How do you deal with procrastination?

I don't. (Hell I've been on a reply streak here for the past few hours). I've gotten to terms with the fact that procrastination is ok and is a part of life and general organization. It's a part of your free time.

IMO talking about "procrastination" kinda misses the forest for the trees. All by itself, "wasting time" isn't particularly harmful. I mean, if you spend an hour on the shitter browsing Facebook that's bad, but if you spend that same hour with your eyes closed and call it "Meditation" you're the zenmeister. I call BS.

There's multiple things to unpack here:

1. What do you define as procrastination? The best one I believe to be "the misprioritization of leisure time over pressing matters".
2. What you wrote in your post sounds more akin to "compulsive social media consumption". A lot of people have that. (Currently guilty myself!)
3. How do these things actually affect you? Do they impact your work, your family life, your mental health, etc.

I think #1 is an organization problem. My life greatly improved organization-wise when I started using Google Calendar as the source of truth for all my timebound planning. I also use Dynalist, per a recommendation here on Tildes, as my scrapbook to keep track of various things. I've always been of the "get things done" mindset when I have a thing to do: If it's quick to do, do it now, get it over with. If not, set a deadline.

#2 is tougher. I think it's a problem when it takes up too much time; it can definitely affect your mental well-being, etc. That said there's ways to make it at the very least not completely unproductive. Here's what social media I use and how:

• Facebook is the lowest tier trash. I keep it off 99% of the time, with exceptions if there's an event organized on there or something. The people I care about, I communicate with outside of facebook; so I don't really give a crap about the stupid bickering that goes on there.
• Twitter is what you make of it. I curate my follows and try not to have too much politics stuff show up there. The only "news"/"politics" style accounts I follow are The Associated Press, a neutral outlet, and Maggie Haberman because she's cool. There's also Nate Silver and G Elliott Morris who tweet about politics quite a bit but I'm a sucker for numbers. The rest is work-related, tech, etc. All in all, my Twitter feed is addictive because it tends to be interesting, not mindless.
• Reddit has … changed. The redesign really has destroyed how I used to use it (curated mode, like Twitter). Now what I've done is I set up a huge mainstream-crap blacklist of subreddits in my /r/all filter, and I just browse /r/all headlines. Even with all the filters, Reddit is probably currently my most mindless activity and I'm using it less and less for that reason.
• Tildes and HN I browse kind of mindlessly, but the content is of high quality and doesn't actually move that much, so I'm ok with it.

What I focus on:

1. Don't just consume, contribute. Commenting and posting your own stuff I believe is important for the sole reason of not being a "passive consumer". Being active in the medium means you put more effort into it, which in turn means you spend less "free time" doing so (as free time always tends towards the lowest effort stuff). Reddit's decline is 1:1 for me with my reduced commenting activity on the site.

2. Curate curate curate. I read something a while back which I keep thinking about: Social media you consume becomes a part of yourself. You give it brainspace. The stuff you read becomes you. Make it clean. Don't abuse junk food, don't abuse junk media; same story. (Ironically, I'm better at the latter).

3. If you find yourself really in "endless scroll" mode, just go do something else. Go to sleep, watch a movie, whatever. Doesn't have to be active, just has to be something else than "mindless browsing", which I believe to be what's toxic.

So I would recommend everyone do the Coursera course Learning how to Learn which covers a bunch of important information for anyone with a human brain. Including procrastination, memorization & learning difficult concepts. It's free with registration provided you don't want a certificate (what would you do with it?).

The key points I took from it on procrastination:

• The unpleasant feeling before starting on something is inevitable and universal. If you're not habitually doing something then it will feel bad before you start & you just have to accept this.
• As such saying "I'll just wait till I feel motivated" is never going to work. You'll put the thing off until reality forces you to rush it.
• Utilizing tricks just to get started like Pomedaro can make a meaningful difference to productivity even if it feels a bit silly.
• Procrastination is fundamentally about avoidance of bad feelings via displacement activity, it's really bad if it becomes habitual.
• Habits are made up of: A trigger, a habitual behaviour & a reward. (Say: Trigger is opening a new browser window, behaviour is typing in reddit.com & reward is seeing new joke/kitten/outrage).
• Will power is a limited resource so if you're trying to force yourself to do something unpleasant over long periods this is less effective than using will power to disrupt your habitual procrastination.
• This can be done via removing the stimulus that triggers is (delete your browser?? install a reddit blocking extension?), or by using will power at the point of the trigger to remind yourself why you need to stay on track.
• It's important to break the link between trigger and reward if you want to overcome procrastination habits.

Anyway those are my notes from memory, you'll have much better luck actually doing the course.

For certain things that I'll "do later", I set up tasker profiles to launch the appropriate app or send the appropriate notification at certain times of the day (or whenever I open my phone within such and such period of time). These function both as reminders and kind of like a guilt trip into doing the thing. I have a smart-ish watch that can display notifications that I got for pretty cheap, and it's helpful as I can have all my reminders on my wrist (the watch is the Mi Band 3, if you're interested).

This is specific only to reddit and doesn't address the bigger question, but I figure it's worth mentioning anyway: there's an app called NoSurf that might help you.

Rather than being a fully-featured app with total access to the site, it is intentionally limiting. It will only show you the first page of r/all and your personal frontpage. When you click through to the comments, it will only show you the three top level ones. No more. You cannot go to specific subreddits or page through historical content. It is only ever a bare-bones, current snapshot.

It sounds very restrictive, but, to be honest, that's what's great about it. It has done wonders for cutting down my reddit usage. It gives me just enough feed to satisfy my need to stay current but doesn't allow me to dive into meaningless content for hours.

You could try using an extension like LeechBlock. It lets you set up groups of sites with restrictions like "only allow me to spend 10 minutes on these sites every 2 hours". Of course you can circumvent it by using a different browser or something similar, so it will still require some self-discipline, but it can be really useful for helping you realize how much time you're spending on the sites that are distracting you.

Have you tried something like StayFocused? Since you're technical, you can set this up with a cron job.. but the idea is the same.

HN has noprocrast in the settings. Set that regardless.

For me, I break my tasks down into the smallest chunks possible. Since you have to study, hit up the library and work there -- treating it like an office. Tether your phone so you don't have to waste any time messing with public wifi, too.

Get a Pomodoro timer for your system and stick to it. Don't use the breaks to go online, but use it to stretch, walk around, etc. Also don't stick to the standard timing if its not working for you. For me, I like 15 minutes every two or three hours --- but that's if I'm in a zone and need that time away to refocus.

Break your tasks in the smaller pieces possible, and I mean really small, more like a book subtopic than a book chapter. Start right now whatever you have to do right now, and finish one item. Use something with nice visual feedback. I like checkboxes on Emacs Org Mode, but paper will do for most people. Org tracks how long I take for each task, and at the end of the day I generate a report with the overall time spent. Feels good.

My workflow isn't quite the same as a full-time developer's, but I've found that setting aside Friday every week to do nothing (as much as possible) but clean up the tasks I've been punting is the best strategy for me. There's an enormous sense of relief in getting them completed, and I can recuperate with weekend time relatively free from anxiety.

By creating a structured time and space for the "don't wanna's", I've taken "I'll do it later" outside of the procrastination doom loop, and made an opportunity to tell myself, "It's now 'later' and I'm getting this done."

I'm constantly surprised at how much easier these tasks are in the doing, than I'd been dreading when I put them off in the first place.