7 ms·

A Universal Law of Procrastination (2016)

163 points by brahmwg 8y ago

burnte 8y ago
I'll read this later.
- gitgud 8y ago
  I'll leave an insightful comment later.
  - vinod1073 8y ago
    I'll share the article later! :D
    - akskos 8y ago
      I'll think of some clever joke to add here later
- sideshowb 8y ago
  I'm reading it straight away. In lieu of doing something else.
baxtr 8y ago
TL;DR There is a law for pressure before deadlines. The formula is 1/r where r is the “distance” i.e. time left to an event.
- sporkologist 8y ago
  I think mine's more like 1/r^2.
  - BobbyTable 8y ago
    And maybe add an +1 so its always offiset to miss the target, and deadline appearing before reaching peak productivity
- hxchen 8y ago
  This should be on the top! Time savior.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  It's almost like the thing that people regularly describe with a "pressure" metaphor is similar to pressure.
Starwatcher2001 8y ago
Does the date when a student hands in a piece of work (which seems to be what they are measuring) corrolate with when they actually did the work? It seems to me that a student who did the work early, but then sat on it for some reason (maybe to polish it), is very different to one who did the work at the last minute - even if they handed it in on the same day.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  That was one issue that stood out about the claim that most NSF proposals are submitted shortly before deadline. Even if you have a proposal 95% complete months early, there's no real benefit to submitting it, and some value to waiting - to polish, or perhaps to amend the proposal for a changing world. I've certainly seen professors go back and rework proposals at the last minute because someone else had published related work they needed to account for. The other issue that came to mind is that people finish work near deadlines with procrastinating, because work takes time. If there are two proposal deadlines per year, and the average person takes ~6 months to write a proposal, you'd see a normal distribution ramp-up of submissions, and never see the declining count because those people missed the deadline.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jonathanstrange 8y ago
I must be an atypical procrastinator then, because I only procrastinate activities that are less pleasant than others but have no deadline at all. If there is a deadline, I tend to do the work as early as possible, usually much earlier than my colleagues, so the pressure goes away and I can procrastinate about the activities whose time I self-manage again. I've found out over the years that the #1 reason for delaying self-managed tasks is that they are too big, appear like huge obstacles, which causes me to turn to the easy and fun creative parts of other tasks. Divide-and-conquer works fine to alleviate this problem, and I also use a bit of GTD when I'm stressed in order to increase the time available for slacking. Needless to say this only applies to activities that are slightly unpleasant, there are also aspects of my work that don't cause me to procrastinate at all. There seem to be different types of procrastinators, or at least two of them: those that procrastinate when they have to manage time themselves those that procrastinate when there are fixed deadlines. I've never understood the second type, to be honest. If you have a deadline, why not just do it quickly, so you're done with it?
- letsgetphysITal 8y ago
  That's not procrastination. That's efficiency.
  - jonathanstrange 8y ago
    I wish it was. What I mean is that when there is no external deadline there is a habit of starting project 1, when it gets difficult, then start project 2, when it gets difficult, then start project 3, ... Both in work and with my hobbies, the end result is that there are many unfinished projects. The ones that get finished are usually very good, because a lot of thought went into them, but the ratio finished:unfinished is like 1:4. Similar to investment funding, but in the personal case it seems to be a form of procrastination. I tend to switch projects when the one I'm working on becomes difficult. I admire the people who can work sequentially, project 1 -> finished, project 2 -> finished, etc.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    It is procrastination when the thing without a specific deadline needs to be done eventually for your own good, like seeing a dentist or making craigslist listings for clutter, or the next step on a side project, or calling for a warranty repair on a piece of mildly broken furniture. These are things that have been on my to-do list for 11 months.
ollin 8y ago
From my own retrospective notes, tasks that are "dangerous" (w.r.t. planning) are: * Administrative; i.e. my brain doesn't anticipate any tangible end product or outcome upon completion, and... * Free of a strict, externally imposed deadline, and... * Impossible to complete in one sitting, usually because... * The method to complete them isn't clear, but it... * Probably involves doing lots of experiments, research, contacting people, etc., and... * The optimal time to start work has already passed. I doubt these are universal, but I've found it useful to be able to recognize tasks like these as a separate class from normal work, rather than being surprised when they turn out to be different.
- criddell 8y ago
  Does it impact hobbies as well as work? For example, something like practicing a musical instrument seems like it would hit all of your danger points.
  - ollin 8y ago
    The key points regarding hobbies are the first ("administrative") and third ("impossible to complete") points. The hobbies that I've had which were successful have all been ones where I was intentional about (and capable of) generating incremental, tangible progress within a single session. The hobbies I've failed at are those where I tried to work on a large goal without any rewarding subgoals, and eventually couldn't make my brain work for nothing anymore. For me, at least, it still applies.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  > The optimal time to start work has already passed. This is affecting my life really bad. I've been trying to fight this for years with next to no success. If I pass the optimal time to start a task I find it almost impossible to start after that point. Say, sometimes I know that if I do it a bit faster and maybe sloppier I can still make the deadline but for some unknown reason it's so hard to do it and I go back to procrastinating. Another similar problem I have with procrastination is "soft deadlines". When something has a deadline but it's not the end of the world if the deadline is passed (say you can still accomplish the task 2 days later and it'll be ok) I find it incredibly hard to do it after the soft deadline. You have no idea how many troubles I collected this way since I kept procrastinating sending important documents to people, government etc... If I send them the day they're due everything is fine; if something comes up, say like scanner breaks, I forget etc... it takes months for me to send that document.
PeterStuer 8y ago
As a procastrinator I get it, but wouldn't you get the same data from non-procastrinators if you overload their capacity and observe them switching to the 'highest pressure' deadline?
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  Yes, this seems like a major flaw with the grant proposal data discussed. Young professors and grad students are often really busy during work hours, and don't necessarily know all their deadlines well in advance. If you give them a six-month window to write a proposal, they'll probably work on it incrementally while fitting in as many other deadlines as they can. Obviously procrastination happens, but it's also possible to get last-minute submissions from good time management; people use the full time available to create more space to get other work done.
dexen 8y ago
Worth refreshing this serious, if tongue-in-cheek paper: Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf ``We are writing this sentence two days before the deadline. Unfortunately that sentence (and this one) are among the ﬁrst that we have written. How could we have delayed so much when we have known about this deadline for months? (...)''
jakebaker 8y ago
I’ve mentioned it before but a near magical solution for my procrastination is an app developed by a friend called Focusmate [1]. You pair with a partner and then have a shared co-working session via a video chat. Something about the other person being “present” dramatically improves my ability to go immediately into a flow state. [1] www.focusmate.com
pnutjam 8y ago
bookmarking this to read later...
naasking 8y ago
Is it a universal law of procrastination, or a universal law of hesitation/perfectionism? Submissions close to the deadline could also be due to people continuously refining their submission, and not because the work hasn't actually been done. People are just hesitating to submit because they want to optimize their chance at success. Real procrastination has a different character I think, speaking as a terrible procrastinator myself. Although hesitation/perfectionism is definitely a part of it.
alexkrycek 8y ago
There can be a deep connection between procrastination and anxiety. The following article definitely rang true for me: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-practice/201303/6-tips-overcoming-anxiety-related-procrastination?amp https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-practice/201303/6...
- ElijahLynn 8y ago
  That article resonated with me as well, thanks for sharing. I added her book The Anxiety Toolkit to my reading list.
1_player 8y ago
There's so much research about procrastination, and any everybody does it, in some form or another. Is procrastinating the norm and being driven the exception? Is something "wrong" with people that are more often than not doing everything on time? Maybe raised in a certain way, or exhibiting uncommon neural patterns. Doing research on why people procrastinate might be like researching why people aren't running as fast as Usain Bolt.
- hyder_m29 8y ago
  Our bodies have evolved to survive rather than sit around crunching reports.
romwell 8y ago
On that note, a relevant read is the following: Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators[1] (Michael A. Bender, Raphael Clifford, Kostas Tsichlas). The paper assumes a linear productivity increase towards the deadline (note: the article proposes a hyperbolic relation), and solves the scheduling problem given this constraint. The paper considers offline and online scheduling cases, and concludes with the following: "It is now several hours later, just minutes before the deadline. We were searching for the ideal way to end the paper and circumstances have unfortunately provided the answer. A campus-wide power failure at Stony Brook has cut two hours from our last-minute working time and highlights the difficulties of online scheduling for procrastinators." [1]https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0606067 https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0606067

163 points by brahmwg 8y ago

burnte 8y ago

I'll read this later.

gitgud 8y ago
I'll leave an insightful comment later.
- vinod1073 8y ago
  I'll share the article later! :D
  - akskos 8y ago
    I'll think of some clever joke to add here later
sideshowb 8y ago
I'm reading it straight away. In lieu of doing something else.

baxtr 8y ago

TL;DR There is a law for pressure before deadlines. The formula is 1/r where r is the “distance” i.e. time left to an event.

sporkologist 8y ago
I think mine's more like 1/r^2.
- BobbyTable 8y ago
  And maybe add an +1 so its always offiset to miss the target, and deadline appearing before reaching peak productivity
hxchen 8y ago
This should be on the top! Time savior.
hannasanarion 8y ago
It's almost like the thing that people regularly describe with a "pressure" metaphor is similar to pressure.

Starwatcher2001 8y ago

Does the date when a student hands in a piece of work (which seems to be what they are measuring) corrolate with when they actually did the work? It seems to me that a student who did the work early, but then sat on it for some reason (maybe to polish it), is very different to one who did the work at the last minute - even if they handed it in on the same day.

Bartweiss 8y ago
That was one issue that stood out about the claim that most NSF proposals are submitted shortly before deadline. Even if you have a proposal 95% complete months early, there's no real benefit to submitting it, and some value to waiting - to polish, or perhaps to amend the proposal for a changing world. I've certainly seen professors go back and rework proposals at the last minute because someone else had published related work they needed to account for. The other issue that came to mind is that people finish work near deadlines with procrastinating, because work takes time. If there are two proposal deadlines per year, and the average person takes ~6 months to write a proposal, you'd see a normal distribution ramp-up of submissions, and never see the declining count because those people missed the deadline.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jonathanstrange 8y ago

I must be an atypical procrastinator then, because I only procrastinate activities that are less pleasant than others but have no deadline at all. If there is a deadline, I tend to do the work as early as possible, usually much earlier than my colleagues, so the pressure goes away and I can procrastinate about the activities whose time I self-manage again. I've found out over the years that the #1 reason for delaying self-managed tasks is that they are too big, appear like huge obstacles, which causes me to turn to the easy and fun creative parts of other tasks. Divide-and-conquer works fine to alleviate this problem, and I also use a bit of GTD when I'm stressed in order to increase the time available for slacking. Needless to say this only applies to activities that are slightly unpleasant, there are also aspects of my work that don't cause me to procrastinate at all. There seem to be different types of procrastinators, or at least two of them: those that procrastinate when they have to manage time themselves those that procrastinate when there are fixed deadlines. I've never understood the second type, to be honest. If you have a deadline, why not just do it quickly, so you're done with it?

letsgetphysITal 8y ago
That's not procrastination. That's efficiency.
- jonathanstrange 8y ago
  I wish it was. What I mean is that when there is no external deadline there is a habit of starting project 1, when it gets difficult, then start project 2, when it gets difficult, then start project 3, ... Both in work and with my hobbies, the end result is that there are many unfinished projects. The ones that get finished are usually very good, because a lot of thought went into them, but the ratio finished:unfinished is like 1:4. Similar to investment funding, but in the personal case it seems to be a form of procrastination. I tend to switch projects when the one I'm working on becomes difficult. I admire the people who can work sequentially, project 1 -> finished, project 2 -> finished, etc.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  It is procrastination when the thing without a specific deadline needs to be done eventually for your own good, like seeing a dentist or making craigslist listings for clutter, or the next step on a side project, or calling for a warranty repair on a piece of mildly broken furniture. These are things that have been on my to-do list for 11 months.

ollin 8y ago

From my own retrospective notes, tasks that are "dangerous" (w.r.t. planning) are: * Administrative; i.e. my brain doesn't anticipate any tangible end product or outcome upon completion, and... * Free of a strict, externally imposed deadline, and... * Impossible to complete in one sitting, usually because... * The method to complete them isn't clear, but it... * Probably involves doing lots of experiments, research, contacting people, etc., and... * The optimal time to start work has already passed. I doubt these are universal, but I've found it useful to be able to recognize tasks like these as a separate class from normal work, rather than being surprised when they turn out to be different.

criddell 8y ago
Does it impact hobbies as well as work? For example, something like practicing a musical instrument seems like it would hit all of your danger points.
- ollin 8y ago
  The key points regarding hobbies are the first ("administrative") and third ("impossible to complete") points. The hobbies that I've had which were successful have all been ones where I was intentional about (and capable of) generating incremental, tangible progress within a single session. The hobbies I've failed at are those where I tried to work on a large goal without any rewarding subgoals, and eventually couldn't make my brain work for nothing anymore. For me, at least, it still applies.
gnulinux 8y ago
> The optimal time to start work has already passed. This is affecting my life really bad. I've been trying to fight this for years with next to no success. If I pass the optimal time to start a task I find it almost impossible to start after that point. Say, sometimes I know that if I do it a bit faster and maybe sloppier I can still make the deadline but for some unknown reason it's so hard to do it and I go back to procrastinating. Another similar problem I have with procrastination is "soft deadlines". When something has a deadline but it's not the end of the world if the deadline is passed (say you can still accomplish the task 2 days later and it'll be ok) I find it incredibly hard to do it after the soft deadline. You have no idea how many troubles I collected this way since I kept procrastinating sending important documents to people, government etc... If I send them the day they're due everything is fine; if something comes up, say like scanner breaks, I forget etc... it takes months for me to send that document.

PeterStuer 8y ago

As a procastrinator I get it, but wouldn't you get the same data from non-procastrinators if you overload their capacity and observe them switching to the 'highest pressure' deadline?

Bartweiss 8y ago
Yes, this seems like a major flaw with the grant proposal data discussed. Young professors and grad students are often really busy during work hours, and don't necessarily know all their deadlines well in advance. If you give them a six-month window to write a proposal, they'll probably work on it incrementally while fitting in as many other deadlines as they can. Obviously procrastination happens, but it's also possible to get last-minute submissions from good time management; people use the full time available to create more space to get other work done.

dexen 8y ago

Worth refreshing this serious, if tongue-in-cheek paper: Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf ``We are writing this sentence two days before the deadline. Unfortunately that sentence (and this one) are among the ﬁrst that we have written. How could we have delayed so much when we have known about this deadline for months? (...)''

jakebaker 8y ago

I’ve mentioned it before but a near magical solution for my procrastination is an app developed by a friend called Focusmate [1]. You pair with a partner and then have a shared co-working session via a video chat. Something about the other person being “present” dramatically improves my ability to go immediately into a flow state. [1] www.focusmate.com

pnutjam 8y ago

bookmarking this to read later...

naasking 8y ago

Is it a universal law of procrastination, or a universal law of hesitation/perfectionism? Submissions close to the deadline could also be due to people continuously refining their submission, and not because the work hasn't actually been done. People are just hesitating to submit because they want to optimize their chance at success. Real procrastination has a different character I think, speaking as a terrible procrastinator myself. Although hesitation/perfectionism is definitely a part of it.

alexkrycek 8y ago

There can be a deep connection between procrastination and anxiety. The following article definitely rang true for me: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-practice/201303/6-tips-overcoming-anxiety-related-procrastination?amp https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-practice/201303/6...

ElijahLynn 8y ago
That article resonated with me as well, thanks for sharing. I added her book The Anxiety Toolkit to my reading list.

1_player 8y ago

There's so much research about procrastination, and any everybody does it, in some form or another. Is procrastinating the norm and being driven the exception? Is something "wrong" with people that are more often than not doing everything on time? Maybe raised in a certain way, or exhibiting uncommon neural patterns. Doing research on why people procrastinate might be like researching why people aren't running as fast as Usain Bolt.

hyder_m29 8y ago
Our bodies have evolved to survive rather than sit around crunching reports.

romwell 8y ago

On that note, a relevant read is the following: Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators[1] (Michael A. Bender, Raphael Clifford, Kostas Tsichlas). The paper assumes a linear productivity increase towards the deadline (note: the article proposes a hyperbolic relation), and solves the scheduling problem given this constraint. The paper considers offline and online scheduling cases, and concludes with the following: "It is now several hours later, just minutes before the deadline. We were searching for the ideal way to end the paper and circumstances have unfortunately provided the answer. A campus-wide power failure at Stony Brook has cut two hours from our last-minute working time and highlights the difficulties of online scheduling for procrastinators." [1]https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0606067 https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0606067