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Beating Procrastination with Self-Imposed Deadlines
castironwok writes "Procrastination attracts us because of hyperbolic time discounting: the immediate (guilty) rewards are disproportionally more compelling than the greater delayed cost. Procrastination is the reward itself. An MIT professor found that when he allowed his students to give themselves their own homework deadlines, they would artificially restrict themselves to counter procrastination. However, they did not set deadlines for optimal effectiveness. I am personally a huge procrastinator and it's always a pull between rational logic (giving yourself the most time by choosing end dates as the deadline), and your past experience saying you will put it off so force yourself to start early."
Of course it's also inefficient to start late, but one should not try to start earlier than necessary. The task will occupy your mind longer and especially if you don't like to do the work, it will stress you longer. The task does not become more difficult if you put it off until you need to do it. It just gets longer, because you will allow interruptions (there's still time, so...).
I find that deadlines I set for myself don't help - unless it's a real deadline with definite consequences beyond my own limitations, I tend to ignore it. And even if it is a 'real' deadline, at the last moment I'll weigh the consequences of not having the job done against Yet Another All-Nighter... and sleep generally wins - or another game. Or movie. Or anything else...
... what else am I going to do at work all day?
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I've had a lot of issues with procrastination and anxiety, and recently I realized that procrastination is actually due to anxiety-you feel anxious about a task, so you choose to ignore it for the time being. Thus, doing things that help with anxiety often help with procrastination. I think exercise is the best answer for this, but I imagine things like meditation, yoga, etc. help as well.
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It's a big problem for me, and one that I've only had limited success in dealing with. So I don't want to claim to have found the answer or anything.
But I think the key is to formalize the process of deciding what to do *now*. Another way of saying that is that procrastination is a problem with deciding what to do in the moment -- that if you procrastinate, you have to recognize that your ability to do that is broken.
The easiest way to manage this is with a to-do list -- you just go through the things on your list, and try not to think about what else you could be doing, or what you should be doing. Just work the list.
The more robust way is to try to embrace the "Getting Things Done" system (it's described in a book of the same name). The book describes a system that's good enough to keep track of pretty much everything you have going on, and an algorithm that will let you pop off tasks and do them effectively. If you do the system, presumably (it's a big jump, and I haven't made it), you won't drop the ball on tasks, and you'll always know what to do right now.
I find that when properly applied, procrastination results in increased efficiency.
By delaying my work significantly (but not to the point where I'll have to reduce my delivered quality) I find that I do not wind up coding stuff against docs and specs that will be changed.
I learned this in college. We'd bust our butts trying to code something early, and the next class the prof would alter the spec because the problem contained unexpected (by him) challenges that he had not intended. If you waited a bit, the prof would code up his solution as an answer key to diff ours against, and he'd hit the challenges and recast the problem.
So by putting off stuff to some extent, I wind up not coding stuff that I'll just wind up throwing out anyway.
I've had a lot of issues with procrastination and anxiety, and recently I realized that procrastination is actually due to anxiety-you feel anxious about a task, so you choose to ignore it for the time being. Thus, doing things that help with anxiety often help with procrastination. I think exercise is the best answer for this, but I imagine things like meditation, yoga, etc. help as well.
Another reason people procrastinate is perfectionism. Some put off doing or finishing something because they want it to be perfect but knowing whatever it is won't be perfect they delay doing it. I was kind of disappointed the article didn't mention this at all. If you know why you procrastinate you may be able to work on it easier than if you don't know why.
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That's what works for me. Need to implement a large piece of code and don't know where to start? Pick the easiest part of the project, and implement that. Repeat. Before you know it, you're all done. This works particularly well with an object-oriented language like C++, since there are usually lots of little methods you can work on.
Another thing I find that helps: At the end of the day, try to leave something trivial for the start of the next day. That way, if you're not a morning person, you have something to warm up with until the coffee kicks in.
The above also works for writing. Tell yourself that you're going to write a 200-page novel, and you'll probably never get started. Instead, think of how a story might begin, and just write a couple pages. The next day, you'll think about what might happen next, and you add another page or two.
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If you look at the "Procedure" section of page 220 of the pdf of the actual paper (because I know all of you of course have now read the paper) it talks about the apparent incentives for the subjects involved in the study by stating "In fact, the external incentives for the students in the free-choice section encouraged submission of all three papers on the last possible day."
In the paragraph prior the writer states "second, students had to announce the [self-chosen] deadlines for submission prior to the second lecture;"
and then on the next page "in fact, only 12 student (27%) chose to submit all three papers on the last day of class."
The study was conducted at MIT. The paper never acknowledges the role peer pressure and the desire to be perceived as a non-procrastinator by the rest of the class might play in an individual's choice of paper submission date, particularly if that "announcement" was public, and instead focuses on how the submission deadlines would best be gamed; Yet peer pressure and performance pressure at MIT is an acknowledged problem very much part of the culture of MIT.
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