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In Praise of Procrastination
Ponca City writes "Every year, millions of Americans pay needless penalties because they don't file their taxes on time, forgo huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never get around to signing up for a retirement plan, and risk blindness from glaucoma because they don't use their eyedrops regularly. James Surowiecki writes that procrastination is a basic human impulse, a peculiar irrationality stemming from our relationship to time — in particular, from a tendency that economists call 'hyperbolic discounting,' the ability to make rational choices when they're thinking about the future, but, as a future event gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. Game theorist Thomas Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves a collection of competing selves, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control, where one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals. Philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: 'Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.'"
I meant to get first post, but something more important came up.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1388
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I've been fighting procrastination for several years, and I am sure many have and still are. The one(and seemingly only) solution that I have found is to change your entire attitude towards your life. Procrastination arises from your mental extrapolation of how long a certain task will do and how many other small sub-tasks it will include. This line of thinking is most likely to overwhelm you and stop you right in you tracks("well, just look how much there's still to do, i'd rather do it later, when i am not as busy"). This is, at least for me, is the source of laziness. The right way to approach things is not to think about the future AT ALL, it is hard, but possible. Living in the moment and doing what excites you at one particular moment in time still somehow accomplishes the task at hand, and you don't spend your time thinking about it as a bunch of small sub-tasks. Think of it as writing a 50 page essay. You don't just sit down and start thinking "oh I have to write a 50 page essay, look at how much planning i have to do before it", when to actually do it, all you have to do is just separate it in sections based on topics that it covers, sit down and start writing in said section sentence by sentence. Different approach, same result. This advice, my fellow geeks, also applies to interaction with opposite sex. "Oh no, i might say something, and then she might say something and i'll ruin everything so i shouldn't say anything at all." - Bad. "I feel like saying something to her right now, I should say it." - Good.
Today? Nothing. Back then? A lot.
Don't make the basic mistake to dismiss the short term relevance. A lot of the things I do don't have any long term relevance (at least individually; another aspect which is easily overlooked is that the sum of individually irrelevant things can be together very relevant). But my life would be poor without them.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
try to name one Etruscan or one Babylonian
Etruscan: Lars Porsenna
Babylonian: Hammurabi
Alas, I acquired a smattering of classical knowledge at high school (a few decades ago). Since the classics were taught the "old-fashioned" way (i.e. via sadistic brutality) this knowledge actually survived grad school in Engineering, among other things.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Well, to be fair, everybody knows Hammurabi from his famous book, "282 Laws and You".
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
An like so much of procrastination, it will probably not be necessary to read it later because much better articles will come along, or the theory will be completely debunked, or its fleeting (and perceived) importance will vanish.
Procrastination is a learned workload management technique. People learn that the demands placed upon them by parents, society, or physical environment, can often be avoided just by waiting it out.
Every day you put off picking up your toys as a child is one more day you don't have to. Every day you avoid re-thatching the roof of your grass shack is another day to hunt and gather.
Many, if not most, "penalties" are simply nulled out with the passage of time. So rather than being irrational, this is a perfectly normal rational, learned workload management technique.
The brilliance of an intelligent species is the avoidance of unnecessary waste of energy and time on problems that solve themselves, while focusing on goals that really matter, and which will not solve themselves.
Actual penalties endured due to procrastination are failures of risk management skills, not some imaginary "irrational relationship to time".
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I think most people would happily trade 10% of their salary for 10% more vacation (5 more weeks). We in the U.S. work way too much and live too little.
As for procrastination, unfortunately it often pays off in the workplace. If your boss asks for something to be done at deadline D and you know it takes T, then you do the prep work up front (like research the problem) but don't actually start on the specifics until D-T. Because quite often it turns out no longer to be needed, or before T arrives it's discovered something different is needed, so different that you would have to start over on the task-specific parts. Personally I hate having work on my plate and compulsively finish it up as soon as possible, but doing so isn't really in my own interest (in terms of ROI on my work).
And, like always, laziness is the mother of all invention. We harnessed animals so we wouldn't have to work ourselves, invented mills to save work of hand milling, etc etc. Basically we invent machines and smarter ways of doing things to save work. Unfortunately this is contradictory to the modern workplace where if you created a machine to do your work for you the employer would lay you off rather than continue paying you a salary for work done by your machine. More specifically, they'd buy your machine and RIF those now superfluous. It's why sysadmins automate tasks with scripts, even though if they do it well enough they might soon find themselves without work. Similarly an engineer who does the work of two and consistently delivers quality results early, without even appearing to work hard, may find management suspicious of whether their job warrants even one single full-time position. At least if management isn't technical enough to tell the difference.
And don't forget the number of times that there are no penalties to avoid at all, because it turns out that the activity was unnecessary.
Yeah, I'm looking at you, work. The number of times it turns out that someone else has already done something, often even before I'm assigned a task, well, it pays to procrastinate.
You take all of your long-term projects, break them down into atomic tasks and allocate time resources to each. However, you have to plan for the unanticipated, high priority tasks that arise short term. So you leave openings in your schedule to accommodate some number of these. But, there are times when such emergencies do not arise. You can keep some low priority tasks to fill in, or you can slide to high priority stuff forward.
Do the low priority stuff and let the boss see you doing it. The question is then, "Why are you doing this bullshit when my project is due next month?" "Because I have already allocated sufficient resources to complete said project", I think to myself. But PHB doesn't like that kind reasoning. He wants to see nothing but assholes and elbows dedicated to his priorities.
Slide the high priority stuff up and risk completing it early. Then the boss questions why you asked for a month on the last one and trims two weeks off your next estimate. And then the panic jobs arrive.
Either way, you're screwed. Procrastination is just a reaction against such scheduling conflicts and a means to keep a bit of flexibility in your planning. As long as PHB thinks its a psychological problem, you can get away with it (or fake a nervous breakdown and get some vacation time in the form of long term disability leave).
Have gnu, will travel.
I used to deliberately procrastinate on all coding jobs. That is because I found that I performed best under the stress of an approaching deadline. It forces you to totally focus on the job. In those circumstances, I was most creative, and productive, and made the fewest errors.
I believe that's why programmers have always loved all nighters. Programs conceived, designed, implemented, and tested in a single unbroken session are far more cohesive than any others.
I say all this in the past tense. Eventually I burned out when the stress overwhelmed me. Now I'm retired to a cruising sailboat and the closest thing to a deadline I see is the approaching change of season.
When talking about procrastination, we must either talk about the healthy or unhealthy procrastination. Every single person procrastinates to some degree and for most it is indees exactly as you say (negative effects tend to be short lived or minor and there are many positive side effects). Procrastination can also be rather ugly psychological problem, in which case that doesn't quite hold true.
Anecdote 1
When I was at my first job (18 years old, straight out of high school and landed in a great job. I was rather competent at what I did but I also had a lot of luck...), I suddenly got a huge load of responsibility. The company would sell projects (I won't go into detail about what it was. But the things to know were: They cost thousands of dollars a piece, last for a year or so and most customers weren't that interested to pay attention the whole time... So very poorly ran project might go a year unnoticed by a customer but at that point, shit would hit the fan) and I was assigned quite a lot of those. For most of the time, I handled those really well but then there were a few more problematic ones: We couldn't proceed before I would get some data from the customers. "I'll give them a call some day." Fine. A few weeks went... And at that point the procrastination started to kick in: "Shit. This is still on hold? It's a bit embarrassing to call them now and admit that we've done nothing during the first six weeks. Not the end of the world but unpleasant. I'll do it soon". Guess whether I did or not? Another month rolled by. "Shit. This is pretty bad. Not catastrophic but bad none the less. But the later I do this, the worse it gets... I'll better call them soon.". A few more weeks. At that point my superior began making some inquiries but I managed to dodge them. A few more weeks... At this point it was pretty "catastrophic" (Well, there was a large chance that the company would have to return some money and apologize... I might or might not have been fired for that) but I knew that every day made it worse.
I kept promising myself "I'll make the call after lunch." or "I'll make the call tomorrow." or "I'll make the call when it is exactly 2:30 pm."... But I could never do it when the moment came. I wasn't lazy or incompetent: I would do every new project and most old project very well. It just were those few skeletons in the closet that I just couldn't force myself to deal with. My superior began finding out and put some pressure on me to continue with the project... But I couldn't make the call. I liked what I did but every single time I heard a phone ring I thought "Maybe this time one of those customers calls...". The stress became so bad that I had to take a few shots before going to work, just so I could make myself do that... How did I eventually solve the problem? I quit. The awesome job had just gotten too stressful because of those few cases and after months of suffering I had proved myself that I just couldn't deal with them. So... That was it.
Anecdote 2
I'm not sure if this is technically an anecdote or not, because it is my general process... I guess it is an anecdote about a single procrastinating person.
I, like many people, do things the last night before deadline. And very late at night at that. But it isn't laziness: I don't choose immediate gratification over long term goal... As I don't enjoy myself while I delay things. Sure, up untill the deadline is close, I'll just think "Meh, I can do it later. It isn't a biggie." (As is common for procrastinators). Then, when deadline is close I think that healthy procrastinators say "Shit. I'll have to do it now." or "Meh. Too late. I just won't do it in time". But I? I can't start it but I won't accept not doing it on time... So I can't do anything fun as I know "I should be doing [the thing]" and will just feel anxious and bad about that. But I also can't start the thing... Untill it is really, really as late as it can be. That 2 hour thing that should be due 8am next morning? I'll start feel bad about it
I'll be sure to read it ... later.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
May the Maths Be with you!
Not quite all human activity.
In 5 years, what will your current work be worth?
50 years?
500?
5000? Our entire civilisation will be gone.
50,000?
Anyone name anything or anyone or from 50,000 years ago? It's a blink of an eye in geological and evolutionary terms, but there is one single thing you can do which can matter over these timescales.
Have children. Procreate. Pass your genes on.
Your genes have an unbroken line of success going back to the primordial slime 4 billion years ago. If you break that line you are just another genetic dead end.
Deleted
I look at things a bit differently, and it mostly works for me. I see the set of things that I could do as each having a different level of addictiveness. Together they arrange themselves in a pecking order. Whatever is available at the top of the list I tend to do. At the same time, deep down, I KNOW exactly what I should be doing.
The key for me is to remove the activities from contention that have addictiveness above the level of what I know I should be doing. As long as it takes X amount of time to get a particular fix, I don't get instant gratification. Instant gratification works best to increase addictiveness - increase the minimum delay and work necessary to get the payoff and that effort becomes something that can itself be procrastinated (coupled with the fact that you KNOW you shouldn't be doing that). And after a while the things you were addicted to don't have the same pull.
Which leads me to another observation: there is a different pecking order in terms of the potential maximum level of addictiveness versus the current level of addictiveness. e.g. If I haven't played $GAME in a month, there is virtually no pull. But I know that if I were to play $GAME now for a few hours, I would feel more compelled to do that than say, post to slashdot. This will last for a few days. If I play $GAME for a week, I will suffer withdrawal symptoms and be prone to relapses for weeks after. I've come to realize that there are certain activities that are like crack to me in terms of out-prioritizing other things, and they need to be out of my life.
Some things I don't even have to try in order to know how addictive they are. From everything that I can see, MMORPGs are the opium dens of the 21st century. They are only cheap if money is your only metric of how much they cost you. I will never try them for the same reasons I will never try any cocaine, meth or heroin.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Whomever posted this story really took their time...
I have so much experience in procrastinating. I am going to write a book about it. One day..
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
This might help:
http://antiprocrastinator.com/
You may be closer to the answer than you think. One of the proposed explanations for hyperbolic discounting is taking the uncertainty of risk into account. Within certain assumptions, if you don't know the actual risk level, or how likely it is you need to do the work, hyperbolic discounting becomes consistent.