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

frist post

[alx5000]

frist post!

Re:/. is once again a full day behind reddit and d

[gregmac]

When digg first came out, it was great .. news was always posted days ahead of /. (and probably still is), and it had lots of stuff I probably wouldn't otherwise have looked at (eg, tech stuff not on /.). However, as time went on, I found two problems .. constantly, stories that just weren't interesting would get pushed to the top (eg, any stories about digg itself always got a huge number of diggs), lots of viral content (even if it was a year or two old .. but apparently 'new' to the digg crowd) would get pushed to the top, etc. (There is a bunch of other stories that would always seem to get up there too, I can't remember now).

The other problem was it was just news overload .. so much stuff to read every day, between digg and /., you could honestly spend several hours EVERY DAY just reading news. So I basically gave up on digg, and just go to /. - despite its problems - for my news fix. I've heard of reddit but never visited, just because it came out after the point I decided to stick to one source for my tech news headlines.

So like other people are saying, don't assume everyone reads all three of those sites, it's fine to post interesting content. Just ignore it if you saw it somewhere else before, or stick to just one.