[HN Gopher] Summary of "The Procrastination Equation"
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Summary of "The Procrastination Equation"
Author : caned
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-10-05 23:41 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.njlifehacks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.njlifehacks.com)
| julianeon wrote:
| > 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.
| Karellen wrote:
| > > Procrastination exists because there are two distinctly
| different personalities living inside all of us.
|
| > Respectfully, this is a discredited scientific model of the
| brain.
|
| Agreed. There are three personalities in my brain.
|
| The rational decision maker, the instant gratification monkey,
| and the chaos monster:
|
| https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti...
| jprete wrote:
| Tim Urban's model is not exactly scientific, either. If I
| were labeling personalities in my brain I'd have a completely
| different set.
| mat_epice wrote:
| 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.
| satisfice wrote:
| 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.
| asynchronous wrote:
| 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.
| jll29 wrote:
| > 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.
| Flimm wrote:
| 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| 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.
| jprete wrote:
| 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.
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Based on the comments, seems we don't like this book.
|
| I'm a work procrastinator (I feel bad about it), but I can read
| book.
|
| Which book you read in this area that helped with your
| procrastination problem?
|
| There is a Further Reading in the article - any of those?
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Bookmarked for tomorrow
| bch wrote:
| Note to self: come back to upvote
| [deleted]
| 0x008 wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| Swizec wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| > 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."
| tomek_ycomb wrote:
| This is 100% not just you. Procrastination for many people in
| an avoidance mechanism of sorts related to anxieties.
|
| New York times article on procrastination was pretty nice
| called "why you procrastinate"
| crdrost wrote:
| > In other words, we procrastinate on tasks because they're not
| our highest motivation.
|
| I think we need to draw a distinction _a 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.
| tomek_ycomb wrote:
| 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
| conjectures wrote:
| Puts an equation front and centre. Eschews brackets.
| layer8 wrote:
| The book actually uses a fraction bar.
| Mimmy wrote:
| For clarity it should be:
|
| MOTIVATION = EXPECTANCY x VALUE / (IMPULSIVENESS x DELAY)
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| "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.
| regularfry wrote:
| 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.
|
| I am in this equation and I don't like it.
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(page generated 2023-10-08 23:00 UTC)