I struggled with procrastination for over a decade. Recently, that’s started to change for the first time. This is a (very personal) account of what changed for me and what I’ve learned since. It’s the post I wish I could send to my younger self.

Before I even hit my teens, I started avoiding my schoolwork. I was especially good at avoiding tasks when using a screen, where distractions were easy to find. Once the panic of an approaching deadline set in, I’d do hasty work at the last minute, usually finishing just under the wire. This pattern continued through college and all the way into the workforce.

I didn’t understand why I was procrastinating. Most of the time, my tasks came along with classes or jobs I’d chosen voluntarily, because I liked them. But I felt it was impossible to even start most of the time, until the mounting pressure of a deadline made it impossible not to.

I didn’t like to tell people about it. I got good grades, and I was always passionate about what I spent my time doing—what possible reason could I have to delay and struggle? I used to joke that one day, the consequences of my actions would catch up to me, and then everyone would know, and I’d learn my lesson. As if a failing grade or getting fired would flip a switch and teach me how to be productive.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning a lesson, just not one I should have been learning. Every time I wasted hours online and then did my work in a haze of panic and guilt, I reinforced it.

The Procrastinator’s Lesson: Doing work feels bad, so I should avoid spending time on it as much as possible.

The Procrastinator’s Lesson is a vicious cycle. If I assume work will feel bad, I’ll avoid doing it until the last minute. Then I must do it quickly while I’m very stressed. That is unpleasant. So I prove myself right: doing work feels bad, and I should avoid it.

I had a few tools that I could use to get things done. The sheer panic of imminent deadlines nearly always did the job; I sometimes manufactured extra deadlines to keep myself on track. Working with someone else, or even just being watched, kept me on-task consistently. And—this one took me a bit longer to pick up on—if I could avoid screens entirely for a given task and sit down at a table with nothing but a piece of paper, I could often force myself through it.

Most of these strategies just reinforced the Procrastinator’s Lesson. They were ways to weaponize the shame and guilt I needed to get things done.

As my work responsibilities increased, so did my stress; at the same time, I was expected to be more productive. I used my tools when I could, but they couldn’t get me through a whole workday. I even converted my hybrid job to in-person so there would be more people around to scare me into working, but it wasn’t enough.

Eventually, I was seriously considering switching careers to one where I could avoid working alone, or at least avoid screens. I thought I’d tried everything and that I simply couldn’t be changed, that working would always be a struggle against myself.

Around this time, I confessed the whole truth to a senior coworker. To my surprise, he didn’t think I was screwed. He told me he thought he could help. And it turned out that hearing “I think this is a problem we can solve” from someone I know to be a good problem solver gave me hope. For the first time in a long time, I was optimistic about an issue I’d struggled fruitlessly with for over a decade.

That’s when things started to change for the better.

We decided I should adopt an experimental mindset: try things out, see what their effect was, and talk about it. During this time, I tried a lot of things that didn’t help at all. I also found some things that did help! None of them were silver bullets, but they helped me chip away at the problem. Here are some of the new tools I found.

The first thing that made a dent was keeping daily should-did lists. They were a little different from typical to-do lists. Each day had three fresh lists for the early morning, late morning, and afternoon. The list of things I’d actually done was a separate column; no checking things off. The should-did lists gave me a tiny dose of deadline panic three times a day. They also helped me keep track of what I was doing, what I had said I would do, and what I’d actually spent my time on.

I also discovered some smaller things. It’s easier for me to get into a productive frame of mind if I’m drinking a nice tea and listening to a playlist I like. Asking for help faster and avoiding particularly time-sucky tasks helped me save a lot of time.

My biggest breakthrough during this period was using step lists for tasks. Part of what made tasks feel impossible to me was not knowing where to start—a kind of blank page anxiety that applied even to massive legacy codebases. The uncertainty was enough to send me fleeing to distractions. Beginning was less daunting, it turned out, if I made a list of steps.

The steps I used broke things down so far that it felt a little silly. Steps could look like “find the file where X is used” or “make a decision on Y and write it down.” Silly as it was, these steps made starting a task feel possible. When the first step of a task was to make a list of steps, I was more likely to start thinking about it than run from the problem.

My new strategies made working easier, but they weren’t quite enough. I was still reaching compulsively for distractions in the middle of tasks whenever I felt uncertain or bored; that kept me feeling behind and stressed out. But I wasn’t losing as much time to procrastination anymore. The joy of that success, combined with my new strategies to make work easier, started to break down the association between work and stress.

When the holiday season rolled around, I took a full two weeks off work. By this point, I was well aware that screens were a big part of the problem. Inspired by (but not fully committed to) Unplug by Richard Simon, I decided I’d spend my break looking at screens as little as possible.

This involved some stuff that seemed a little weird. I leaned a lot on my very patient partner who was willing to digitally navigate us around unfamiliar cities and look up restaurant opening hours for me. When anyone turned on the TV as background noise, I would move to another room to avoid being distracted by it (although I made exceptions for family movie nights). There were a few days I didn’t turn my phone on until dinnertime or later, and when I did need to use it, I held it at arms’ length to remind myself to stick to what was strictly necessary. I managed to fill most of my spare time with books and teaching myself to knit.

This was surprisingly effective. After a week or so, I found it much easier to resist the desire to constantly check my phone and the impulse to open a new tab and find something distracting. I became okay with being bored.

I was a little scared to return to working on a screen. My first day back at work, I decided not to check any notifications or messages in my first hour of the day: no phone, no Slack, no email. Nothing burned down, and I had a really productive hour. After two weeks of digital minimalism, it was much easier to avoid distracting myself.

In my months of experimentation, I’d figured out how to make productivity feel possible. Now, with the ability to resist distracting myself, I had the tools I needed to get things done. And suddenly I wasn’t procrastinating anymore.

It was a little confusing at first. Just like that, this thing that had plagued me for years… stopped? I wasn’t sure if it was going to stick—I’d had brief “epiphanies” before that never lasted—but this time really did seem different.

As I spent more time focused on work, I gradually re-taught myself that I went into this field because I find software development fun. During this time, I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work, which helped me find words to identify the type of pleasant focus I’d been missing out on. It really was nice to spend time considering a problem deeply without distractions. In fact, the very thing I’d been running from felt a lot nicer than reading the news or social media ever had.

I’d managed to unlearn the Procrastinator’s Lesson and teach myself a new lesson:

The Enthusiast’s Lesson: Doing interesting work is engaging and fun.

With that understanding, it was a lot easier to get things done. My new mindset didn’t magically solve all my problems or make me hyperproductive. But it got rid of some very large obstacles, which at least gave me more time to think about the smaller ones.

It turns out that productivity is a skill like any other. I now have the tools to keep improving that skill at a steady pace.

These days, I’m still experimenting. I’ve started weaning myself off of step lists; they aren’t as important now I’ve got more practice starting tasks. I’m trying to figure out how to replicate my high early-morning productivity at some other times of day. I’m experimenting with building in breaks so I don’t exhaust myself when I spend more time focusing than ever before. And I’m still trying to find a daily balance of necessary shallow work and important deep work.

What’s really important is that I’m not miserable anymore. That’s in part because I’m not stressed about being behind, but also because I spend the day doing something I enjoy. I no longer associate my work with shame and guilt; instead, I associate it with satisfaction and fulfillment.

I’ve escaped the vicious cycle and entered a virtuous cycle. The more time I spend working and enjoying my work, the better I get at doing it, and the more I ultimately enjoy it. I’ve finally unlearned the Procrastinator’s Lesson.