> Impulsiveness. This refers to your sensitivity to delay. The more impulsive you are, the less willing you are to delay gratification. The more impulsive you are, the more you value immediate rewards over long-term rewards.
> Delay. This indicates how long you must wait to receive the expected rewards, benefits, payouts. The longer you have to wait, the less motivated you’ll be and the more likely you are to procrastinate.
This may sound convincing at the surface, but I feel it is not a good model of
what was happening when I procrastinated a bit e.g. as a doctoral student. I observed that if I was expected to work on X, I suddenly had great ideas (and motivations) to do Y, where Y was also some piece of scientific work, just not in the realm of what I was supposed to work on (Y != X). So explanations in terms of impulsiveness or instant gratification don't seem to be what was going on there.
Also, if you are smart, you know that procrastination activities defer your
gratification even further.
The best ways to beat procrastination turned out to be (for me, at the time):
1. write up any ideas briefly so you can tell yourself "I've preserved it, I can get back to it later."
2. chop your main work into little chunks, get the first one done and then reward yourself (book shopping and chocolate work miracles), then onto the next one.
3. if a TO DO list had 10 sub-pieces of work on it, try to pick one that seems the least effort instead of necessarily doing them in the default order (where this is possible). This helps get you into work mode; once completed, see reward yourself.
I agree. For me, procrastination is purely about the emotions I have regarding the task - uncertainty, disgust, or fear of failure. It has nothing to do with the delay or size of the reward, because I’m already dealing with a large and immediate emotional penalty.
It isn't that. It is just "working on this makes me feel bad, so I will avoid doing it." There isn't an expectation that tomorrow it will be easier. I just want to work on a different thing that doesn't make me feel bad right now.
Where for me, "feels bad" starts at the body getting tensed up and the gut being twisted, and goes up from this to becoming nearly paralyzed and tortured, with higher cognitive functions shutting down and even the simplest incremental action on the task requires forcing my own limbs to move.
It's like the physically painful stress of suddenly having to make a very difficult choice, except it doesn't go away until I finish the task, give up on it, or... just do something else. So it's less of a "I will avoid doing it", and more of the mind giving up under torture.
My issue with procrastination is that my reward circuits seem kind of broken. My dopamine system is not motivated much even by fairly extreme future positive rewards. It's almost entirely rewarded by removal or reduction of certain types of future negative outcomes. (Primarily, these are either social, or safety/security related in nature.)
I'm not sure how to self-structure a reward system around that without being kind of a psycho.
Your steps are also good practice for getting things done in general.
I would add that part of the main work is to further subdivide any chunks that are poorly defined, and that the time spent elaborating and subdividing chunks is a productive work activity.
Ideally, at the end of a workday I like to have at least one or two chunks sufficiently defined that when I show up the next morning I can just sit down and complete them without having to put any thought into it.
The ideas that you mention are discussed in the book, and fit in the procrastination equation. For example, when you chop up your main work into little chunks and reward yourself for each chunk, you are decreasing the delay factor of the equation, by decreasing the time it takes to get the first taste of a reward. You are also increasing the value factor, by adding additional rewards, and increasing the expectancy factor, but making the first baby steps seem more achievable.
In my experience/understanding, one's emotions are a better explanation of procrastination than an insufficient ability to "delay gratification".
For example if you feel anxious/hopeless/overwhelmed, you might not perceive the theoretical eventual gratification as a potential outcome, or might avoid thinking much about a task at all. Seen through this lens, the subdivision trick is more of a way to manufacture a provisional motivation framework and engage with a task in a less emotionally threatening way. (With the hope that this framework can either carry you through the task or can be discarded after your negative emotions have been reduced)
I realize this doesn't directly contradict any points you made, but to me the procrastination equation doesn't feel like the most fruitful mental model of procrastination to start with.
There is nothing new in the article, it is basic motivational “science”.
However, I feel this does not apply for me and greatly misses one of the main aspects of procrastination: the fear of disappointment. Can I fulfill my parents expectations? Can I fulfill my own expectations? Will I fail? Will it hurt to face my own demons and my own fears of not succeeding?
Am I just different? I thought this was what procrastination is about for everyone.
> the fear of disappointment. Can I fulfill my parents expectations? Can I fulfill my own expectations? Will I fail? Will it hurt to face my own demons and my own fears of not succeeding?
This falls pretty squarely into the “expectancy” factor. You don’t have faith that you’ll obtain a pleasing outcome, hence you procrastinate instead.
From the article “Expectancy. Do you expect to succeed? Are you confident in your ability to achieve a great outcome in whatever you aspire to do? If your expectancy is high, then you’ll be more motivated and you’ll procrastinate less. It’s only natural: you’re more motivated to pursue something that gives you a good chance of having a pleasing outcome.”
I'm sure many have the same feelings as you, however for me procrastination has always been (to use a college example not super relevant these days) "I'd rather do $A than $B, even if that means doing $B later means I'll do a worse job at it" where $B is something like writing a paper and $A is hanging out with friends or playing video games or something. I haven't much experienced the "I'd rather do $ANYTHING than $B because I might not do very well at $B regardless," at least not consciously.
Here’s a super common pattern of procrastination for me that is similar to fear of failing, or even related:
“I’d rather do $ANYTHING than $B because I don’t actually know how to get started with $B or haven’t yet decided it’s the right next step”
In those moments the gut is trying to tell me something important. Usually $B is not in fact the correct next step and a better option $C exists if I just take the time to look around a little.
Of course sometimes the gut is just afraid or needs more info in which case you gotta give $B a forceful attempt to see how it feels. Often it ends up working just fine or you gain additional info that makes $C super obvious.
Fear of disappointment is associated with the difficulty of the task, which is mentioned in the article. You won’t be too afraid of failing at something easy, is the hard stuff you veer away from. The reasons why that’s hard is different for everyone
I think my critique to the article would then be that there is not distinction between actual objective utility of the solution (I.e. expected outcome) versus the own standards and fear of being not good enough (which is totally unrelated to the actual utility or greatness of the solution).
"Put differently, the motivation for engaging in distractions has become much higher while the motivation for work has stayed more or less the same. The result? Procrastination."
Is skipping over the fact that the industry of knowledge workers has grown exponentially. You're much less likely to procrastinate in manual work, especially in a group.
As a bit of a meta conversation, I'm a bit torn over book summaries as articles.
I've suffered through many books that had a very good message, but should have been 20% as long as they were. Much repetition in every possible spot, just to end up with a book of a respectable length that people don't feel bad spending $15 on. Comprehensive summaries are a great way to get around that.
On the other hand, these summaries are (by definition) derivative works that serve almost entirely as just distillations of the book. There's some opinion rolled in, but the description of the source material goes far beyond a book review to the point that it could be seen as a time- and money-saving replacement. If I were an author, I wouldn't be happy that my book was interpreted by a random third party, let alone that many folks will assume they got the value from the work and won't buy it.
I totally understand that, but with nonfiction and self-help books like this, you don't really need as much repetition in my opinion. Repetition of the same point tends not to help as much here as it does in fiction.
For example, I read Atomic Habits by James Clear a couple months ago. It had a ton of repetition, and in my opinion it was a huge simplification of "complex nuanced human behavior" (that point's discussed elsewhere im the thread). I would hold the book in higher regard if it had repeated itself less, which didn't help much, and instead expanded on its ideas by adding more nuance instead. If this was a summary of a fiction book, I'd agree, but in this context I don't agree with your argument.
> Procrastination exists because there are two distinctly different personalities living inside all of us. There’s the primitive and impulsive side of us and there’s the rational and thought-through side of us. Those personalities line up with different brain regions: the limbic system (seat of our impulses) and the prefrontal cortex (seat of our reason and willpower).
Respectfully, this is a discredited scientific model of the brain. In short, emotions are "whole brain" things which cannot be localized to one part of the brain that precisely. See Barrett's book "How Emotions are Made" for more.
I wouldn't recommend anybody to read these kinds of books and only because they never helped me.
Once I went into the actual clinical literature of many various kinds of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy I saw significant improvement in the way how I live my life and how often procrastination encounters me.
The reason why they helped by gaining a very nuanced understanding of how the mind works. This allowed to identify the patterns from a point of understanding and self-compassion ("Ah, see, this is what they meant with perpetuation").
However, that is not enough. You also need constant awareness of these patterns in order to change them. Something that you learn in Mindfulness courses and train with meditative practices and journaling.
So, if I may present a simple equation: Go to the doctor.
I can't relate to the bottom line "get a doctor" - even though it turns up a lot in these kinds of discussions. I live in a reasonably civilized county (Germany), but still know people who have or had trouble finding medical help with serious mental health problems (depression etc.).
The idea of going to a doctor with "procrastination" seems very off in that context. Is it different in the US?
> The idea of going to a doctor with “procrastination” seems very off in that context.
I understand your sentiment, but how about we call “procrastination” what it is: Consistent and repeated non- or under-functioning.
If the person has tried over years so many things, out of the good and best will to function, participate in society and work culture and still fails, why do you still call it “procrastination”? I guess it must be a cultural thing, especially German, to not give the benefit of doubt and just call a medically relevant condition “Faulheit”. I hope you realize that denying the be benefit of doubt - especially after many years of unsuccessful tries, perpetuates the sickness of people and denies them aid that would help them and make them functional again.
Procrastination can be a symptom of deep and challenging mental health issues, some of which have still huge stigma around them. This stigma makes individuals not seek help where actually needed. So please, work on your stigmatization and be more compassionate so that the person might have a chance to overcome their internalized stigmatization.
I mean, the goal here is to turn people functional again, and not bully them, am I right?
I have ADHD, and I more strongly relate to the Atomic Habits model (based on Tiny Habits) of Cue -> Craving -> Response -> Reward.
I don't really like the word "motivation" because I feel as though nobody can really describe what it actually means, except that it's this mysterious power that results in you being able to do things you don't want to do. Atomic Habits describes on a more psychological level why we might be driven to perform a certain action, kind of on the basis that this mysterious "motivation" doesn't actually exist, and some people were just lucky in development to acquire good habits that yield more success.
To me, procrastination means that my mind pushed the undesirable task out of my head because it's desperate to think about or engage in something more immediately stimulating. Having mindfulness of this happening and using my inner monologue to think about what I want to do, and what I'm experiencing emotionally/physiologically, is a huge help to me in deciding what I actually want to do, rather than my executive function autopiloting straight past the important task.
I can't take books that try to reduce complex nuanced human behavior into an oversimplified equation seriously. They always feel like BS to me. I'm sure there are a few useful ideas in there, but the fact that the author is oversimplifying things to appeal to an as-large-as-possible audience makes me question all information presented in the book. If it's BS in one aspect, it's quite likely to be BS in other aspects as well.
Almost all self-help books have this flaw. I think most of them won’t sell without providing something that looks like a solution. But to get that solution, they dress up the author’s badly-founded personal beliefs as final truth, support the thesis with cherrypicked personal anecdotes, and pretend they’ve thoroughly tested it all.
While I'm leery to be yet another book recommender in a discussion thread, suggesting a possible non-solution, I have to say Overcoming Anticipatory Anxiety by Seif and Winston is a decent self-help book when it comes to dealing with the core emotional motivators that lead to procrastination and other avoidant behaviors. It's steeped in CBT practices, which I'm not even sure I buy, but I found the "wise mind" concept of moving past one's current anxieties instead of engaging and getting stuck doom-debating with oneself. It's definitely got its share of dubious-sounding supposed anecdotes from the practitioners' sessions, neuroscience that sounds okay I guess, and too much time spent dissecting the problem into different categories. But! the book doesn't repeat itself too much, and it is only about 165 pages, which is practically pamphlet-sized compared to all of the bloated self-help books pretending to be novels or even textbooks.
I think it's less of a book with a specific solution than a book with possible solutions that doesn't take that long to read through and choose.
Thanks for making the recommendation. I've been increasingly realizing that my procrastination, which has been extremely resistant to "usual" methods, may be driven primarily by habituated, intense anxieties. I'm only beginning to look at it from this angle, and going through this book you mentioned feels like a good next step.
Can anyone figure out what the units would be? Delay is presumably time, and I can accept money for "value" because it's a sort of usable proxy for other internalised value systems.
Is expectancy "estimated probability of success"? That would make it unitless, and I think impulsiveness is supposed to be unitless too: "sensitivity to <other factor>" sounds like a unitless scaling parameter to me.
That would mean, according to this equation, motivation is measured in dollars per day.
Yeah, I'd say expectancy is unitless, value is in something like "utils", and expectancy * value is the expected value. I would put impulsiveness in something like amount of "meh" per second (e.g. for each second you have to wait for reward, you feel that amount more "meh" about doing the task). That would give motivation units of utils/meh.
Although, I don't think our actual motivation is linearly inversely proportional to delay at all. I wouldn't expect people to feel about 86,000 times more motivated to do a task that rewards you with $10 one second later versus the same task if the $10 took 24 hours to arrive in the mail.
> MOTIVATION = EXPECTANCY x VALUE / IMPULSIVENESS x DELAY
This is actually a good thing! I think that's why procrastination is so natural. This is not a criticism of the article, but an attempt of explaining why procrastination is not just a thing to fight, more like something you need to work with.
Let's frame the problem in terms of money and games, as a simplified model. I can give you the chance to play a game in 1 year where you have a 50% chance of winning $100. How much are you ready to pay me now for the privilege? Of course, you want to make money.
The first step is to multiply the chance by the prize, here, that's $50. So if I offered you to play immediately, you will want to pay less than $50. That's the "expectancy x value" part of the equation.
Now, the delay. many things can happen in a year, one of us may die and you will never get to play and win your prize, and you'd want to take interest rates into account. Let's say you go with 10%/year, so that's down to about 45%, that's your "expectancy x value / delay".
Now "delay" factor always increases with time but it is not linear, for example, I used interest rates for my toy model, which is an exponential. This is where we introduce "impulsiveness", which is more like a function than a factor, so I would rewrite the equation as "expectancy x value / impulsiveness(delay)". As a function, impulsiveness is always increasing and depends on many factors, but generally, the more impulsive you are, the faster it will climb. In my toy model, it is represented by an interest rate.
So, the "procrastination equation" actually maximizes value!
A more practical example would be the famous marshmallow experiments where a kid is offered a single marshmallow, and if he doesn't touch it for 10 minutes, he gets a second one. It can be seen as a test of delayed gratification, but it can also be seen as a test of trust. The experimenter may come back to steal the first marshmallow instead of giving a second one, and to be fair, outside of an experiment, if you see a plate with a single marshmallow somewhere and leave it alone for 10 minutes, it is more likely that someone else will eat it than someone putting a second one next to it.
You can convert this to the expected value in the way you would a financial outcome.
The expected value is value times probability.
And then the time aspect is just discounting future value back to today, like you would a cashflow. Your impulsiveness is then how much you discount tomorrow vs today.
(Expectancy * value)*(impulsiveness)^time
This way you can put a number on your impulsiveness probably from 1.001 to 2
There is so much ignorance about "procrastination." Stop demonizing it and start respecting yourself. There is wisdom in your procrastination. We are all optimizing (or satisficing, really) over a great many variables, all the time.
I learned decades ago that what I thought was dirty shameful procrastination was a complex and important process of negotiating with my unconscious to get work done. For some kinds of things, my reluctance to get going is evidence that something is not right about the work itself-- I should not have agreed to do it in the first place and I should unagree to it. For other kinds of things, it's just a sign that my unconscious is still working on the problem and I should let it do its thing.
I use a method I call "procrastinate and push" which means I spend a little while trying to get the word done and if I feel resistance, I let it go until tomorrow. Then I try again. I alternate between pushing and completely ignoring the work, until at some point, either I conclude I will never do it, or more likely the wall suddenly gives way and I find I have the answers.
It's like my brain is in the kitchen, cooking, and it unlocks the door when the soup is more or less ready.
A good backup to this, is that in the essay writing example, the student will undoubtedly write a better essay at the end of the semester when he has learned more and has other peers asking questions about it, than if he started right away and wrote it. The math makes perfect sense.
Of course this all breaks down as soon as there's an actual deadline attached to the task, with actual negative consequences from not meeting it. Using GP's "if you feel resistance, put it off until tomorrow" method, I ended up putting things off way past their deadlines, which is why I no longer use this approach.
Yet, I do use this approach. And I've been running a consulting business for 24 years, and I've been a columnist for IEEE Computer Magazine. I've written two books, done zillions of talks.
I have missed a few deadlines, yes. That's not the end of the fucking world. But what might be more of a problem is doing poor quality work.
When I wrote Software Realities for IEEE Computer, I never missed a deadline. How I did that is I never knew what the real deadline was. I instructed the editor to give me a series of deadlines that I would treat as real. But if I really couldn't meet one with a good article, I would ask for the next (also fake IRL) deadline.
Pressure does help, but it's just ignorant and abusive to treat procrastination like a disease and disrespect your intermal mental rhythms. You will burn yourself out that way, kiddo, as I did before I figured this shit out.
> In other words, we procrastinate on tasks because they’re not our highest motivation.
I think we need to draw a distinction à la economics’ “revealed preference” here, because there’s the famous divide between importance and urgency and “motivation” compacts the two.
My version of this is agnostic to the reason why, it's the maxim, “Never top priority, never happens.” If you find yourself never cleaning up tech debt, then as a matter of “revealed priority” I can assert that it was never your top priority, but I can't say exactly why, that's for you to find out. Makes it really easy to solve some of those problems, “we have 13 weeks in the quarter, that will be allocated as 5 two-week sprints and 3 “refactor weeks,” hey, now it will be top priority at some point!
> The reward for writing, on the other hand, is distant at the beginning of the semester.
The Goldratt book Critical Chain talks about this in the context of one-off projects like software has to deal with, calling it “Student Syndrome,” the idea that we actually build a lot of safety buffer into our project deadlines and then we immediately waste it all because the urgency becomes so low. I have an experiment called Hot Potato Agile that would in theory fix this, I wrote it up in a Google Doc somewhere, if you have a team struggling with deadlines and looking for a better way, let me know and I can share it.
> And so, you’re faced with a decision between what you want and what the monkey wants, between immediate gratification and long-term success.
There's a bit of research showing this to be kind of a naive take, coming from the obesity side where the willpower is viewed as being used to eat healthy things and the impulse is to eat crappy snack food. And the core finding is just that it is an environment that you sign yourself up for. So if you go to the grocery store and say “I’m not going to bring those junky foods into my house,” then that is very easy for your willpower to do at the time, assuming you don't go there hungry. And these are the so-called high-willpower people. But they didn't have more willpower overall, they just shifted it left. The people who struggle with willpower are the people who don't use the little bit earlier and instead fill their houses with junk food and then when they need to grab a bite between tasks, that's the natural thing to choose.
So for example my shell scripts often involve the OSX “Say” command, so that if I'm waiting on a long running process and I give myself permission to start browsing Hacker News or whatever, I don't leave it on my own recognizance to check back in on the work. The work comes and tells me that it's done, interrupts my flow elsewhere. Stuff like that. Stop victim blaming, recognize that you are part of these larger attention networks, redesign the flow through those networks accordingly. The monkey is on your side!
> It means we should watch our diet and eat as healthy as we can.
This is actually probably the best advice, in the whole article. The constant ensugarification of a tired person trying to stay engaged, the amount that the body needs to work to streamline all of the blood sugar variability, it literally exhausts your mitochondria, you literally have less energy. If you can radically cut down the sugar intake and up the sleep and exercise—no diet here, diets can crash your metabolism, just swap out the sugars for starches—you can give them a chance to heal and that will help with everything.
These are good ideas in my opinion, but somewhat came through to me as a little bit laden with judgement and negativity.
That might work well for you, but I have only been able to work on these things through a relatively shame-less perspective, and have found progress there. Just pointing it out there for anyone who like me may have kind of liked and disliked your reply
> Delay. This indicates how long you must wait to receive the expected rewards, benefits, payouts. The longer you have to wait, the less motivated you’ll be and the more likely you are to procrastinate.
This may sound convincing at the surface, but I feel it is not a good model of what was happening when I procrastinated a bit e.g. as a doctoral student. I observed that if I was expected to work on X, I suddenly had great ideas (and motivations) to do Y, where Y was also some piece of scientific work, just not in the realm of what I was supposed to work on (Y != X). So explanations in terms of impulsiveness or instant gratification don't seem to be what was going on there. Also, if you are smart, you know that procrastination activities defer your gratification even further.
The best ways to beat procrastination turned out to be (for me, at the time):
1. write up any ideas briefly so you can tell yourself "I've preserved it, I can get back to it later."
2. chop your main work into little chunks, get the first one done and then reward yourself (book shopping and chocolate work miracles), then onto the next one.
3. if a TO DO list had 10 sub-pieces of work on it, try to pick one that seems the least effort instead of necessarily doing them in the default order (where this is possible). This helps get you into work mode; once completed, see reward yourself.