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."

Comments

Re:It's inefficient to start early

[bigman2003]

I manage a small programming team, and one of my jobs is to set up deadlines. The nature of where we work means that we don't really HAVE deadlines at all (gubment) but we need to make progress.

So, I impose deadlines on my team. Usually they are fairly aggressive, but we always meet them. Two days before the last deadline, my team was all working frantically trying to get things done. One of the guys asked, "Why the hell did you make the deadline so early? Why not just push it out two more months?"

My answer was the same as always: "If I had pushed this deadline out two months, we'd be going through this same exact crunch time, just two months later."

It's just a fact, if we have six months to do a job, we'll finish in exactly six months. If we're given 12 months to do the same job, we'll finish in exactly 12 months.

Re:It's inefficient to start early

[syousef]

Man am I glad you're not my manager. If you don't want your team to burn out you should be minimising those crunch times not resigning yourself to them being inevitable. How do you do that? Lots of intermediate deadlines. Then your team can't wait for the end and just crunch to get it in on time.

The way you're going you'll end up with a burnt out team that thinks you're a tyrant. ...and it gets modded up as insightful here on /. *shakes head*

Field notes from the field in question

[iabervon]

I went to MIT, so I can explain a bit about the culture in which this research was done.

First of all, there's always something you're supposed to be doing. If you have three assignments for a class due at the end of term, you'll definitely have more important things to get done all term, and then you won't have enough time at the end of term to do the assignments. Even if you didn't do anything fun all term, you'll have procrastinated by getting more of each of the assignments for other classes done than you would have had you worked on the end-of-term assignment earlier. It's really hard to give up on an assignment that's due tomorrow because you haven't started on the one due in two months. It's not just that you have a more immediate reward if you procrastinate the stuff that's not due tomorrow; the reward is calculated and reported to you in advance in percentage points, and you definitely lose those points if you don't go after them immediately.

Also, assignments are designed for maximizing the standard deviation, which gives the most detail for grading. This is achieved by having the average be 50. This, in turn, means that, if you're doing fine, you could do twice as much work and still not get everything done. And you could check over your answers if you really wanted to, and take even more effort. So it's not like you're ever done with all your upcoming assignments and have time to work on the long-range ones.

Also, the main risk isn't doing badly in classes or failing them, it's going insane. If you pass any of your classes (or even if you don't, really), you're better of than if you have to take a term off. So doing something fun and relaxing can actually be quite important. I heard claims that sleeping at night sometimes helps, too, but I didn't try that. Relaxing when you need to is always on a shorter deadline than the end of the term, so it takes precedence.

And, of course, every class has something or other due at the end of the term (or a final just after classes end). You're in trouble if you've got three things due for this class at the same time as every other class has some project or exam.

So the optimal strategy is probably to choose deadlines around when your other classes have big assignments and exams, and stick to those deadlines, but tell the professor you'll have everything in at the end of term (but then forget that you didn't specify your deadlines).

The thing I'd find most interesting is how many students chose to have the deadlines at the end of term, but then turned in the first assignment in the first half of the term.

Re:Anxiety

[astrashe]

In the book "Getting Things Done", David Allen talks about this, and he claims his system addresses it. His system is fairly elaborate, and starting to use it is a big committment that I haven't made, so I can't verify that it works. What he says sounds plausible, though.

Allen's theory is that stress comes from "open loops" -- things you have to keep in your head, and worry about. As you get further and further in the hole, the open loops accumulate, and your stress level goes up.

Allen's answer is to put everything into a system, and get it ouf of your head. You don't have to remember anything, because it's all written down and recorded.

The idea is that you don't have to worry about it because you can trust the system. Once you record it, you can be confident that it will get taken care of, because the system is robust, and you know that it works. So at any given time, you just think about what's on your plate at that moment, and tune other stuff out.

Re:Big problem for me

[swillden]

Another good thing about the to-do list is that you get a sense of satisfaction after every small task is completed. So even though the big project isn't done you still get some mental reward, which encourages you to do more.

For me, this is often counterproductive. When I check a task off of the list it makes me feel that I deserve to reward myself for having finished a task, so it makes me want to slack off for a bit. That usually leads to doing something like taking a quick glance at slashdot, where an interesting discussion will catch my attention and I'll spend two hours reading and posting, or playing a quick little game... which I find I don't want to stop playing, or putting a few minutes into a personal project... which turns into a couple of hours, or... you get the idea.

Honestly, I've decided that only two things work well for me: intense interest or intense pressure. If I'm really interested in a task, because it involves learning or doing something cool, I have a built-in motivation to do it and there's no problem. If the task isn't intrinsically interesting, though, the only thing that motivates me is pressure. If I'm not being pressured externally (which is what really works the best, even though it's unpleasant), I have to try to create my own pressure, via arbitrary deadlines, which I then have to convince myself are real.

I explain this to whoever I'm working for on a given project, and ask them to apply the pressure I need, or, alternatively, give me tasks I think are cool enough that I want to do them. It usually works out pretty well for everyone.