How I deal with procrastination by walking into the resistance

I found that beating my procrastination is just leaning into the resistance.

What do I mean?

I find that procrastination (at least when I experience it) has a lot to do with trying to get away from the mixture of different uncomfortable feelings I know I will feel if I complete a task in a way that falls short of the standard I envision.

This standard I envision for myself can be set at the beginning of the task, or it could fluctuate throughout the task.

Let me try to break it down and make things a bit more understandable:

If I'm writing something I'm invested in (such as this essay), that means at least one part of my mind will anticipate I will be judged by others (and myself) as stupid (or incompetent) if my final output falls short of the standards I imposed on myself (either when I started writing or during writing).

In short, a fear about being judged by others and myself in a way that is different (and negative) to how I currently see myself.

Basically, my identify at a fundamental level gets threatened. And my mind wants to prevent this from happening.

I therefore procrastinate because I'm unwilling to tolerate potentially experiencing the feelings that come from being judged by myself and others in a way that is incompatible with how I see myself.

And because I'm unwilling, in the first place, to tolerate experiencing uncomfortable feelings that threaten my identity, my mind purposely (but perhaps not consciously) avoids (or tries to avoid) doing certain tasks because it means having to first travel through these uncomfortable feelings before I can actually complete the task.

This itself comes from expectations I have for a minimum level of quality and/or measurable performance that I expect myself to meet.

Measurable performance includes:

• Quantity: A greater amount of tangible work produced overall (eg. writing 4 pages instead of 3)
• Time: Two possibilities here. First, a reduction of time spent on something (for eg. writing a blog post in 20 minutes instead of 40 minutes). Second, an increased amount of time committed to something (eg. Two hours of focused, deep work rather than 1 hour)

I've found that walking into the resistance (rather than the default of walking away) is what dissolves the resistance step by step.

Each step into the direction of the resistance (in this case, each word I type without overthinking or self-editing my thoughts) lessens the resistance more and more.

In this sense, each step into the resistance (even though it feels like walking towards something that will expose me as stupid or incompetent) increasingly quiets the assertions (ie. the verbalized and non-verbalized things our mind communicates to us) that cause me to equivocate.

And it is this equivocation that leads to doubt and uncertainty which ultimately manifests in my behavior as procrastination.

This essay isn't meant to offer a comprehensive or definitive solution to procrastination other than to suggest walking into the resistance even though we feel feelings of doubt.

The reason is that there are too many unknown unknowns around procrastination and I've not dived into any of the scientific literature or research around it to offer any sort of definitive or comprehensive answer.

Additional notes about this essay:

• The operative word throughout this essay is MY procrastination. YOUR procrastination could be very different from how I experience and resolve mine
• I write to be "precise" about my procrastination, not "accurate". Accurate means how close I am to correctly elucidating what actually causes procrastination from a scientific/factual basis. I am instead aiming for precise, which means describing my own experience of procrastination in a way that matches as closely as possible (using the vocabulary known to me) what I experience in my mind. This means I try to describe what I experience - without regard about whether it is what actually causes procrastination from science's point of view.
• I am trying to capture all the small, interrelated moving parts of an amorphous, non-physical experience. Therefore, a lot of what I write may be quite difficult to read and come across as jumbled word salad.