Comment by uncircle

Thank you for your message!

You are absolutely right, and I have actually tried lots of different things and abandoned just as many methods after only a few days. But what pushed me to write this article is that this time, it was different. After several months, this method is still holding up.

> The snark was from my personal experience that serial procrastinators ride a particular high when they change their methods, especially if they spend money for something that hopefully solves their issues. It never lasts long, we return to baseline quite fast. This is why there is tons of posts about "here's how I solved my procrastination issue" when they've only used the supposed panacea for a couple of days.

This reflects my experience as well. Whether it's getting a special little "Getting Things Done" notebook/app or getting the accessories involved in this post, before long my brain has "helpfully" optimized them back out of my life and I'm back at square one.

> serial procrastinators ride a particular high when they change their methods, especially if they spend money... It never lasts long, we return to baseline quite fast

That's probably why the author has beginner tasks on the whiteboard like making a bed, washing the dishes, etc. It's hard to imagine having such tasks throughout one's entire life while struggling with procrastination.

4-8 weeks is about the range that a new task system works for me. Probably not coincidentally I had As in most of my classes around the midterms, but graduated with a C average (a semester was 17 weeks at my university).

If you’re procrastinating, but then find a method that works and go on to use it for several years, you didn’t have a procrastination issue, you just didn’t know how to get started.

Chronic procrastinators will inevitably procrastinate no matter what method they find.

> What's I find more interesting, is methods that have worked for someone for years.

From 2020 I use a three column worksheet (Libreoffice in Debian): one row per day. One thin column for the date, the second for pending tasks, the third for the "done" ones. Theoretically I just copy-paste between the "pendings" to the "done", but I also add notes as the day progress, so it is also a kind of personal diary. At the end of the day tasks not achieved get moved to some rows below, and new ones are added as needed. The spreadsheet is configured to start automatically on session login, so I can't forget to see my daily assignment. Not perfect, but (mostly) works for me.

Whiteboards have been my main strategy too. And a little while ago I ran across this: https://community.frame.work/t/whiteboard-input-module/58985 and bought the same stickers and pens and it works much better than I expected - the pens write super-durably for dry-erase and light bumping doesn't erase them at all. I have weeks-old reminders on there that are almost new looking.

For day to day stuff I just use a more normal whiteboard that I do my best to erase at the end of the day, and migrate longer term stuff to some other location. I like it better than a regimented "always empty" system since reasonable leakage from one day to the next is pretty common for me.