HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator | Tim Urban | TED Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator | Tim Urban | TED

96 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
5 HN users recommended this talk5 months2016–2023 score 5.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended as a funny, empathetic take on procrastination and the origin of the life calendar concept.

Tim Urban's TED talk on why people procrastinate, covering YouTube binges and Wikipedia rabbit holes. It ends with the life-calendar idea as a nudge to act before time runs out.

“absolutely legendary TedX talk that humanizes procrastination” (HN, 2023)

1 strong recommendations · 5 recommendations · 1 citations · 1 critical · Talks

8 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@akhayam May 2023 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Taxonomy of Procrastination
Nicely written. Before taxonomies and remediation, I would watch Tim Urban's absolutely legendary TedX talk that humanizes procrastination--despite all its ills--and how to empathize with procrastinators (inside and around you): [this video]
Humanizes procrastination and builds empathy for procrastinators.
@nu2ycombinator Jun 2016 Recommends
on HN thread Imagine yourself starting, not finishing
On similar topic, following video is very informational and entertaining. Especially last part the life calendar. Sometimes this life calendar motivates me procrastinate the procrastination :) [this video] .
Informative, entertaining talk ending with life calendar.
@uppsalax Jan 2021 Recommends
on HN thread The Reason We Procrastinate and How to Stop
Thank you for sharing, procrastination is something very addictive. A way to deal with it is fundamental. I'd like to share with you a TEDx Talk a professor of mine shown us along a Behavioural Psychology course: [this video]
Talk on procrastination shared from a psychology course.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@bloqs Jan 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Show HN: Life calendar – use the concept of Memento mori to embrace every week
Might be useful for some readers. I originally saw the life calendar concept in Tim Urbans excellent TED talk about procrastination a few years back. I couldnt find one on his site so I simply used the ASCII square character on Word and printed out a box for every week from birth until I am 85. I decided I wanted the weeks bigger so I deleted the already passed weeks, and changed the end date to proposed retirement at 65. It's not fun. I've lost the file but easy enough The talk [this video]
Source of the life calendar concept.
@cttet Jan 2022 Pushes back
on HN thread Procrastinatory Doom Loops
Read more
I share the same problem for a very long time and the situation gets worse as I grow up. But recently at least I have more understanding of my problem on this. The most important thing I want to share with you is that: Not most of things online are not useful to people like me, because the people are different. A lot of advices can be misleading too.( [this video] ) this one especially. Because for different people, the procrastination experience is very different. If you have the same issue as me, the core problem is not actually about planning and decision making. It is about my ability to do things. It's a long essay but I will put the essence here: To some of the people (about half the population as I estimate), there are two way to obtain knowledge, one is learning, the other is training. People tends to acquired knowledge by learning and lack of training will be highly likely to have my kind of procrastination, especially on something we are not really trained on. The common experience of me doing things is plan things, make time estimates and do it. This sounds familiar but it is extremely different experience among people. As a "learner" although I made the time estimates, I don't really know them well. But with something that I am more comfortable with, I have a special feeling about the time estimates, that will have a strong confidence on that I can finish in a certain time frame. I tend to have no decision hesitations on tasks like this. This is usually the reason that

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close