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

Hey!

[SeanMon]

I was gonna post this yesterday, but...

Nevermind.

It's inefficient to start early

[JackHoffman]

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...).

Re:It's inefficient to start early

[wrook]

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.

Perhaps this is the case with your team, but I have to say that I have not observed this on the programming teams I work in. In fact, I have *often* heard managers say this. But actually, it seems not to be the case.

I have observed two things. If the imposed deadline is shorter than the time actually needed to do the job, then the job will appear to be finished (i.e., people will say they are done), but there will be many things missing. Later, people will say "Oh, we were all under a tight deadline, so I guess we must have forgotten to do that".

More interestingly, if the deadline is longer than the time actually needed to do the job, I have observed that the job is done early. But (and this is an important but), all of the functionality is actually there.

To perform this experiment for yourself, I suggest that you take several small problems (small bugs are good for this). Try to find problems that will take from 1/2 a day to a day. Assign deadlines ranging from 2 hours to 3 days. Record the amount of time it actually takes to do the work. Then do code reviews of all the work.

I think you will find the experiment very instructive.

I have found that when there is always work in the queue, there is no point to setting deadlines. Instead it is better merely to estimate the work (so that you can make predictions). It is also counter productive to measure the amount of time each task takes (otherwise people will cut corners in order to meet some kind of unreasonable expectation, sometimes self imposed). Instead, just keep a rolling average of how close your estimates are to reality (i.e., we've gone 10 days and we've finished 11 days of estimated work, therefore we are going at 1.1x our estimated rate). This gives you predictability without the negative side effects of measuring too closely. IMPORTANT: Don't complain or cheer if the work rate is different than the estimated rate. This is to be expected. The information is only to allow you to communicate progress with management.

In every case that I have implemented this (and obviously this isn't my idea -- it's standard practice in many shops), productivity, quality and predictability have all improved. It's worth a try (But don't take my word for it -- do the test...)

I live one calendar week ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

Forces me into finishing up early. I can't watch TV or listen to the radio and sometimes it is a little odd like when I showed up for last week's Christmas celebrations, but I'm making the deadlines.

P.S. Happy New Year!

Real deadlines...

[S. Traaken]

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...

But if I don't procrastinate...

[Alicat1194]

... what else am I going to do at work all day?

Anxiety

[Cr4wford]

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.

Put best...

[paintswithcolour]

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they go by."

--Douglas Adams

Procrastination makes me more efficient

[jridley]

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.

Re:Procrastination makes me more efficient

[orangepeel]

And now, having long since left Yale, you spend your days reading and posting to Slashdot ... under the name "Breakfast Pants".

Oh yes, I can see clearly that procrastination hasn't hurt you at all.

;-)

Re:Procrastination makes me more efficient

[mattwarden]

You laugh, but Breakfast Pants is the first person on Slashdot ever to use a semicolon correctly. If that's why people attend Yale, and I submit that it is, then Yale did its job.

Procrastination

[I don't want to spen]

Last post!

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

[Mard]

Who gives a shit what's on digg? Precisely. Digg. Reddit. Slashdot is all about intense commentary (nay, we have discussion, even!) on topics which interest a wide geek user base, NOT about who got the news out first (although Slashdot is still quick enough to get the big news out in a meaningful time frame). If you care about is hearing things first, stick to Digg with their 1-3 line comment of "I agree with the article." and 40 responses of "Me too." Honestly, what purpose does it serve to find articles one day earlier, if there are no comments as insightful as those here on Slashdot to bring meaning and a wider perspective to it? Same article, sure. They both had it yesterday, sure. Slashdot has 50x as many comments in 1/20th the time. I'll be sticking here, thanks.