17 ms·

The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

389 points by melling 8y ago

padobson 8y ago
Akrasia and Enkrateia remind me of the dual nature of humans that St. Paul describes in Romans: We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. Romans 7:14-25 Paul is writing here about the battle between a person's moral ideals and how their desires conflict and often overrun those ideals, admitting that even he is a hypocrite who does things he otherwise condemns. I like how procrastination is discussed in forums like HN. We can recognize it as something keeping us from our goals, but can also empathize with each other in failing to master it. This is how I see the early church's approach to sin in St. Paul's era, or at least that was the point he was making in Romans. In the same way, we can combat procrastination as a community by sharing our stories and providing the insight to overcome it. This is my favorite part of community, be it in church or on HN or elsewhere.
- solipsism 8y ago
  It's easy (or at least easier) to be open and honest about our faults and failures when no one is telling us we'll burn in eternal damnation for them.
  - frockington 8y ago
    That's not really a thing in Christianity, Jesus had that whole "let he without sin cast the first stone" thing or whatever it was
    - rosser 8y ago
      It may not have a thing for Jesus, or the Bible, but it's very much a thing for Christianity. Yet another illustration of the fundamental divergence of that institution from its origins.
      - mistermann 8y ago
        > but it's very much a thing for Christianity I wonder if you might explain what exactly you mean by this, and to what degree you believe it is a thing. And to be very, very clear: I'm asking this absolutely sincerely. Not in a clever or trolling manner, but rather, I am asking in an epistemological sense.
        rosser 8y ago
        I grew up in a couple different Christian traditions, and have known and spoken about this question with people with backgrounds, and/or who currently worship in many others. I have friends and family who follow every denomination from Catholic, to Lutheran, to Evangelical, between, and beyond. The notions of Hell and damnation not uncommon, though certainly not universal, in the practice of Christianity, particularly among the laity. Doctrinally, it's less overt, especially among the more liberal traditions, but even there (I'm specifically thinking of Episcopalian and Methodist lineages, here), it's not unheard of. EDIT: ...in my experience.
        mistermann 8y ago
        I think the general theme is going to be ever-present in any Christian religious teachings, but in your experience, do you feel like "heavy emphasis" was put on that particular idea, and especially as a motivating factor for controlling behavior or allegiance....as a tool to manipulate? And if it isn't confidential, the people you're familiar with, is that restricted to a fairly tight geographical region, or quite spread out? I'm wondering if perhaps it is the case that there are somewhat distinct regional flavors of religious teaching. If this was the case, with a generally more mobile populace, families often tending to live further apart, one would expect this to decrease over time, especially with young people who've moved away from family, although any number of things could cause a change in younger generations.
- danieljohnson 8y ago
  Amen.
- Scarblac 8y ago
  The only problem is that I am procrastinating by being on HN, and if I read about combating procrastination here then I can even fool myself into thinking I'm doing something useful.
  - padobson 8y ago
    Yeah, I definitely hear that. It's very easy to fool yourself into believing that something is helpful when it's not. That said, I've definitely gotten a ton of benefit from reading HN. It's a great resource for discovering new tech, startups, research, and many other things. If you find part of it beneficial, maybe you should work it into your daily plan/schedule/checklist or however you might organize the productive parts of your day. Put it after a high-friction task, something you have trouble starting. Then reading HN is like a reward for completing that high-friction task. Then you can contribute what you learned to a blog post or comment thread on HN, thus perpetuating the community.
piinbinary 8y ago
I think that one of the things that causes "starting friction" for me is the fear of getting distracted/interrupted after I start a task. To get myself to start that kind of task, it seems to be useful to hole myself up somewhere that people can't find me and turn off slack. Then starting the task becomes easy. On the other hand, personal projects seem easy to start but hard to finish. After working on something for a few weeks it ends up on the back-burner, often never to see the light of day again. I wonder if an effect similar to Akrasia is at play, or if that is due to something different.
- beat 8y ago
  It's related, I think. You're working on something that will take a while, and even though you're doing the work, it's still delayed gratification. Worse, it's often the schlep, as pg puts it - that unenjoyable middle ground of work work work with no tangible reward. But the new thing... it's shiny. It's immediately gratifying to say "I'm going to start on this new thing that won't suck like the old thing sucks."
vlasev 8y ago
This can be modeled fairly easy. Let's say we want to do X. In our estimation, it would take some amount of work E divided into effort P over time t (so E = Pt), to borrow language from physics. We estimate this quantity and set out to work on the task. We expect that we'll get there at a rate of dE/dt = P, but we don't. In reality, we most often tend to achieve less per unit of time. I'd say it's when the effort required is more than P that we are most vulnerable to quitting on a task. But what if we've put no effort into the task yet? Well, I think procrastination of this sort is modeled well by our experience (Victor Hugo was an experienced author by that point). If in the past we've done some tasks and they've taken significantly longer time and energy than we initially thought, even if we don't consciously remember, our bodies will in some sense. I think what's happening is that there is a payoff based on the difference between effort P and required effort P' to finish in the same time. When P - P' > 0, we feel superb. When P - P' < 0, we feel like quitting. You'd think one's perception would be improved after writing a dozen books, but maybe that's part of the reason a person starts writing another book after the first. A little bit of forgetfulness. But the brain doesn't forget. So, internally, it knows. So we have procrastination. --- Example 1: Losing 20 lbs. How hard should it be?! A good goal to aim for if you do everything right and want to have a sustainable weight loss is 1 lb/wk. But realistically, it ends up being closer to 0.5 lb/wk for most. Would you spend something like 6 months to a year losing 20 lbs? What if there were more pounds to be lost? Now, if you go into this optimistically and not know this, you might lose a few pounds quickly and feel good, but then utterly quit when the real hard times come. (This mirrors any project that is easy to start but hard to complete, like html parsing) --- Example 2: You intuitively know that a phone call to your phone company can help you save some money on your phone bill, but whether consciously or not, you somehow remember that it will take you 1-2 hours and a lot of emotional energy. You put this phone call off until it causes you enough emotional pain on the daily that putting it off by another day is as bad as the phone call itself. (This is an example of not even starting a project due to the perceived pain) This highlights another thing. You can accumulate a lot of pain procrastinating on this call, but it's only the day to day pain that seems to matter in this strange internal calculation, because past pain is discounted a lot. --- Example 3: (A bit tongue in cheek but...) Sleep. Let's say you've had some difficulty falling asleep over the last week. You perceive it as something that takes half an hour of "effort" to fall asleep. Naturally, you procrastinate until that effort is low enough, but this usually leads to too little sleep in the end. --- Is there actionable advice from this? Yes. The more real-life knowledge you have of yourself, your projects (both successful and dropped), the more realistic your estimates can be. If you then bump up your estimates based on how off you were about them in the past, maybe then you'll get a glimpse on how much real work it'll take. Would you still start that project? Maybe you'll end up starting fewer projects but dropping fewer before the finish line.
gregknicholson 8y ago
(I was mildly disappointed to note that sans-serif font on James Clear's site is not Clear Sans.)
torstenvl 8y ago
Ha! Immediately I thought, "This article seems interesting, I'm going to favorite it to read later!" Oh, wait...
olooney 8y ago
"Reduce friction to start" is a huge one for me. Especially if "starting" is a bunch of busywork like writing a Dockerfile, initializing a git repo, creating package metadata files, etc. I've found it helpful to just dive in and start writing the "fun" part first and turn it into a "real" project later. Usually after an hour of coding or less I feel I've created something of value that I want to save and reuse so there's no motivational problem.
- thaumaturgy 8y ago
  Yes, and the essay missed a related point that I've found to be really valuable: reducing the scope of the project is a great way to reduce the starting friction. So, if I need to build a new application or work on a home improvement project, and I plan in advance the entire scope of the project, all the way out to the end some number of weeks or months from now, starting it requires more commitment and becomes more daunting. But if instead I chunk it down into smaller, self-contained tasks, those tasks are maybe a day's worth of work individually and not so bad. I can start one in the morning and feel better about the state of things by the afternoon.
- bernhardwenzel 8y ago
  yes, I can relate to this 100%. That's why I have become a huge fan of using Vagrant in (my) tutorials. Just clone and type "vagrant up" and everything is installed and ready to jump right into coding. I love coding, I almost loathe config and admin stuff (especially if installing doesn't work arrr)
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  That has always been the biggest turn off for me as well. Setting up everything takes too long and I like just jumping straight into the project. My gym is right behind my desk, I have 0 excuses to workout almost everyday
  - fyfy18 8y ago
    Could you elaborate more on your workouts? And how well it’s working out?
codeafin 8y ago
Would recommend the book "War of Art" for those who enjoy reading about this kind of topic. A short, fun read that names the effect "Resistance".
nine_k 8y ago
Can't fail to link the classic work with nice pictures, explaining apparently the same thing: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti... (The above is the first in a series of 3 posts, IIRC, including a post on effective beating of procrastination.)
RobertRoberts 8y ago
"All procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination" Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, was an amazing audio book, where the author mentions that it's short so the audiobook itself does not become a tool of procrastination for the listener. :) "Just Get Started" (step 1) is something I still tell myself. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18079767-solving-the-procrastination-puzzle https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18079767-solving-the-pro... The audiobook is on youtube (not sure if a legal copy), this link skips the 17 min intro. (link in the comments) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I6nGw2GeU0&t=1030s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I6nGw2GeU0&t=1030s
j1elo 8y ago
Through years of reading articles about performance and productivity, I had kind of extracted those same conclusions and over time have given those recommendations to people around me with procrastination issues. However, I had never read a short article that summarized the ideas in such a concise and well written form, very informative but at the same time very easy to read. So a big thank you to the author for this piece. I'll be linking it to several people.
trukterious 8y ago
>Time inconsistency refers to the tendency of the human brain to value immediate rewards more highly than future rewards. To me it seems this sort of reasoning suffers from the homuncular fallacy. Who is placing value on the rewards: are some rewards 'rewarded' more highly than others? What about those rewards, etc. >When you make plans for yourself — like setting a goal to lose weight or write a book or learn a language — you are actually making plans for your future self. Yes, you're making a prediction on the basis of imperfect self-knowledge. And that's before even considering creativity, which by definition is unpredictable. So for example booking a plane flight is one thing and writing a novel is another. It isn't merely a matter of blinkered self-control: one has to be distractable to go in new directions.
- j1elo 8y ago
  > Who is placing value on the rewards: are some rewards 'rewarded' more highly than others? I guess your own brain by means of producing dopamine? And to the second question, obviously would depend on the amount of dopamine that gets generated (if that's at all how the rewarding effect of that substance works on the brain)
beat 8y ago
Useful things for those in the struggle... Deep Work, by Cal Newport. An excellent book on how to work on really big ideas/projects effectively, without losing your humanity in the process. This is a must-read for anyone serious about work. Pomodoro Technique. This is well-documented with lots of apps and tools online, but it's pretty simple. Set a 25 minute timer. Work, without interruption, for 25 minutes. When the timer goes off, do not-work for 5 minutes - exercise, web surf, whatever. When that timer goes off, set another 25. It's nice because it does the boundary stuff this article talks about in a manageable way. It's not "I'm going to work hard all week", but rather "I'm going to work hard for 25 minutes".
- amorphous 8y ago
  My biggest problem I have with deep work is not that it makes undoubtedly sense and leads to interesting results but to find what to work on. I can't find my deep work. Finding a niche and sticking to it is much harder than performing deep work.
  - amorphous 8y ago
    honest question, why does this get downvoted?
    - beat 8y ago
      Beats me. I mostly get downvoted for violating the political status quo of "What's good for young educated white men is good for everyone" that drives HN. But downvotes happen for all sorts of weird reasons I don't understand.
  - nbeleski 8y ago
    Choosing somethind to dedicate time and effort is consistently one of the hardest decisions one can take. Choosing something (or sometimes someone) can mean you are giving up on an (almost) infinite number of other options. I encouter this pretty frequently between people getting into serious cientific research.
  - 8y ago
PunchTornado 8y ago
Does anyone have any advice on how to get started doing something productive at work when you've got no tasks? I feel so guilty spending endless time on reddit an HN.
- thaumaturgy 8y ago
  You probably have forgotten about some past things that you wished you had done that would make your job easier. So keep a personal, easy-to-access log of some sort that you can quickly add notes to while you're busy with other tasks. During downtime, come back to your log and knock a few things off the list. A good task for right now would be to find whatever log you think would work best for you, and then try to think of something to add to it.
- mroll 8y ago
  Ask the question “How can I make the company better right now?” Maybe there is some documentation that needs to be written, or some small bug you ran across the other day, etc
  - PunchTornado 8y ago
    sorry, I meant productive for me, not for the company
    - cellularmitosis 8y ago
      Investing in skills as a developer is a great way to benefit both yourself and your company. You have a great gift -- that of "free time at work". I had lots of this in a former life as a sysadmin, and I squandered 90% of it, and I deeply regret all of those micro-decisions to surf the web instead of learning a skill. Find problems which interest you (for me, that's currently lexers, parsers, lisp, code visualization, tools to make tools to make tools, etc), or parts of the "stack" which you never fully understood (In college we never actually went over how a C function call works, how to read stack frames, etc). If you don't have any problems at hand to fuel your curiosity, maybe try upping the signal-to-noise ratio of your junk food -- read a programming book instead of reading HN. Small, consistent investments are more important over the long run (30 min / day for months rather than a week-long fugue state). If books aren't your thing, find a structured series of exercises which you can work through. Project Euler is great. Make-a-lisp is great as well (github.com/kanaka/mal). Turn what you learn into blog posts, github gists, or flash cards -- distill your knowledge into easily digestible parts so that you can catch yourself up to speed quickly 6 months from now when you need that topic again. These won't create immediate benefit, but five years from now you will be tremendously more valuable.
andy_wrote 8y ago
I like that Victor Hugo's 19th century version of "deleting apps from your phone" is "deleting your clothes". I have found that an easy, milder nudge, for either computer or mobile device, is to remain logged off of things by default and explicitly log out whenever you're done.
- jibreel 8y ago
  This is how i kicked facebook out of my life 3 years ago. I made it a habit to only log in to facebook in incognito mode, i would have to log back in every time i close the session, and that was enough to remove it completely from my life.
melling 8y ago
HN changed their algorithm? I posted this a day ago and still got credit. This is the first time. I saw this term in the Economics: The User’s Guide by Ha-Joon Chang, which was recommended by HN readers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17590984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17590984
bernardino 8y ago
What helped me get down to deep work was doing away with the nonessentials, i.e. a lot of physical material things, all forms of entertainment, the internet especially, inner clutter like comparing myself to others, etc. Seneca once noted in his Moral letters to Lucilius, “Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.” I found this was applicable to nearly everything: my digital life (think Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism), my physical life (think Henry David Thoreau's Walden), my inner life (think Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet), etc. In short: Getting down to my bare self, helped me get down to deep work.
- ckosidows 8y ago
  I feel that when I eliminate forms of entertainment from my life or impose limits I can often go too far and then swing back in the other direction. Your comment seems to indicate you manage your vices similarly. Do you also recede back into them or has this not been a problem for you?
  - bernardino 8y ago
    No, I definitely resort back to entertainment every once in a while. I wouldn't go as far to call it a problem though. I suppose entertainment in low doses is fine but entertainment as the main staple of our diet is no good. In terms of deep work, I think it's important to see the side of spectrum of how entertainment only exists to stimulate a neurological response. For instance, think about always refreshing a site we are particularly fond of when we know implicitly that we should not be doing that and we should be doing something else. But hey, it's increasingly hard do so, especially now when technology is growing exponentially. There's no doubt it's difficult, we know that. It takes real mental fortitude. But this is where doing away with the nonessentials comes into play - when you do so, what's left is us, face to face with what we have to do. If anything above makes sense. All this talk about entertainment reminds me of David Foster Wallace on Entertainment Culture: https://tonyreinke.com/2018/03/05/david-foster-wallace-on-entertainment-culture/ https://tonyreinke.com/2018/03/05/david-foster-wallace-on-en... A few good bits: > "It just, I guess my point is, right now and I think the next 15 or 20 years are going to be a very scary and sort of very exciting time when we have to sort of reevaluate our relationship to fun and pleasure and entertainment because it’s going to get so good, and so high pressure, that we’re going to have to forge some kind of attitude toward it that lets us live." > "what it’s going to be like and what sort of resources we’re going to have to cultivate in ourselves and in our citizenry to keep from sort of dying on couches. I mean, maybe that sounds silly, but the stuff’s going to get better and better and better and better and it’s not clear to me that we, as a culture, are teaching ourselves or our children what we’re going to say “yes” and “no” to."
m3mpp 8y ago
We procrastinate because most of the jobs we do are completely mindless, repetitive and boring, and we have to spend so much time doing them. Good luck finding a method to fight that... Unless you're rich and the owner of your own time, in this case you don't need any "motivational" tool. Edit: lobotomy is another solution of course, using pills or any kind of drugs that massively reduce the amount of neurons in the brain.
- whamlastxmas 8y ago
  Adderall is very common I think because it makes it much more tolerable to sit and do boring work.
  - m3mpp 8y ago
    Yes, and twitter, facebook, 24/7 news, computer games, everything we can to escape the simple fact that life, for most of us is just plain boring and meaningless.
- AWildC182 8y ago
  And meaningless. Who cares about a stupid UI that 3 users are going to ever see and will be deleted at the next rewrite? To be productive, work has to be rewarding and for it to be rewarding, it has to have meaning.
  - m3mpp 8y ago
    Oh yes, and it's a shame because software development used to be meaningful, until accountants took over the world...
nabla9 8y ago
Douglas Andams had huge prolems with the same issue. He was once locked in a hotel suite a for two weeks by his publisher Sonny Mehta. 'It was simple. I sat at the desk and typed and Sonny sat in an armchair and glowered.' "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by" – Douglas Adams
mschuller 8y ago
Wasn't the marshmallow experiment this articles argument is mostly referring to recently debunked? https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jun/01/famed-impulse-control-marshmallow-test-fails-in-new-research https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jun/01/famed-impu...
fossuser 8y ago
I think the design your future actions is a big part of this. I've had some success with framing two modes, Architect Mode and Implementation Mode. Architect Mode is when you sit down and make a plan to achieve a long term challenging goal (losing a lot of weight, getting in shape, learning something new, etc.). It's where you set up a routine and plan for what you're specifically going to do each day in order to do this. Being able to separate this plan from when you're actually enacting it is important because it removes the choice and doesn't allow comparisons of an immediate reward with an abstract distant reward. Implementation Mode has to follow what was set up by the architect and is not allowed to make decisions - this is because you're compromised and unreliable when comparing an immediate reward (do I eat that slice of cheesecake?) to a long term abstract reward and it's very easy to rationalize why what you want to do is actually okay (it's only an extra 400 calories anyway - today can be a cheat day etc.). A big part of succeeding with implementation is stacking success (doing the thing every day without missing any day) and picking a small enough starting point. Another is not putting yourself in positions where you're easily tempted to fail (don't buy oreos and have them in the house). Once you get more in the rhythm of things you are safer in more difficult environments. When Implementation mode fails it means the architect needs to reevaluate why and make changes - it doesn't help to ruminate or beat yourself up about the failure. Even with this mindset things are difficult, but I've found it to be the most successful for long term goals when they're clearly defined - most of it is getting the psychology right - then the behavior can follow.
- padobson 8y ago
  Love this. Especially this part: When Implementation mode fails it means the architect needs to reevaluate why and make changes Every plan I've ever put together to improve myself or my life has failed on initial implementation. It wasn't until I expected the first iteration of the plan to fail that I learned how to succeed. Plan. Fail. Tweak. Retry. The goal usually doesn't need to change, but the plan often does.
  - fossuser 8y ago
    Yeah - I agree, I think we're working with hardware that has biological rewards training us to do things we may not want to over a long time horizon. Separating architect/implementation allows you to plan free of the pull of the immediate reward. Accepting failure as part of the process and recognizing that it's not impossible to succeed seems like a big piece of getting the mindset right. We can overcome these issues, but it's not an easy thing to do.
whack 8y ago
I have a pet theory than the reason people procrastinate, is because they don't concretely identify their future selves, as being the "same person" as their present self. Rather, they view their future self as an abstract person, more akin to a friend, than self. This level of relatedness varies with time as well. People identify very strongly with their future self from tomorrow, perhaps akin to their best friend. But they identify their future self from years/decades later, more akin to a distant cousin. From this perspective, procrastination becomes analogous to selfishness. A very "altruistic" person would prioritize their future self to the same extent that they would prioritize their present desires. Perhaps even more so. Whereas a more "self centered" person sees their future self as a stranger whose desires are inconsequential to their present selves. What would be really interesting to consider, is the correlation between "future altruism" and traditional altruism. One can imagine these two being completely uncorrelated, the same way a racist person can be completely uncaring towards other races whilst still being altruistic within their own race. But if there is indeed a stronger correlation, that would be a very interesting finding.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  I doubt it's that complex. Occam's razor suggests a simpler explanation: there is discomfort in starting a task, therefore people delay starting that task. It's a pain avoidance strategy, which sounds much more likely than some self-referential, future-self theory.
  - beat 8y ago
    Well, why don't we overcome the discomfort? We overcome it for other things. Lack of identification with future-self means we don't see harm our current actions inflict on our future self as harm to ourselves.
    - Sangermaine 8y ago
      You're again overcomplicating. We don't overcome the discomfort because it's discomfort for ourselves now. A discomfort in the hand overcomes two in the bush. We generally only put up with discomfort when we have no other choice or something is forcing us to deal with it rather than putting it off. Given the choice, most people avoid or put off any discomfort as much as possible.
tunesmith 8y ago
The existence of akrasia is one of those things that many people accept as reasonable, but if truly adopted as an axiom and reasoned from in a consistent manner, would lead to far different conclusions than we've adopted as a society. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/3/5/17080470/addiction-opioids-moral-blame-choices-medication-crutches-philosophy https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/3/5/17080470/addiction...
redmaverick 8y ago
This sounds like an excuse and maybe it is. This could be rooted in biology. Just like people are right handed or left handed and some are more organized and others less so. People are wired differently.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
southerndrift 8y ago
>Fighting Akrasia Fighting akrasia is silly. A-krasia means "lacking command" [1]. How do you fight something that is not there? The question has to be: How do you create krasia? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia
gloriousduke 8y ago
Why do we set out to do something? In many cases it's because we've been told achievement is important since a very young age. But since all accomplishments will presumably be lost at the time of the heat death of the Universe, maybe it's more important to focus only on tasks if your inner voice requires such dedication for your own happiness/sanity. If you never get to enjoy life because you're constantly working at achieving what is required mostly by external influences, you may be wasting your existence. "This above all: to thine own self be true."
madeuptempacct 8y ago
For me, it's mostly realizing that whatever I am doing is pretty pointless. As I am in my 10th hour of writing an article on, let's say, prototypal inheritance in javascript, I realize it's totally unnecessary and no one cares, so I might as well be relaxing.
Vektorweg 8y ago
I wouldn't have read the article, if I wouldn't procrastinate right now.
rhlala 8y ago
I would add balance, trying too hard is usually a bad idea.
swerveonem 8y ago
Because you get strange stack overflows.

389 points by melling 8y ago

Akrasia and Enkrateia remind me of the dual nature of humans that St. Paul describes in Romans: We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. Romans 7:14-25 Paul is writing here about the battle between a person's moral ideals and how their desires conflict and often overrun those ideals, admitting that even he is a hypocrite who does things he otherwise condemns. I like how procrastination is discussed in forums like HN. We can recognize it as something keeping us from our goals, but can also empathize with each other in failing to master it. This is how I see the early church's approach to sin in St. Paul's era, or at least that was the point he was making in Romans. In the same way, we can combat procrastination as a community by sharing our stories and providing the insight to overcome it. This is my favorite part of community, be it in church or on HN or elsewhere.

solipsism 8y ago
It's easy (or at least easier) to be open and honest about our faults and failures when no one is telling us we'll burn in eternal damnation for them.
- frockington 8y ago
  That's not really a thing in Christianity, Jesus had that whole "let he without sin cast the first stone" thing or whatever it was
  - rosser 8y ago
    It may not have a thing for Jesus, or the Bible, but it's very much a thing for Christianity. Yet another illustration of the fundamental divergence of that institution from its origins.
    - mistermann 8y ago
      > but it's very much a thing for Christianity I wonder if you might explain what exactly you mean by this, and to what degree you believe it is a thing. And to be very, very clear: I'm asking this absolutely sincerely. Not in a clever or trolling manner, but rather, I am asking in an epistemological sense.
      - rosser 8y ago
        I grew up in a couple different Christian traditions, and have known and spoken about this question with people with backgrounds, and/or who currently worship in many others. I have friends and family who follow every denomination from Catholic, to Lutheran, to Evangelical, between, and beyond. The notions of Hell and damnation not uncommon, though certainly not universal, in the practice of Christianity, particularly among the laity. Doctrinally, it's less overt, especially among the more liberal traditions, but even there (I'm specifically thinking of Episcopalian and Methodist lineages, here), it's not unheard of. EDIT: ...in my experience.
        mistermann 8y ago
        I think the general theme is going to be ever-present in any Christian religious teachings, but in your experience, do you feel like "heavy emphasis" was put on that particular idea, and especially as a motivating factor for controlling behavior or allegiance....as a tool to manipulate? And if it isn't confidential, the people you're familiar with, is that restricted to a fairly tight geographical region, or quite spread out? I'm wondering if perhaps it is the case that there are somewhat distinct regional flavors of religious teaching. If this was the case, with a generally more mobile populace, families often tending to live further apart, one would expect this to decrease over time, especially with young people who've moved away from family, although any number of things could cause a change in younger generations.
danieljohnson 8y ago
Amen.
Scarblac 8y ago
The only problem is that I am procrastinating by being on HN, and if I read about combating procrastination here then I can even fool myself into thinking I'm doing something useful.
- padobson 8y ago
  Yeah, I definitely hear that. It's very easy to fool yourself into believing that something is helpful when it's not. That said, I've definitely gotten a ton of benefit from reading HN. It's a great resource for discovering new tech, startups, research, and many other things. If you find part of it beneficial, maybe you should work it into your daily plan/schedule/checklist or however you might organize the productive parts of your day. Put it after a high-friction task, something you have trouble starting. Then reading HN is like a reward for completing that high-friction task. Then you can contribute what you learned to a blog post or comment thread on HN, thus perpetuating the community.

piinbinary 8y ago

I think that one of the things that causes "starting friction" for me is the fear of getting distracted/interrupted after I start a task. To get myself to start that kind of task, it seems to be useful to hole myself up somewhere that people can't find me and turn off slack. Then starting the task becomes easy. On the other hand, personal projects seem easy to start but hard to finish. After working on something for a few weeks it ends up on the back-burner, often never to see the light of day again. I wonder if an effect similar to Akrasia is at play, or if that is due to something different.

beat 8y ago
It's related, I think. You're working on something that will take a while, and even though you're doing the work, it's still delayed gratification. Worse, it's often the schlep, as pg puts it - that unenjoyable middle ground of work work work with no tangible reward. But the new thing... it's shiny. It's immediately gratifying to say "I'm going to start on this new thing that won't suck like the old thing sucks."

vlasev 8y ago

This can be modeled fairly easy. Let's say we want to do X. In our estimation, it would take some amount of work E divided into effort P over time t (so E = Pt), to borrow language from physics. We estimate this quantity and set out to work on the task. We expect that we'll get there at a rate of dE/dt = P, but we don't. In reality, we most often tend to achieve less per unit of time. I'd say it's when the effort required is more than P that we are most vulnerable to quitting on a task. But what if we've put no effort into the task yet? Well, I think procrastination of this sort is modeled well by our experience (Victor Hugo was an experienced author by that point). If in the past we've done some tasks and they've taken significantly longer time and energy than we initially thought, even if we don't consciously remember, our bodies will in some sense. I think what's happening is that there is a payoff based on the difference between effort P and required effort P' to finish in the same time. When P - P' > 0, we feel superb. When P - P' < 0, we feel like quitting. You'd think one's perception would be improved after writing a dozen books, but maybe that's part of the reason a person starts writing another book after the first. A little bit of forgetfulness. But the brain doesn't forget. So, internally, it knows. So we have procrastination. --- Example 1: Losing 20 lbs. How hard should it be?! A good goal to aim for if you do everything right and want to have a sustainable weight loss is 1 lb/wk. But realistically, it ends up being closer to 0.5 lb/wk for most. Would you spend something like 6 months to a year losing 20 lbs? What if there were more pounds to be lost? Now, if you go into this optimistically and not know this, you might lose a few pounds quickly and feel good, but then utterly quit when the real hard times come. (This mirrors any project that is easy to start but hard to complete, like html parsing) --- Example 2: You intuitively know that a phone call to your phone company can help you save some money on your phone bill, but whether consciously or not, you somehow remember that it will take you 1-2 hours and a lot of emotional energy. You put this phone call off until it causes you enough emotional pain on the daily that putting it off by another day is as bad as the phone call itself. (This is an example of not even starting a project due to the perceived pain) This highlights another thing. You can accumulate a lot of pain procrastinating on this call, but it's only the day to day pain that seems to matter in this strange internal calculation, because past pain is discounted a lot. --- Example 3: (A bit tongue in cheek but...) Sleep. Let's say you've had some difficulty falling asleep over the last week. You perceive it as something that takes half an hour of "effort" to fall asleep. Naturally, you procrastinate until that effort is low enough, but this usually leads to too little sleep in the end. --- Is there actionable advice from this? Yes. The more real-life knowledge you have of yourself, your projects (both successful and dropped), the more realistic your estimates can be. If you then bump up your estimates based on how off you were about them in the past, maybe then you'll get a glimpse on how much real work it'll take. Would you still start that project? Maybe you'll end up starting fewer projects but dropping fewer before the finish line.

gregknicholson 8y ago

(I was mildly disappointed to note that sans-serif font on James Clear's site is not Clear Sans.)

torstenvl 8y ago

Ha! Immediately I thought, "This article seems interesting, I'm going to favorite it to read later!" Oh, wait...

olooney 8y ago

"Reduce friction to start" is a huge one for me. Especially if "starting" is a bunch of busywork like writing a Dockerfile, initializing a git repo, creating package metadata files, etc. I've found it helpful to just dive in and start writing the "fun" part first and turn it into a "real" project later. Usually after an hour of coding or less I feel I've created something of value that I want to save and reuse so there's no motivational problem.

thaumaturgy 8y ago
Yes, and the essay missed a related point that I've found to be really valuable: reducing the scope of the project is a great way to reduce the starting friction. So, if I need to build a new application or work on a home improvement project, and I plan in advance the entire scope of the project, all the way out to the end some number of weeks or months from now, starting it requires more commitment and becomes more daunting. But if instead I chunk it down into smaller, self-contained tasks, those tasks are maybe a day's worth of work individually and not so bad. I can start one in the morning and feel better about the state of things by the afternoon.
bernhardwenzel 8y ago
yes, I can relate to this 100%. That's why I have become a huge fan of using Vagrant in (my) tutorials. Just clone and type "vagrant up" and everything is installed and ready to jump right into coding. I love coding, I almost loathe config and admin stuff (especially if installing doesn't work arrr)
Kagerjay 8y ago
That has always been the biggest turn off for me as well. Setting up everything takes too long and I like just jumping straight into the project. My gym is right behind my desk, I have 0 excuses to workout almost everyday
- fyfy18 8y ago
  Could you elaborate more on your workouts? And how well it’s working out?

codeafin 8y ago

Would recommend the book "War of Art" for those who enjoy reading about this kind of topic. A short, fun read that names the effect "Resistance".

nine_k 8y ago

Can't fail to link the classic work with nice pictures, explaining apparently the same thing: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti... (The above is the first in a series of 3 posts, IIRC, including a post on effective beating of procrastination.)

RobertRoberts 8y ago

"All procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination" Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, was an amazing audio book, where the author mentions that it's short so the audiobook itself does not become a tool of procrastination for the listener. :) "Just Get Started" (step 1) is something I still tell myself. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18079767-solving-the-procrastination-puzzle https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18079767-solving-the-pro... The audiobook is on youtube (not sure if a legal copy), this link skips the 17 min intro. (link in the comments) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I6nGw2GeU0&t=1030s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I6nGw2GeU0&t=1030s

j1elo 8y ago

Through years of reading articles about performance and productivity, I had kind of extracted those same conclusions and over time have given those recommendations to people around me with procrastination issues. However, I had never read a short article that summarized the ideas in such a concise and well written form, very informative but at the same time very easy to read. So a big thank you to the author for this piece. I'll be linking it to several people.

trukterious 8y ago

>Time inconsistency refers to the tendency of the human brain to value immediate rewards more highly than future rewards. To me it seems this sort of reasoning suffers from the homuncular fallacy. Who is placing value on the rewards: are some rewards 'rewarded' more highly than others? What about those rewards, etc. >When you make plans for yourself — like setting a goal to lose weight or write a book or learn a language — you are actually making plans for your future self. Yes, you're making a prediction on the basis of imperfect self-knowledge. And that's before even considering creativity, which by definition is unpredictable. So for example booking a plane flight is one thing and writing a novel is another. It isn't merely a matter of blinkered self-control: one has to be distractable to go in new directions.

j1elo 8y ago
> Who is placing value on the rewards: are some rewards 'rewarded' more highly than others? I guess your own brain by means of producing dopamine? And to the second question, obviously would depend on the amount of dopamine that gets generated (if that's at all how the rewarding effect of that substance works on the brain)

beat 8y ago

Useful things for those in the struggle... Deep Work, by Cal Newport. An excellent book on how to work on really big ideas/projects effectively, without losing your humanity in the process. This is a must-read for anyone serious about work. Pomodoro Technique. This is well-documented with lots of apps and tools online, but it's pretty simple. Set a 25 minute timer. Work, without interruption, for 25 minutes. When the timer goes off, do not-work for 5 minutes - exercise, web surf, whatever. When that timer goes off, set another 25. It's nice because it does the boundary stuff this article talks about in a manageable way. It's not "I'm going to work hard all week", but rather "I'm going to work hard for 25 minutes".

amorphous 8y ago
My biggest problem I have with deep work is not that it makes undoubtedly sense and leads to interesting results but to find what to work on. I can't find my deep work. Finding a niche and sticking to it is much harder than performing deep work.
- amorphous 8y ago
  honest question, why does this get downvoted?
  - beat 8y ago
    Beats me. I mostly get downvoted for violating the political status quo of "What's good for young educated white men is good for everyone" that drives HN. But downvotes happen for all sorts of weird reasons I don't understand.
- nbeleski 8y ago
  Choosing somethind to dedicate time and effort is consistently one of the hardest decisions one can take. Choosing something (or sometimes someone) can mean you are giving up on an (almost) infinite number of other options. I encouter this pretty frequently between people getting into serious cientific research.
- 8y ago

PunchTornado 8y ago

Does anyone have any advice on how to get started doing something productive at work when you've got no tasks? I feel so guilty spending endless time on reddit an HN.

thaumaturgy 8y ago
You probably have forgotten about some past things that you wished you had done that would make your job easier. So keep a personal, easy-to-access log of some sort that you can quickly add notes to while you're busy with other tasks. During downtime, come back to your log and knock a few things off the list. A good task for right now would be to find whatever log you think would work best for you, and then try to think of something to add to it.
mroll 8y ago
Ask the question “How can I make the company better right now?” Maybe there is some documentation that needs to be written, or some small bug you ran across the other day, etc
- PunchTornado 8y ago
  sorry, I meant productive for me, not for the company
  - cellularmitosis 8y ago
    Investing in skills as a developer is a great way to benefit both yourself and your company. You have a great gift -- that of "free time at work". I had lots of this in a former life as a sysadmin, and I squandered 90% of it, and I deeply regret all of those micro-decisions to surf the web instead of learning a skill. Find problems which interest you (for me, that's currently lexers, parsers, lisp, code visualization, tools to make tools to make tools, etc), or parts of the "stack" which you never fully understood (In college we never actually went over how a C function call works, how to read stack frames, etc). If you don't have any problems at hand to fuel your curiosity, maybe try upping the signal-to-noise ratio of your junk food -- read a programming book instead of reading HN. Small, consistent investments are more important over the long run (30 min / day for months rather than a week-long fugue state). If books aren't your thing, find a structured series of exercises which you can work through. Project Euler is great. Make-a-lisp is great as well (github.com/kanaka/mal). Turn what you learn into blog posts, github gists, or flash cards -- distill your knowledge into easily digestible parts so that you can catch yourself up to speed quickly 6 months from now when you need that topic again. These won't create immediate benefit, but five years from now you will be tremendously more valuable.

andy_wrote 8y ago

I like that Victor Hugo's 19th century version of "deleting apps from your phone" is "deleting your clothes". I have found that an easy, milder nudge, for either computer or mobile device, is to remain logged off of things by default and explicitly log out whenever you're done.

jibreel 8y ago
This is how i kicked facebook out of my life 3 years ago. I made it a habit to only log in to facebook in incognito mode, i would have to log back in every time i close the session, and that was enough to remove it completely from my life.

melling 8y ago

HN changed their algorithm? I posted this a day ago and still got credit. This is the first time. I saw this term in the Economics: The User’s Guide by Ha-Joon Chang, which was recommended by HN readers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17590984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17590984

bernardino 8y ago

What helped me get down to deep work was doing away with the nonessentials, i.e. a lot of physical material things, all forms of entertainment, the internet especially, inner clutter like comparing myself to others, etc. Seneca once noted in his Moral letters to Lucilius, “Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.” I found this was applicable to nearly everything: my digital life (think Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism), my physical life (think Henry David Thoreau's Walden), my inner life (think Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet), etc. In short: Getting down to my bare self, helped me get down to deep work.

ckosidows 8y ago
I feel that when I eliminate forms of entertainment from my life or impose limits I can often go too far and then swing back in the other direction. Your comment seems to indicate you manage your vices similarly. Do you also recede back into them or has this not been a problem for you?
- bernardino 8y ago
  No, I definitely resort back to entertainment every once in a while. I wouldn't go as far to call it a problem though. I suppose entertainment in low doses is fine but entertainment as the main staple of our diet is no good. In terms of deep work, I think it's important to see the side of spectrum of how entertainment only exists to stimulate a neurological response. For instance, think about always refreshing a site we are particularly fond of when we know implicitly that we should not be doing that and we should be doing something else. But hey, it's increasingly hard do so, especially now when technology is growing exponentially. There's no doubt it's difficult, we know that. It takes real mental fortitude. But this is where doing away with the nonessentials comes into play - when you do so, what's left is us, face to face with what we have to do. If anything above makes sense. All this talk about entertainment reminds me of David Foster Wallace on Entertainment Culture: https://tonyreinke.com/2018/03/05/david-foster-wallace-on-entertainment-culture/ https://tonyreinke.com/2018/03/05/david-foster-wallace-on-en... A few good bits: > "It just, I guess my point is, right now and I think the next 15 or 20 years are going to be a very scary and sort of very exciting time when we have to sort of reevaluate our relationship to fun and pleasure and entertainment because it’s going to get so good, and so high pressure, that we’re going to have to forge some kind of attitude toward it that lets us live." > "what it’s going to be like and what sort of resources we’re going to have to cultivate in ourselves and in our citizenry to keep from sort of dying on couches. I mean, maybe that sounds silly, but the stuff’s going to get better and better and better and better and it’s not clear to me that we, as a culture, are teaching ourselves or our children what we’re going to say “yes” and “no” to."

m3mpp 8y ago

We procrastinate because most of the jobs we do are completely mindless, repetitive and boring, and we have to spend so much time doing them. Good luck finding a method to fight that... Unless you're rich and the owner of your own time, in this case you don't need any "motivational" tool. Edit: lobotomy is another solution of course, using pills or any kind of drugs that massively reduce the amount of neurons in the brain.

whamlastxmas 8y ago
Adderall is very common I think because it makes it much more tolerable to sit and do boring work.
- m3mpp 8y ago
  Yes, and twitter, facebook, 24/7 news, computer games, everything we can to escape the simple fact that life, for most of us is just plain boring and meaningless.
AWildC182 8y ago
And meaningless. Who cares about a stupid UI that 3 users are going to ever see and will be deleted at the next rewrite? To be productive, work has to be rewarding and for it to be rewarding, it has to have meaning.
- m3mpp 8y ago
  Oh yes, and it's a shame because software development used to be meaningful, until accountants took over the world...

nabla9 8y ago

Douglas Andams had huge prolems with the same issue. He was once locked in a hotel suite a for two weeks by his publisher Sonny Mehta. 'It was simple. I sat at the desk and typed and Sonny sat in an armchair and glowered.' "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by" – Douglas Adams

mschuller 8y ago

Wasn't the marshmallow experiment this articles argument is mostly referring to recently debunked? https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jun/01/famed-impulse-control-marshmallow-test-fails-in-new-research https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jun/01/famed-impu...

fossuser 8y ago

I think the design your future actions is a big part of this. I've had some success with framing two modes, Architect Mode and Implementation Mode. Architect Mode is when you sit down and make a plan to achieve a long term challenging goal (losing a lot of weight, getting in shape, learning something new, etc.). It's where you set up a routine and plan for what you're specifically going to do each day in order to do this. Being able to separate this plan from when you're actually enacting it is important because it removes the choice and doesn't allow comparisons of an immediate reward with an abstract distant reward. Implementation Mode has to follow what was set up by the architect and is not allowed to make decisions - this is because you're compromised and unreliable when comparing an immediate reward (do I eat that slice of cheesecake?) to a long term abstract reward and it's very easy to rationalize why what you want to do is actually okay (it's only an extra 400 calories anyway - today can be a cheat day etc.). A big part of succeeding with implementation is stacking success (doing the thing every day without missing any day) and picking a small enough starting point. Another is not putting yourself in positions where you're easily tempted to fail (don't buy oreos and have them in the house). Once you get more in the rhythm of things you are safer in more difficult environments. When Implementation mode fails it means the architect needs to reevaluate why and make changes - it doesn't help to ruminate or beat yourself up about the failure. Even with this mindset things are difficult, but I've found it to be the most successful for long term goals when they're clearly defined - most of it is getting the psychology right - then the behavior can follow.

padobson 8y ago
Love this. Especially this part: When Implementation mode fails it means the architect needs to reevaluate why and make changes Every plan I've ever put together to improve myself or my life has failed on initial implementation. It wasn't until I expected the first iteration of the plan to fail that I learned how to succeed. Plan. Fail. Tweak. Retry. The goal usually doesn't need to change, but the plan often does.
- fossuser 8y ago
  Yeah - I agree, I think we're working with hardware that has biological rewards training us to do things we may not want to over a long time horizon. Separating architect/implementation allows you to plan free of the pull of the immediate reward. Accepting failure as part of the process and recognizing that it's not impossible to succeed seems like a big piece of getting the mindset right. We can overcome these issues, but it's not an easy thing to do.

whack 8y ago

I have a pet theory than the reason people procrastinate, is because they don't concretely identify their future selves, as being the "same person" as their present self. Rather, they view their future self as an abstract person, more akin to a friend, than self. This level of relatedness varies with time as well. People identify very strongly with their future self from tomorrow, perhaps akin to their best friend. But they identify their future self from years/decades later, more akin to a distant cousin. From this perspective, procrastination becomes analogous to selfishness. A very "altruistic" person would prioritize their future self to the same extent that they would prioritize their present desires. Perhaps even more so. Whereas a more "self centered" person sees their future self as a stranger whose desires are inconsequential to their present selves. What would be really interesting to consider, is the correlation between "future altruism" and traditional altruism. One can imagine these two being completely uncorrelated, the same way a racist person can be completely uncaring towards other races whilst still being altruistic within their own race. But if there is indeed a stronger correlation, that would be a very interesting finding.

WhompingWindows 8y ago
I doubt it's that complex. Occam's razor suggests a simpler explanation: there is discomfort in starting a task, therefore people delay starting that task. It's a pain avoidance strategy, which sounds much more likely than some self-referential, future-self theory.
- beat 8y ago
  Well, why don't we overcome the discomfort? We overcome it for other things. Lack of identification with future-self means we don't see harm our current actions inflict on our future self as harm to ourselves.
  - Sangermaine 8y ago
    You're again overcomplicating. We don't overcome the discomfort because it's discomfort for ourselves now. A discomfort in the hand overcomes two in the bush. We generally only put up with discomfort when we have no other choice or something is forcing us to deal with it rather than putting it off. Given the choice, most people avoid or put off any discomfort as much as possible.

tunesmith 8y ago

The existence of akrasia is one of those things that many people accept as reasonable, but if truly adopted as an axiom and reasoned from in a consistent manner, would lead to far different conclusions than we've adopted as a society. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/3/5/17080470/addiction-opioids-moral-blame-choices-medication-crutches-philosophy https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/3/5/17080470/addiction...

redmaverick 8y ago

This sounds like an excuse and maybe it is. This could be rooted in biology. Just like people are right handed or left handed and some are more organized and others less so. People are wired differently.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

southerndrift 8y ago

>Fighting Akrasia Fighting akrasia is silly. A-krasia means "lacking command" [1]. How do you fight something that is not there? The question has to be: How do you create krasia? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia

gloriousduke 8y ago

Why do we set out to do something? In many cases it's because we've been told achievement is important since a very young age. But since all accomplishments will presumably be lost at the time of the heat death of the Universe, maybe it's more important to focus only on tasks if your inner voice requires such dedication for your own happiness/sanity. If you never get to enjoy life because you're constantly working at achieving what is required mostly by external influences, you may be wasting your existence. "This above all: to thine own self be true."

madeuptempacct 8y ago

For me, it's mostly realizing that whatever I am doing is pretty pointless. As I am in my 10th hour of writing an article on, let's say, prototypal inheritance in javascript, I realize it's totally unnecessary and no one cares, so I might as well be relaxing.

Vektorweg 8y ago

I wouldn't have read the article, if I wouldn't procrastinate right now.

rhlala 8y ago

I would add balance, trying too hard is usually a bad idea.

swerveonem 8y ago

Because you get strange stack overflows.