Good and Bad Procrastination

dtolton writes "Paul Graham has written an interesting article on Procrastination. He presents three different types of procrastination and one type of procrastination is even good! He also suggests that some types of "getting things done" are actually weak forms of procrastination. The only downside to this article is now you'll have to look at your procrastination with an analytical eye too!" Perhaps next year's Christmas shopping can benefit from the writeup?

Comments

procrastinating worked for me...

[yagu]

I used to work for someone who was impossibly manic about things he wanted to do, which always meant things he asked "us" to do. I considered him visionary, but sometimes it was just too much.

My methodology was to mentally file away any requests (and there were many), and take no action other than to sketch mentally what the work would entail. The indicator whether or not it was real work I ever need do was if he came back to me in the next few days or so to see what progress I'd made for "task X".

Fortunately I was able to intuitively cull things that looked important from those that were simply "what ifs", and it was mostly a synergistic relationship -- I always had plenty to do from his bounty of ideas, but was able to be more productive by exercising a "procrastination policy".

Re:procrastinating worked for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Manics can also be procrastinators. I did RTFA from Digg yesterday and while I found it interesting I thought it showed a misunderstanding of procrasination. One thing it is not is lazyness, often extrememly active people procrastinate. Another thing it is not is disorganisation, or lack of coherent thought as you describe above. Sometimes people with fine strategic minds are also terrible procrastinators. We all know the pop psychology of the 'completer/finisher' too, the ability to go for the kill in the final stages of a venture. Many who have this ability to deliver on target are still victims of procrastination.

So what is it? Well, notice I use the word 'victim'. You don't choose to procrastinate. Subtle but true, you have to choose not to Procrastination is either a fear of success or failure, actually the outcome is unimportant. Or better still a fear of change and progress. Perhaps with a programming problem you are secretly worrying where the next contract will come from once you finish this one, which you could so easily do if you just let yourself. In relationships it is the fear that it might "actually work", thus robbing one of the circumstances that excuse or explain a neurosis. This subtle and often unwilling holding back can be explained by the fact the mind enjoys struggle, we are most alive during struggle. Myself I've spotted procrastination because I am enjoying a difficult problem so much I don't want to commit to solving it and 'trivialising' my efforts. What is undone is full of potential, yet what is done and dusted is consigned to the ordinary.

A coder who considers 10 different solutions for weeks on end is not procrastinating, not if, as is usually the case with intelligent circumspect thinkers, they engage the problem with full gusto once they've decided upon the preferred line of attack. Rather, a procrastinator would be someone who, confident in their vision, still finds a reason to hold back. TFA describes nothing more than prioritisation and tasking. Procrastination is a subtle and devilish thing to defeat, often requiring you to look deep behind the facade of your behaviour to discover why you're really doing it.
The cure, imho, is often to embrace a more carefree attitude.

A better piece on the topic

[wahgnube]

This is a far more eloquent and humorous piece on the topic.

Re:A better piece on the topic

[darkov]

I have to agree with John Perry, it's a somewhat valid strategy for dealing with procrastination. But I use a different structure. You might call his hierarchical procrastination, where tasks at the bottom tend to get done more often, while those at the top get tend not to get done.

You would probably call my system cyclical procrastination. The key is to be doing more than one thing at a time. To get started you pick the thing that is least anxiety producing and tell yourself that you can leave it at any time with the proviso that you have to pick up something else, with maybe a short stint reading Slashdot or a newspaper online in between. You then do a little of the task, essentially until you get to a point where something is difficult or you generally want to avoid it more than the second least anxiety producing task. So then you move to that one, since it has become more relaxing to do.

One of the reasons why this works is because after a long enough period, you have had time to think about the harder task and work out how to do it easier or legitimately avoid it, so you can eventually return to it. You also have to find fairly mundane bits of difficult tasks that then let you get drawn further into the task.

If getting anything done at all is highly anxiety producing then the best thing is to change very quickly between many tasks, then it won't feel like you're doing anything at all, when in actuality you are.

Re:Has to be said...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you're working in a group or someone else is otherwise depending on you?

Hate to break the (mostly very good) analogy, but it isn't always true.

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

The article links to Hamming's "You and Your Research". The submitter clearly fails for not including it in the writeup, since it's much more interesting.

Hamming's article mentions that the people w/ the open doors get more done then the people w/ the closed doors, yet isn't Graham's point that interruptions prevent serious work? Doesn't that disprove Graham's claim?

Time management...

[Ruff_ilb]

That's all it seems he's talking about.
TFA mentions:

The reason it pays to put off even those errands is that real work needs two things errands don't: big chunks of time, and the right mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few days to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time when you finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done during those few days, you will be net more productive.
In fact, it may not be a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. There may be types of work that can only be done in long, uninterrupted stretches, when inspiration hits, rather than dutifully in scheduled little slices. Empirically it seems to be so. When I think of the people I know who've done great things, I don't imagine them dutifully crossing items off to-do lists. I imagine them sneaking off to work on some new idea.

He's saying that an approach that does tasks when they should be done that results in a net productivity increase is procrastination, specifically type-C procrastination.
Really though, it just seems like effective time manangement. The true intent of the article seems to lie in DEFINING time management - that is, not "Crossing items off of a list" but rather doing things when they should be done, or "sneaking off to work on some new idea"

Re:Has to be said...

[hackstraw]

Yeah, but it still feels good.

I've become more of a procrastinator over the years. For one, I see less of things being important, because they never are. Health issues are something I'm pretty aggressive about, but I put off stuff all the time. I didn't buy a computer beyond a P1 until recently because they were not good enough. I regret my haste, because then Apple came out with the 4 core PowerMac which should be more adequate than the cheaper iMac G5 that I opted for.

Also, if I put stuff off (since nothing is that important in the first place) I've found that many problems fix themselves or just go away, or something more "important" comes up.

Another thing to take into account is basic psychology. No organism really does anything before the time of reinforcement. People don't go to the bus stop much before the bus arrives. Most people don't do all of their Christmas shopping much before Chistmas. Most people don't file their taxes before April 15th. There are other variables though. I file my taxes right after Jan 1st when I get all of my documents together. I can always use the money, and I'd rather have the cash than the government keep it interest free until April. If I wasn't getting anything back, I'd wait until April 15th like most people.

So everybody, go ahead and fuck yourself. Its OK.

Re:Don't bother reading the article...

[c_forq]

I don't know where you are, but here in America (where most Slashdot staff and users are) today is a federal holiday. Federal holidays mean slow news, since almost everything is shut down (nobody wants to work Christmas day). In my town, there is one Chinese restaurant and a few gas stations open, EVERYTHING else is shut down.

Re:Not so fast

[BoomerSooner]

Coolant flush doesn't necessarily stop a car from blowing a head gasket. A decent mechanic can resurface your head (if that's not available then you can get a replacement from a junk yard) and place a new gasket for a lot less than a new car. I've had it happen on 2 different cars and my mechanic said I have a knack for picking poorly engineered cars. He said both my cars that had this problem was enevitable since almost everyone he knows to own one of these models (first run on new car) had the same problem around the same mileage.

Sometimes you just get unlucky. BTW on my more recent blown head gasket I got a new (used) header and better engineered gasket set and have gone an additional 60k miles without any problems! My break even analysis for if it was worth it was at 24k miles, also I did it when gas was at $1.25!!! Lol, I guess GWBush did help me one way, break even came sooner! POS '95 Plymouth Neon is my daily travel car (140-210 miles a day I drive, love being self employed). My other was a 64 1/2 Mustang. Hopefully I can get a Shelby Cobra this summer!!! 450 Horses!!!

See Also: Another Paul

[dr.badass]

Paul Graham's thoughts on procrastination overlap well with Paul Ford's thoughts on distractions, Followup/Distraction, and Are there "good" distractions?.

Graham:
I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.

Ford:
The most productive times in my life are the ones where I'm just doing my own thing, focused, and trying to solve some problem that I find interesting-when I'm narrowly distracted.

Same idea, different angle.

Re:Don't bother reading the article...

[Headcase88]

"you could work on...something more important. That...I'd argue, is good procrastination."

Working on something more important is a good thing? I'm sure this guy is going to face a lot of detractors that say that working on something less important is better. I hate it when essays have filler like that.

A wise man...

[DaZZl3R]

I wise man once said: "Never do today what you can't put off 'til tomorrow." Half the time the things that you are procrastinating are not really that important. Hence you would have wasted time getting them done when you could have done something else.

While we are on the topic

[kaos_]

Checkout Time Management for System Administrators

Steven Covey?

[nanopolitan]

I don't know who came up with this idea first, but I read it in Covey's
'First things first'. He suggests classifying tasks into four quadrants formed by (urgent, not urgent) and (important, not important), and asks you to get yourself more and more into the (important, not urgent) quadrant. If this requires you to say 'no' to a whole bunch of other things, why, it's all the better! To me, what Paul Graham says is quite similar "say no to other junk, make time for important stuff -- stuff that will give you the thrill of fulfillment not immediately, not tomorrow, but many days (weeks, months) later."

Now, if only I can figure out my life's mission ...

I liked the article

[ilfak]

While there are many controversial points in the article, I liked the following paragraph a lot:

If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way.

I can only confirm that these methods really work since I used them during the development of IDA Pro. You start with something small and grow it. It takes time, patience, energy, but the result is more than simple sum of small parts - the whole is bigger than its elements.

Now I'm working on decompilation (more generally binary program analysis) and hope that the same methods will work...

Procrastination is efficient

[Dr. Mu]

I've always considered procrastination to be a virtue. If you start too soon on a project/job/chore, you'll likely spend way too much time finishing it. Waiting until the last minute forces you to strip the dreaded work to its essentials and eliminate the fluff. Plus, you minimize the opportunity for time-sucking avoidance behavior (which the author incorrectly labels as "type B procrastination").

Re:I have a boss like that.

[Jeremi]

I don't regard him as "visionary". I regard him as "A.D.D". Whatever the latest thing that catches his eye has to be assigned ... then forgotten. But a new shiney idea has to be assigned

How to handle people like that: write each task you are planning to do on a separate piece of paper. Stack the papers on your desk in the order that you plan to do them, with the next task on top and the last task on the bottom. When ADD-man comes in to tell you about the big new thing, tell him to write it down on a slip of paper and insert it into the proper position on the stack. Tell him that when you finish your current task, you will take the next slip of paper from the top of the stack and do what it says, and repeat until the stack is empty.

This way he can come with as many bright ideas as he wants without interrupting your work, and he will be forced to prioritize the new tasks relative to the existing tasks, instead of expecting you to somehow magically complete them all first.