that the war won’t end soon, and we need to move forward somehow. So, I decided to gather all my willpower and start working on this new product. It didn’t go well.
Why do you hate to procrastinate?
Over the years I made peace with periods of procrastination. I think it’s an integral part of any creative endeavor. Yes, your non-technical friends may not consider programming a creative thing, but it is. No point in arguing about this.
When starting something new, it’s healthy to take your time and brood on it for a bit. I may be rationalizing one of my negative traits, but that’s what I believe. I even made a song about it (when I didn’t feel like working on something useful 😅). Having said that, procrastination can only be considered good if you eventually snap out of it and start doing things you were delaying.
Snap out of it!
The most common technique for overcoming procrastination is breaking down larger intimidating tasks into smaller manageable pieces. The smaller you can go the easier it should be to get started on something very attainable.
Usually, this worked for me. But not in the spring and summer of 2022. I guess, if I talked to a specialist, they would classify my state as some mild depression and not just your regular procrastination. But I didn’t talk to anyone and was just staring at the screen and my neatly atomized task list promising myself to start working on it first thing tomorrow.
My mod
This continued for a bit until I found a modification to the technique that finally broke the ice. I already had my near-term tasks broken down into tiny sub-tasks, but I decided that I will only do one tiny task per day and be happy about it.
For the next month I would take one task, complete it in less than an hour (sometimes even in just a few minutes) and consider my work done for the day.
I was lucky and privileged to be able to afford to work that way for a bit. To be clear, I had other routine things I had to do in parallel — those weren’t hard as they were “must do”. But this small modification to the commonly accepted technique allowed me to get back on track and release MJS Diagram in the end.
Yes, it took longer than it could have, and yes, I had to limit my initial scope for v1, but at least the ball is rolling. And it’s not like there was some external deadline or spec on the product.
Procrastination is an organic part of a creative process, and especially in solopreneurship. It’s all fine as long as you have the tools to snap out of it at some point.
Do you have any tricks to help you stop dreaming and start doing?
