> One of the biggest things that can get you drawn into procrastinating is to go into a crazy website checking loop where you loop through Twitter, Hackernews, Reddit, BBC, etc in the hope for a new bit of information that probably has no real relevance to your life.

As someone personally familiar with this phenomenon (for example, I remember smiling at https://xkcd.com/477/ when it was posted in 2008, nearly 12 years ago), and as someone too familiar with procrastination in general, here's one insight I had recently, and an old insight:

1. Firstly, “epiphany addiction” — I encountered it on the blog of Aaron Swartz (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/anders):

> The irony, of course, is that the books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking “that’s so insightful! that changes everything,” but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you’ll start searching for another book to fill the void. Chris Macleod calls this “epiphany addiction”: “Each time they feel like they’ve stumbled on some life changing discovery, feel energized for a bit without going on to achieve any real world changes, and then return to their default […]. They always end up back at the drawing board of trying to think their way out of their problem, and it’s not long before they come up with the latest pseudo earth shattering insight.”

2. Beware of searching for one true method by which you will finally “defeat” procrastination. I remember this excitement when some trick used to work, and the urge to write a post like this (BTW, congrats on writing and finishing this post — I never got around to writing something so “finished”), having found “the answer”. But eventually some trick that used to make you productive may stop helping so much. (Because there are other unaddressed root issues, which seem to find a “workaround”: this is the "procrastination as wily adversary" metaphor, as in War of Art etc.) Ultimately, it seems we need a complementary set of approaches, both external (like Steps 1 to 3 in this blog post: changing your habits), and internal (being more aware of your feelings and drives, etc). Procrastination (for many) seems to be discomfort-avoidance, where the discomfort can be some combination of fear, anxiety, distaste, dread, uncertainty, ambiguity, conflict with (some of) one's values, etc. It helps to become more aware about the nature of your discomfort, and get to the root of it. But ultimately you can't think your way out of the procrastination problem. Things like mindfulness, talking to a therapist, good exercise,… all help; just don't pin your hopes too strongly on one of them, to the exclusion of other approaches. (I had given up blocking websites as it had stopped working for me, but after reading this post I just added a major time-waster to my /etc/hosts file, thank you.)

The goal is to get to a state where you don't feel out of control of your own mind, where you can decide to do something and just do it — but it can be a process to get there. Good luck to you, me, and all of us. “You can't think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking.”