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.'"

Comments

Hyperbolic FP

[shawb]

I meant to get first post, but something more important came up.

Obligatory

[maxwell demon]

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1388

Re:Obligatory

[rubycodez]

that's a good short-term graph. Long term, over decades, my procrastination curve is climbing upward as a second order polynomial, because I realize more and more of the modern rat-race "obligations" are arbitrary made-up bullshit.

From personal experience

[lanceran]

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.

Re:From personal experience

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr

Re:From personal experience

[Dachannien]

I'm not convinced that the "live in the moment" attitude really works for getting large projects done, though. At least not for me. You're right that breaking down a project into its component tasks is helpful for avoiding that "crushing weight" feeling that scares me off from working on a large project, but doing what excites me right now tends to lead to me doing fun stuff instead of getting work done.

The problem, I think, arises when none of those little sub-tasks has any specific reward associated with it. So, you know that you can easily do part 1 of a 27-part project, but you also know that when you finish part 1, you won't really feel any closer to being done than you did with 0 parts done. With no reward - not even a sense of accomplishment - for these individual tasks, the call of fun non-work-related activities grows more seductive.

The key for me has always been to put myself in a situation where the fun non-work-related activities are unavailable. That doesn't work out well for getting stuff done around the house, since all my fun stuff is there, but it works a lot better for my job.

Re:Tradeoffs

[u38cg]

If you get five more weeks with 10% more vacation, I'll bid 89% of your current salary to do your job, because fifty weeks holiday a year still sounds pretty sweet to me.