Help from all of you Would be Great

[playmaker001]

It's becoming a bad habit. I am constantly procrastinating and am disorganized. I was wondering if there were any books I can read that would help me get my life in order. I just recently read Victor Frankl's book and it inspired me. I need like a five year plan or something, and am curious if there are any books that will help. Also, just some general advice on how to go about this would be great. I'm all ears to all suggestions. Thanks to all in advance.

[Alvar]

Not sure about your 5 year plan, comrade but there are a couple of books discussed on the article suggestion thread:

- Willpower by Baumeister, on willpower as a resource and how to train it;
- The power of Habits, by Duhigg on how to create, change and maintain habits.

Go have a look at the thread or check their amazon reviews. I'm still processing the first, the book teaching is influencing many of my actions and choice of habits (like meditation.) Compare it also with the "Instinct willpower" that seems to be more self-help oriented and does not come with some dubious moral sermons.

Some people have also reported enjoying "Self-discipline in 10 lessons", a short book with exercises. Didn't help me much but, as always, YMMV.

[Dawson]

The best suggestion I can give you that comes to mind is Andy Shaw's 'creating and using a bug free mind'. The content is worth its weight in gold and completely b.s. free. I guess I should mention that there's a strong emphasis on financial freedom and how to attain that within the two books as well.

[questra]

I tend to procrastinate a lot too and am working on it as well. Mark wrote really good advice about this at:

http://postmasculine.com/implementation-intention &
http://postmasculine.com/do-something

Personally I've found starting on the easiest part of whatever I'm procrastinating helps. Because momentum just builds from the first task to the next task and so on.

On a side note - getting on that 60-day no porn challenge has added a lot more focus and energy and helped with the procrastination as well.

[Jon]

I am currently reading and enjoying the power of habit. Check out Getting Things Done by David Allan.

Also, you are saying two very different things in your post.

1) procractinating and organizing - a short term problem
2) five year plan - a long term problem.

Why did you link the two?

[Guyintheback]

I'd say you might get something from "Power of Habit", too.

If your procrastination is work related: I read a book (it's in German, and I don't think there is an English version) which talks about procrastination in a school/academic context - like not preparing for an exam.
The author says that procrastination in those cases is often related to either fear of failure or fear of success.

Argument for fear of failure: If you procrastinate, you can convince yourself when you fail that you didn't try with all you got and didn't put everything on the line, so you might have succeeded if you had.

Argument for fear of success: If you procrastinate you make sure you don't achieve what you unconsciously don't want to achieve in the first place, but feel you have to because of external pressure or your own expectations.

Judging from your posts here you don't seem to have a big problem with fear, though.

[emikoala]

Seconding "Getting Things Done" which was really helpful to me.

I also really like this infographic: http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-a...5921_n.jpg

I took some of the tips from that graphic recently and it has made a noticeable difference in my productivity.

[Tim]

Here's some comments on a post I saw about procrastination recently that I thought were quite helpful:

Kahneman and Tversky, the guys who first really began to probe human cognitive errors, found in their research that there was a systematic human tendency to either under or overestimate the expected value of a reward that varied as a function of time.
I'll give you an example. Do you want a dollar today, or 10 dollars in a year? Most people will say a dollar today. How about a dollar today, or 10 dollars in a week? I would take 10 dollars in a week. But does this make sense? I mean, in the first case, I make 9 dollars fewer. Yet, in the second example, I suddenly flip my preference.
It turns out that human motivation is heavily influenced by expectations of how imminent the reward is perceived to be. People overestimate the value of the reward if the reward is imminent, and increasingly discount the value of the reward, the further away it is in time. In other words, your perceived utility of an outcome increases with temporal proximity.
So playing skyrim now is more valuable than an A on your paper until temporal proximity increases the value of that A on the paper, which is when you stay up all night finishing it. One way to try to work around it is to give yourself an immediate reward for forward thinking goal oriented behaviour. You can, for instance, create a situation where you will reward yourself with a tub of ice cream when you've put in 4 hours of work. How can you get around it without resorting to this? Have high level executive functionality. Which to some extent can be exercised by simply practicing doing things you don't want to. So, start small, do 5 minutes of dishes per day. When you have no problem keeping up this routine, add in more tasks with short term punishment but long term reward. You build your way up. However, there are limits.
It's one of the systematic biases in human cognition that this dynamic duo discovered. They were pretty much the death of the rational actor model in psychology, because we're not. Their work is the basis for neuroeconomics, which seeks to take into account that humans aren't rational, that we have systematic cognitive biases, and to reinvent the field of economics so that it has more bearing on reality, and is a reflection of how people really act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_discounting

And...

As David Allen from GTD (Getting Things Done) says, we know what we have to do in a general sense, but have not made any decisions about what do do about it. Once you capture everything you have\want to do and ask yourself two questions, you can get shit done..
What is the outcome of this (plan party, hang xmas lights, Pick up dog food etc, send an email..)
What is the next step I need to do about it (create evite, pull out lights\ladder\hangers when @home, Stop by store on way home, Open gmail...)
If the next step is less than 5 min. Do it right now while it's on your mind. Send Email, Create Evite...
If the next step is more than 5 min. Create a reminder (I use google calendar since it's on all my devices) that will pop up when you need it.
@5pm reminder stop by store for dog food
@6pm Get the lights\ladder\clips to hang lights
Now I don't have to "remember" to do any of it, I can be assured that my system will remind me to do what I need to do at the appropriate times. This leads me from not doing anything (procrastinate) to doing it all. The best part about it is that I have freed my mind about that shit so I worry less, and have more brain power to focus on what I need to be doing right now (post on reddit...)

[nonsense]

I haven't had the time to read it yet, as it's exam time for me now, but I saw this book referenced in a post on therawness and it went straight to the top of my reading list. It's the War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Maybe someone can confirm whether it's a useful read.