Reddit mentions of Transforming Your Self: Becoming Who You Want to Be

So as the author of that article: I do hold that I've had reduced procrastination, and that a major part of it seems like it can be traced to meditation and mindfulness practices. That said, at least so far meditation alone hasn't felt like it could fix everything, though it's possible that it would be even more transformative if I was further along the path (I'm around TMI's Stage Five at the moment).

According to procrastination researcher Piers Steel, your motivation for some task is affected positively by your expectancy (how much you believe in your ability to pull it off) and the task's value (how rewarding the task is to do, and what you expect to get out of it). On the other hand, your motivation is reduced by the delay (how distant in time the rewards for doing the task are) and your impulsiveness (which covers both your personal impulsiveness and situational factors that might distract you). [See also](http://lesswrong.com/lw/9wr/my_algorithm_for_beating_procrastination/I feel that meditation has helped me reduce procrastination by decreasing impulsiveness and making my subconscious more aware of what the true value of doing different tasks is.

But my suspicion is that for people who have big problems with procrastination (including some of my past selves), their main problem is with some kind of internal conflict, with different parts of their mind having various deep emotional needs and conflicting ways of achieving them; which may manifest as conflicting evaluations of expectancy and value. TMI says that eventually, meditation will lead to a unification of mind where different parts of your mind become united behind a single goal, and others on this forum may comment on that. But my experience as a Stage 5-meditator is that this seems to be a pretty long process, and I'm not there yet. When it comes to procrastination reduction, what's been more useful for me has been to apply techniques that address internal conflicts more directly.

I described this in my recent post on self-concepts; apparently a big part of what was going on was that I had an unstable self-esteem and kept feeling bad about myself, and a part of my mind wanted to prove myself by being productive and accumulating positive evidence about myself. At the same time, the exact nature of my insecurity was such that no amount of additional evidence that I accumulated was going to fix it; the problem was with some particularly negative memories and ideas that I had about myself, which had to be dealt with first.

In terms of Steel's research, you might describe this as a part of my mind thinking that productivity would have a high value (since it would fix this gaping emotional hole in my mind), whereas another part kept sabotaging my efforts to be productive by assigning the plan of "feel better about yourself by being productive" a low expectancy (as it had correctly previously noticed that this wasn't useful for actually making myself feel better).

It's possible that sufficient practice with meditation could eventually have fixed this, by healing those emotional wounds through a different route; but the techniques that I used fixed the biggest problem much faster.

On the other hand, I do still stick with what I wrote in my original article as well: meditation and mindfulness has also continued to produce major gains in reducing procrastination. Notice that the article you were referring to was written several weeks after I had fixed my self-concept: mindfulness has made it much faster to really take advantage of all the changes that have been happening on their own after I fixed that emotional wound in my mind. And on the other hand as well, I believe that the improved introspective ability that comes from meditation, made it easier for me to be able to apply those techniques which did heal the emotional wound. Both meditation and the techniques for changing self-concepts, have worked better for me together than I expect either would have worked alone.

I described the self-concept tools I used a bit in my self-concept post, and they're described in much more detail in this book (yes I know, the cover doesn't exactly inspire confidence in its contents). You may also want to look at other techniques which aim at fixing internal conflicts directly, such as Gendlin's Focusing, aversion factoring, and Core Transformation. (Necessary caveat: while several of these techniques have been developed by e.g. psychotherapists, there hasn't been very much - and in several cases no -
rigorous scientific research on validating their usefulness. I'm suggesting them because they have been useful to me and other people that I know, but you should give such a recommendation the same skepticism as any other anecdotal evidence. I can't make any promises of whether they will work for you, or whether the cause of your procrastination even is what I think it might be.)

Good luck!

I recommend checking out this article and seeing if anything resonates with you:

http://steveandreas.com/Articles/building.html

If you do find some resonance there, I recommend the whole book, here:

https://smile.amazon.com/Transforming-Your-Self-Becoming-Want-ebook/dp/B009Y5HS7K?sa-no-redirect=1