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I Tried Every Procrastination Hack. Nothing Worked Until I Understood My Type

My to-do list wasn’t the enemy but misdiagnosing why I couldn’t start

12 min readMay 24, 2025

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Procrastination is best done on a beach.

The cursor blinked. Again. Pinching a tiny black slice into the white canvas of my Word document. That relentless, mocking little bastard was at it for the last two hours. And my room was startin to smell faintly of desperation (never mind the distracting stains on my coffee mug). Another huge paper for my dissertation was due, like, yesterday, and it was breathing down my neck, all hot and bothered. And me? I was writing. Yeah, right. More like I was deep-diving into the internet’s best cat videos. Anything but the thing. My gut was doing that familiar washing machine churn of guilt, anxiety, and a particularly potent strain of self-loathing. You know the feeling. You get it.

But this wasn’t a one-off back then. This was my life. My own personal Groundhog Day of delay. It always started with this cold dread, then a manic flurry of anything but the actual work, cleverly disguised as essential preparation. Finally, it would be the mad, panic-fuelled scramble, pouring caffeine down my throat like it was a cure for incompetence, just to slap something together with more anxiety than I wanted.

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Lennart Nacke
Lennart Nacke

Written by Lennart Nacke

🧠 Tenured brain, weekly drops. Maximum citations but sanity questionable. The prof your prof follows for research, UX & AI ideas. University Research Chair.