10 ms·

How to Cure Deep Procrastination

200 points by joshuacc 15y ago

yread 15y ago
503 Service Temporarily Unavailable That works as well :)
Uthros 15y ago
Suggestion 1) Stop looking at Hacker News
- MaxGabriel 15y ago
  If you read Cal's article, and especially his other DP articles, he is quite clear that this type of procrastination is NOT what he's talking about. Deep procrastination is about feeling completely unable to start a task, and has symptoms like getting extensions and still not meeting them.
  - jsavimbi 15y ago
    Suggestion 2) Stop visiting turntable.fm
diiq 15y ago
This is an excellent suggestion --- though anyone who uses this method should be prepared to discover, sometimes, that they not only have no motivation to complete the given task, but also that the task does not lead in any clear way to what they have decided is a good life. The task can be happily dropped at that point iff they were totally honest in defining "a good life" and completely informed about the path from here to there.
- dimitar 15y ago
  which makes it even more excellent :-)
pier0 15y ago
I've been meaning to contribute something helpful to the discussion, but I keep putting it off.
wccrawford 15y ago
Had me at "procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don’t have a believable plan for succeeding at what you’re trying to do" but lost me again at "ancient brain" and not putting out unnecessary energy. While I've experienced procrastination that had nothing to do with not having a good plan, I've also had the kind that does. And it's far worse. Some procrastination occurs because we know we have time, and other things seem more important or fun. Lack-of-plan procrastination is worse, though. You delay until you have a plan, but without a plan, you can't know if you have time to finish. That -should- push you into making a plan immediately, but the whole enormity of the situation causes a panic reaction that prevents you from thinking rationally about the plan to start with. In the end, you put it aside until you can deal with it. It doesn't matter what reason (tired, no time, need something/someone, etc) you give, it all ends up the same. The only way out of that kind (that I've found) is to seek help. Complain to random people about it, ask people with specific knowledge, etc etc. Just find help somewhere. Sometimes you just need a direction to start heading in.
- rauljara 15y ago
  >lost me again at "ancient brain" and not putting out unnecessary energy. A lot of evolutionary science talks about energy expenditure. For an animal to survive it needs to take in at least as many calories as it expends, so evolutionary scientists often explain behavior in terms of expending calories and preserving calories. E.g, Predators tend to sleep a lot because hunting takes up a lot of calories. It's better to preserve the calories they gained hunting by sleeping a lot, rather then spend them on another hunt that may or may not be successful. As opposed to large herbivores that don't gain that many calories from grass, but don't spend so many eating it, either. They sleep very little because foraging those extra hours turns out to be a caloric win. Our "ancient" brain (which is a crappy term, I know) refers to the set of behaviors we evolved to survive in a society pre civilization. In that environment, effort == calories spent. What the author is saying is that for evolutionary reasons, we evolved to not want to waste calories (put forth effort) if there isn't a good chance of getting them back. But, because our food sources no longer in jeopardy, that evolutionary urge which led to our survival in the wild now leads to the vice known as procrastination.
mattmillr 15y ago
I had this same issue in college, and later as an employee. I've discovered I don't perform very well when I have to ask "why" too many times to figure out the value of the work I'm doing. "Why am I studying this material? To pass the test. Why? To pass the class. Why? To get a good GPA? Why?..." You lost me several Whys back! As a professional, it was the same way. The worst was when my short stint in Finance, but even working for nonprofits and social-conscious startups, it's tough for me to get motivated when the end goal is too many layers of abstraction away. (I think that's strange, because when I'm actually dealing with technology, abstraction is one of my strengths.) This was one of the factors in my decision to start my own company. I want to get rid of the layers of Whys and let them have more weight. Why am I working on this project? To make this client happy, so I can pay the rent this month. Another approach that has helped me in the last year or so has been phrasing my goals and aspirations in the form, "I want to be the kind of person who ___." Then do ___!
- samhoice 15y ago
  It may be that being able to see all the layers of abstraction clearly helps to illustrate just how far removed from worthwhile action the task is. For people not used to dealing with abstraction, they may only sense the disconnect. This may make the problem more apparent.
- jdunlop 15y ago
  That's an interesting observation. I would say it fits, since the person at the top (guy running the company, decision maker, so on) sees the abstractions beneath him, and takes action accordingly. Being a layer of abstraction (as you discuss) keeps you focused in one area, but without much knowledge of what's outside or the companies overall objectives for a specific task. It's hard to find motivation and purpose when you see just code. There was recent article about people getting bored, and it seems to stems from the same source, visibility and purpose. From experience, the view from the top is all about visibility and purpose. You know why things are happening, and you believe in the reason because you are often the source of the actions. You enjoy the work because you feel the connection. So how do we create visibility without inviting the increased communications overhead discussed in the mythical-man month? Is it read only, or does there have to be a full feedback mechanism?
garyrichardson 15y ago
I'll read it later.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ForrestN 15y ago
This strikes me as a somewhat naive understanding of human motivation. While these kinds of reframing techniques might have some impact, most people procrastinate because of subconscious motives they have rather than conscious ones. If you procrastinate to the point that it negatively impacts your ability to function effectively, by definition you have a psychological disorder (of whatever severity) and would do well to tackle that in some form of therapy. Cognitive psychology might offer a more sophisticated version of this article's strategy, where psychodynamic would try to identify and work through the underlying cause of your motives not to work (e.g. part of you wants to experience the sense of crisis that comes from being incredibly behind on a deadline, so let's try to understand that part of you).
- ForrestN 15y ago
  Naive might be too strong, I guess I meant incomplete. These kinds of tricks can be helpful, but are unlikely to "solve" the problem for most people.
- SatvikBeri 15y ago
  This kind of reframing is a technique to align your subconscious motivations with conscious ones. In contrast, there's very little evidence that discovering the "cause" of a motivation really helps. There's a significant amount of evidence that actively building positive emotional connections to the activities you want to do is useful-see Switch, or The Talent Code for examples.
  - klbarry 15y ago
    I also seem to remember that professional therapy in many psychological cases is not significantly more likely to help a person than self discovery/friends/environment change, etc.
    - ForrestN 15y ago
      I'd be interested to see this research. My understanding is that talk therapy is generally considered to be effective, although there is much controversy about which kinds are most effective and how that effectiveness compares to drugs.
snorkel 15y ago
I found that tackling a project is easier if you just do one fast and simple setup task without obligating yourself to do anything more than that. The fast simple setup task could be something that takes less than one minute of your time, such as open an application, create a new document, type a few notes, save the file. Procrastination is friction. Doing the first simple task without any direction or commitment gives you that initial push force needed to get the project moving.
- keeptrying 15y ago
  This is for "regular" procrastination. Thi "deep procrastination" is a different animal. I can actually give an example from my own life. And this is totally legit. Imagine having todo a parallel Masters in Physics so that you'd have the opportunity to do a Bachelors in EEE so that you could get a job working with computers!! I literally was "deep procrastination" for 4 years! One good thing that came out of this is that I can handle really intense situations which others cannot psychologically handle for long periods of time. But on the flip side Im really bad at Prioritizing my own immediate happiness but I'm making progress in that regard. Great post!!
keeptrying 15y ago
I wish I had read this post in college! Any course I didn't like ended up with me being happy with a "D"...
gfunk911 15y ago
BODY OF THE ARTICLE (currently 503): The Deep Procrastination Crisis Above is a snapshot of my blog e-mail inbox, filtered to only show e-mails from students struggling with deep procrastination. Notice that there are close to 60 such messages. If I include blog comments in the search, the number jumps into the hundreds. Deep procrastination is a distressing affliction. Students who suffer from it lose the ability to start school work. Deadlines pass and they hand nothing in. Professors provide special extensions, but the students still can’t bring themselves to do the work. And so on. As evidenced by my inbox, this issue is surprisingly common, especially at elite colleges. Yet it’s also almost entirely off the radar of traditional student counseling, which is why I dedicate time to it here. In my previous post, I introduced a dubious evolutionary explanation for an otherwise very real phenomenon: procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don’t have a believable plan for succeeding at what you’re trying to do. In this post, as promised, I want to apply this evolutionary perspective to help better understand, and therefore better combat, the deep variety of this common issue. The Question of “Why” Deep procrastination usually strikes students later in their college career, when the difficulty of their courses ratchets up. At this stage, their work load gets harder and harder, and at some point some powerful part of their brain says “no more!” An evolutionary perspective on procrastination helps explain this reaction. The student is asking his or her brain to expend lots of energy (from a biological perspective, studying for an orgo exam is an expensive thing to do). One way to see this process is that there’s an ancient part of our brain that has evolved to evaluate any such plans — a filter, of sorts, to prevent the wasting of precious energy. “Why are we going to expend so much precious energy?”, it asks. The more modern, abstract-reasoning, rational part of the student’s brain is quick to respond: “Because we need to expend this energy to pass the test which we need to earn our degree!” “What the hell is a ‘degree’ and why do we need one?”, the ancient brain counters. “Because that’s what you’re supposed to do,” the rational brain responds. And this is where the problem occurs. The rational part of the brain is promoting an abstract societal value. It knows that for a middle class American, earning a college degree is an expected milestone on your path to integration into the middle class economy But the ancient brain doesn’t do well with abstract societal values, which are a recent addition to humankind on the scale of evolutionary time. One way to understand deep procrastination, therefore, is as a rejection of an ambiguous, abstract answer to the key question of why you’re going through the mental strain required by the college experience. (As in my previous post, I’m using an evolutionary explanation metaphorically — as a way to help explain a concrete phenomenon I’ve observed in my research and writing on this topic. Whether the evolutionary explanation for the phenomenon is strictly true is somewhat beside the point and beyond my expertise.) The good news is that this understanding provides a clear strategy for combating this scourge: form a more concrete and personal answer to the question of “why.” Combating Deep Procrastination From my experience, an effective answer to this question of why you’re at college can be constructed through the following process: First, devise a (tentative) answer to the following question: What makes a good life good? This is the foundation on which everything else in your life will be built. Your goal is not the identify the “right” answer, but to instead identify a working hypothesis. This answer will evolve along with your life experience, so this is not a time for perfectionism. If you’re religious, your starting point for finding this answer is obvious. If you’re not religious, you could jump into philosophy — as this question has been at the core of human thinking since the time of the Greeks — but I’ve found it’s more approachable to start with biographies of people whose life you admire, looking for evidence of their own responses to this prompt. Second, decide how your experience at college can best be leveraged to support this vision of a good life. If, for example, you decide the key to a good life is to master something useful to the world, this might lead to you to see college as an opportunity to master a hard skill while exposing yourself to examples of people applying this skill in useful ways. Third, identify the set of specific student tactics that will help you succeed in this leveraging. In our above example, this thinking might lead you to the concrete strategies I espoused in my romantic scholar series. This process provides a more personal and concrete answer to the fundamental question being posed by your ancient brain. “Why should I expend all this difficult energy?”, it asks once again. “Because it’s part of a well-thought through plan for leading a good life,” you now respond. “Sounds good,” it agrees while you head to the library. As I noted in an earlier post on this subject, this self-reflection is not an easy process. But college really is a fantastic time to face these basic questions. Deep procrastination, once you understand its source, doesn’t have to a Jobian affliction. It can instead be seen as the prompt you need to get your internal shop in order. If you’ve had success combating deep procrastination with answers to these basic questions, please share your experience. Concrete examples help deep procrastinators commit to a way out.
smcl 15y ago
503 error - "Please try again later" Oh the irony
lincolnwebs 15y ago
Conversely, sometimes you decide it isn't worth it. My senior year of high school, I was being pushed to take 3 AP courses. I thought about what I wanted out of my senior year, and decided I already had what I needed to get into college and wanted to enjoy it. I took 1 AP course instead - and procrastinated in it horribly, but at least my GPA didn't suffer horribly from 1 course. Sometimes you don't need to convince yourself of anything, you need to change course.
squasher 15y ago
If you liked/needed this post, you'll LOVE The Now Habit: http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-Guilt-Free/dp/1585425524/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310753244&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-G...
MaxGabriel 15y ago
Hmm, Cal is the only one who has pinpointed a very real, seemingly unexplored phenomenon. The problem is, he's just one person and seems to really struggle to grasp this phenomenon. Not struggle like he doesn't have any clue where he's going, but a kind of grappling with the essence of dp. So, his theories sort of feel like hypotheses that hes refining over time. This is very much how I read Cal, as if I'm reading a log of his ongoing research and suspicions
btcoal 15y ago
"Deep procrastination usually strikes students later in their college career, when the difficulty of their courses ratchets up. At this stage, their work load gets harder and harder, and at some point some powerful part of their brain says “no more!”" My mileage definitely varied. I found that after my second (Sophomore in the US) year in college I rarely procrastinated. It was getting through the required classes the first two years, where the why at the end of a long chain of questions was "because you have to to graduate from MIT." That's not as motivating as it sounds. Eventually I was taking only classes I wanted to be in. And if I didnt want to do an assignment and wasnt going to destroy my GPA I just didnt do it. Fast-forward to the real world and it returns. Deadlines from bosses help to avoid procrastination but if the work isn't too challenging and expectations are low enough you can still do some deep procrastinating. But then again, maybe the reasoning my work isn't challenging enough is because I didn't get the most amazing job in the world because I didn't just push through those assignments in college that I really didn't want to do. Hmmm...that's some meta-circular evaluation right there[1]. [1] No it isnt.
bborud 15y ago
I added it to my Read-It-Later queue. I win.
Produce 15y ago
As an alternative explanation for why we procrastinate, I'd like to introduce the idea that modern society is fundamentally broken. If we have social structures (software) in place which go so deeply against the grain (wetware) then the problem is not the grain but the direction that we are sanding in. In essence, modern society is trying to run ARM instructions on an x86 CPU. It's a testament to how broken it is that someone would suggest that the effect is the thing to be cured, as opposed to the cause. The fact of the matter is that we have orders of magnitude more knowledge about how we work and what makes us happy than even 50 years ago. Yet we do not apply it. It's the same as the issue in software development where we have accepted industry standards for producing quality work yet relatively few teams use them, and hardly any use all of them. Ofcourse, the reason for these inefficiencies at processing new information is the same as the one which causes procrastination - the wetware simply isn't built for it. And so we have a vicious circle. There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel. Whatever we are aware of at a given point in time will shape the next moment. Yes, our wetware is at odds with the environment it has created, but our wetware is capable of self-modification, hence the author's suggestion being a perfectly good one until we can reach the tipping point as a collective. But I still argue that curing procrastination is putting a bandage on a rotting limb which desperately needs to be amputated and replaced with a tentacle.
qaexl 15y ago
The general doctrine sounds great. The specific solution outlined sucks. My hypothesis: easier to get in touch with primal survival instincts and twiddling that directly. The author is still answering those self-reflection questions with abstract thoughts that has nothing to do with survival instincts. Meaning: Interrupt yourself every time you feel procrastination -- that heavy, draining, depressing, oppressing feeling -- that sudden drop in energy when thinking about taking the next step -- or even planning and deciding the course of action to take you to your goal. Catch yourself feeling this. Then directly manipulate that.
thaumaturgy 15y ago
o-f'r-cryinoutloud. I can't believe everyone's actually discussing this as though it were insightful. Look, you're sitting at home, you're a student, and you have, let's say, three things you can choose to do right now: 1. You can study for your class tomorrow, working towards a degree. Effort required: high. Reward: far future. 2. You can go out with friends. Effort required: medium to low. Reward: near future. 3. You can play a video game. Effort required: low. Reward: immediate. So which one do you really want to do? Before you answer that, let's add one more little piece to our hypothetical: let's imagine that you have all the time in the world. You're immortal. There is absolutely no rush to get your degree. Whether you do it this year or in thirty years will make absolutely no difference. So which one do you do? This is procrastination. I should know. I'm an expert procrastinator. There are about eleventy-seven things I should be doing right now -- and they are all things which require a lot of effort right now, and won't pay off today. What am I doing instead? I'm wasting time on HN: low effort, immediate reward. If I couldn't be on HN, I'd probably be in my garden. Again: low effort, quick reward. This guy's a book author. He wants to sell more books. He probably wants to make a little extra money doing speaking engagements. So he has to set himself up as an expert, and to do that, he's put together this notion about "ancient brains" and evolutionary psychology (which is mostly bunkem) and the "wasting" of energy. And it sounds sort of OK, except that it skirts around the basic notion that we're largely reward driven, and all of these distractions that we have today are really good at pushing our little reward button, and we'll keep triggering our reward button for as long as we can -- until we become that little mouse that starved itself to death pushing its feel-good button. Short-circuiting this requires two forms of self discipline: one, you have to tear yourself away from pushing the reward button occasionally (and no amount of telling yourself why you're trying to get a degree will do that). You have to have enough self-awareness to realize that you've just blown your entire afternoon on a game or online and you have nothing to show for it, and maybe you should try to squeeze in some actual work before the day's over. Two, you have to have the discipline to recognize the things that make you procrastinate, and engineer around them. For me, it's barriers. Once I get working on something, I'll plow through it like a bullet through jelly. But, if I'm not yet working on it, and there's the merest little speed-bump of a barrier to overcome before I can work on it ... then I don't want to start. So, for that reason, I put a lot of extra effort into making it really convenient to get things done. I write scripts that do things for me with a single command. I keep things organized so that I don't have to find things (which is a barrier) before I can get started. I try to keep things simple. But that's just me. Maybe it's different for you. But I seriously doubt that the approach in this guy's article will actually help anybody.
bitwize 15y ago
"Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing like that> I chose not to choose life; I chose something else."
gwern 15y ago
> In my previous post, I introduced a dubious evolutionary explanation for an otherwise very real phenomenon: procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don’t have a believable plan for succeeding at what you’re trying to do. In this post, as promised, I want to apply this evolutionary perspective to help better understand, and therefore better combat, the deep variety of this common issue. Instead of fumbling with folk intuitions and deeply dodgy evolutionary psychology (hard for even the experts to not embarrass themselves doing), why not look at what the psychologists have actually found? http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/ covers the literature. (You will notice that the equation includes 'expectancy' as only one of the related variables. This is a simplified form; the full equation with the details can be found in all the linked PDFs. http://lesswrong.com/tag/procrastination/ http://lesswrong.com/tag/procrastination/ also has a lot of interesting reading which are much better than this guy.) And heck, while I'm at it, the overview of research on how to be happy: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/
swah 15y ago
Now I'm curious about the Good Will Hunting email.
bukavu 15y ago
I don't think you can ever completely cure it<a href=http://beststand-mixer.com/kitchenaid-600/kitchenaid-600>.</a&#62 http://beststand-mixer.com/kitchenaid-600/kitchenaid-600&#62...; You are either driven or you aren't.
sardonicbryan 15y ago
How to stop procrastinating: 1) Stop reading articles about procrastination. 2) Start doing what you're supposed to be doing, you lazy asshole.
- mannicken 15y ago
  Define procrastination. Perhaps I'm working on research for procrastination articles, or studying design of that web-page. I understand what you're trying to do but a bit of advice for the future: do not offend your reader. You can offend something else they might hate, e.g. "fuck procrastination". I just downvoted you solely on the lazy asshole comment because I took it personally, because I'm reading this. If you were to say it personally to someone, in certain cliques, you would've gotten the shit beaten out of you for saying things like that unless you aren't their teacher. I would personally just flip you off, told you to go fuck yourself, and then never spoke to you again. Just friendly advice.
checoivan 15y ago
Do something you love.
bugmenot 15y ago
I look forward to his follow-up piece, "How to Cure Human Nature".

200 points by joshuacc 15y ago

yread 15y ago

503 Service Temporarily Unavailable That works as well :)

Uthros 15y ago

Suggestion 1) Stop looking at Hacker News

MaxGabriel 15y ago
If you read Cal's article, and especially his other DP articles, he is quite clear that this type of procrastination is NOT what he's talking about. Deep procrastination is about feeling completely unable to start a task, and has symptoms like getting extensions and still not meeting them.
- jsavimbi 15y ago
  Suggestion 2) Stop visiting turntable.fm

diiq 15y ago

This is an excellent suggestion --- though anyone who uses this method should be prepared to discover, sometimes, that they not only have no motivation to complete the given task, but also that the task does not lead in any clear way to what they have decided is a good life. The task can be happily dropped at that point iff they were totally honest in defining "a good life" and completely informed about the path from here to there.

dimitar 15y ago
which makes it even more excellent :-)

pier0 15y ago

I've been meaning to contribute something helpful to the discussion, but I keep putting it off.

wccrawford 15y ago

Had me at "procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don’t have a believable plan for succeeding at what you’re trying to do" but lost me again at "ancient brain" and not putting out unnecessary energy. While I've experienced procrastination that had nothing to do with not having a good plan, I've also had the kind that does. And it's far worse. Some procrastination occurs because we know we have time, and other things seem more important or fun. Lack-of-plan procrastination is worse, though. You delay until you have a plan, but without a plan, you can't know if you have time to finish. That -should- push you into making a plan immediately, but the whole enormity of the situation causes a panic reaction that prevents you from thinking rationally about the plan to start with. In the end, you put it aside until you can deal with it. It doesn't matter what reason (tired, no time, need something/someone, etc) you give, it all ends up the same. The only way out of that kind (that I've found) is to seek help. Complain to random people about it, ask people with specific knowledge, etc etc. Just find help somewhere. Sometimes you just need a direction to start heading in.

rauljara 15y ago
>lost me again at "ancient brain" and not putting out unnecessary energy. A lot of evolutionary science talks about energy expenditure. For an animal to survive it needs to take in at least as many calories as it expends, so evolutionary scientists often explain behavior in terms of expending calories and preserving calories. E.g, Predators tend to sleep a lot because hunting takes up a lot of calories. It's better to preserve the calories they gained hunting by sleeping a lot, rather then spend them on another hunt that may or may not be successful. As opposed to large herbivores that don't gain that many calories from grass, but don't spend so many eating it, either. They sleep very little because foraging those extra hours turns out to be a caloric win. Our "ancient" brain (which is a crappy term, I know) refers to the set of behaviors we evolved to survive in a society pre civilization. In that environment, effort == calories spent. What the author is saying is that for evolutionary reasons, we evolved to not want to waste calories (put forth effort) if there isn't a good chance of getting them back. But, because our food sources no longer in jeopardy, that evolutionary urge which led to our survival in the wild now leads to the vice known as procrastination.

mattmillr 15y ago

I had this same issue in college, and later as an employee. I've discovered I don't perform very well when I have to ask "why" too many times to figure out the value of the work I'm doing. "Why am I studying this material? To pass the test. Why? To pass the class. Why? To get a good GPA? Why?..." You lost me several Whys back! As a professional, it was the same way. The worst was when my short stint in Finance, but even working for nonprofits and social-conscious startups, it's tough for me to get motivated when the end goal is too many layers of abstraction away. (I think that's strange, because when I'm actually dealing with technology, abstraction is one of my strengths.) This was one of the factors in my decision to start my own company. I want to get rid of the layers of Whys and let them have more weight. Why am I working on this project? To make this client happy, so I can pay the rent this month. Another approach that has helped me in the last year or so has been phrasing my goals and aspirations in the form, "I want to be the kind of person who ___." Then do ___!

samhoice 15y ago
It may be that being able to see all the layers of abstraction clearly helps to illustrate just how far removed from worthwhile action the task is. For people not used to dealing with abstraction, they may only sense the disconnect. This may make the problem more apparent.
jdunlop 15y ago
That's an interesting observation. I would say it fits, since the person at the top (guy running the company, decision maker, so on) sees the abstractions beneath him, and takes action accordingly. Being a layer of abstraction (as you discuss) keeps you focused in one area, but without much knowledge of what's outside or the companies overall objectives for a specific task. It's hard to find motivation and purpose when you see just code. There was recent article about people getting bored, and it seems to stems from the same source, visibility and purpose. From experience, the view from the top is all about visibility and purpose. You know why things are happening, and you believe in the reason because you are often the source of the actions. You enjoy the work because you feel the connection. So how do we create visibility without inviting the increased communications overhead discussed in the mythical-man month? Is it read only, or does there have to be a full feedback mechanism?

garyrichardson 15y ago

I'll read it later.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ForrestN 15y ago

This strikes me as a somewhat naive understanding of human motivation. While these kinds of reframing techniques might have some impact, most people procrastinate because of subconscious motives they have rather than conscious ones. If you procrastinate to the point that it negatively impacts your ability to function effectively, by definition you have a psychological disorder (of whatever severity) and would do well to tackle that in some form of therapy. Cognitive psychology might offer a more sophisticated version of this article's strategy, where psychodynamic would try to identify and work through the underlying cause of your motives not to work (e.g. part of you wants to experience the sense of crisis that comes from being incredibly behind on a deadline, so let's try to understand that part of you).

ForrestN 15y ago
Naive might be too strong, I guess I meant incomplete. These kinds of tricks can be helpful, but are unlikely to "solve" the problem for most people.
SatvikBeri 15y ago
This kind of reframing is a technique to align your subconscious motivations with conscious ones. In contrast, there's very little evidence that discovering the "cause" of a motivation really helps. There's a significant amount of evidence that actively building positive emotional connections to the activities you want to do is useful-see Switch, or The Talent Code for examples.
- klbarry 15y ago
  I also seem to remember that professional therapy in many psychological cases is not significantly more likely to help a person than self discovery/friends/environment change, etc.
  - ForrestN 15y ago
    I'd be interested to see this research. My understanding is that talk therapy is generally considered to be effective, although there is much controversy about which kinds are most effective and how that effectiveness compares to drugs.

snorkel 15y ago

I found that tackling a project is easier if you just do one fast and simple setup task without obligating yourself to do anything more than that. The fast simple setup task could be something that takes less than one minute of your time, such as open an application, create a new document, type a few notes, save the file. Procrastination is friction. Doing the first simple task without any direction or commitment gives you that initial push force needed to get the project moving.

keeptrying 15y ago
This is for "regular" procrastination. Thi "deep procrastination" is a different animal. I can actually give an example from my own life. And this is totally legit. Imagine having todo a parallel Masters in Physics so that you'd have the opportunity to do a Bachelors in EEE so that you could get a job working with computers!! I literally was "deep procrastination" for 4 years! One good thing that came out of this is that I can handle really intense situations which others cannot psychologically handle for long periods of time. But on the flip side Im really bad at Prioritizing my own immediate happiness but I'm making progress in that regard. Great post!!

keeptrying 15y ago

I wish I had read this post in college! Any course I didn't like ended up with me being happy with a "D"...

gfunk911 15y ago

BODY OF THE ARTICLE (currently 503): The Deep Procrastination Crisis Above is a snapshot of my blog e-mail inbox, filtered to only show e-mails from students struggling with deep procrastination. Notice that there are close to 60 such messages. If I include blog comments in the search, the number jumps into the hundreds. Deep procrastination is a distressing affliction. Students who suffer from it lose the ability to start school work. Deadlines pass and they hand nothing in. Professors provide special extensions, but the students still can’t bring themselves to do the work. And so on. As evidenced by my inbox, this issue is surprisingly common, especially at elite colleges. Yet it’s also almost entirely off the radar of traditional student counseling, which is why I dedicate time to it here. In my previous post, I introduced a dubious evolutionary explanation for an otherwise very real phenomenon: procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don’t have a believable plan for succeeding at what you’re trying to do. In this post, as promised, I want to apply this evolutionary perspective to help better understand, and therefore better combat, the deep variety of this common issue. The Question of “Why” Deep procrastination usually strikes students later in their college career, when the difficulty of their courses ratchets up. At this stage, their work load gets harder and harder, and at some point some powerful part of their brain says “no more!” An evolutionary perspective on procrastination helps explain this reaction. The student is asking his or her brain to expend lots of energy (from a biological perspective, studying for an orgo exam is an expensive thing to do). One way to see this process is that there’s an ancient part of our brain that has evolved to evaluate any such plans — a filter, of sorts, to prevent the wasting of precious energy. “Why are we going to expend so much precious energy?”, it asks. The more modern, abstract-reasoning, rational part of the student’s brain is quick to respond: “Because we need to expend this energy to pass the test which we need to earn our degree!” “What the hell is a ‘degree’ and why do we need one?”, the ancient brain counters. “Because that’s what you’re supposed to do,” the rational brain responds. And this is where the problem occurs. The rational part of the brain is promoting an abstract societal value. It knows that for a middle class American, earning a college degree is an expected milestone on your path to integration into the middle class economy But the ancient brain doesn’t do well with abstract societal values, which are a recent addition to humankind on the scale of evolutionary time. One way to understand deep procrastination, therefore, is as a rejection of an ambiguous, abstract answer to the key question of why you’re going through the mental strain required by the college experience. (As in my previous post, I’m using an evolutionary explanation metaphorically — as a way to help explain a concrete phenomenon I’ve observed in my research and writing on this topic. Whether the evolutionary explanation for the phenomenon is strictly true is somewhat beside the point and beyond my expertise.) The good news is that this understanding provides a clear strategy for combating this scourge: form a more concrete and personal answer to the question of “why.” Combating Deep Procrastination From my experience, an effective answer to this question of why you’re at college can be constructed through the following process: First, devise a (tentative) answer to the following question: What makes a good life good? This is the foundation on which everything else in your life will be built. Your goal is not the identify the “right” answer, but to instead identify a working hypothesis. This answer will evolve along with your life experience, so this is not a time for perfectionism. If you’re religious, your starting point for finding this answer is obvious. If you’re not religious, you could jump into philosophy — as this question has been at the core of human thinking since the time of the Greeks — but I’ve found it’s more approachable to start with biographies of people whose life you admire, looking for evidence of their own responses to this prompt. Second, decide how your experience at college can best be leveraged to support this vision of a good life. If, for example, you decide the key to a good life is to master something useful to the world, this might lead to you to see college as an opportunity to master a hard skill while exposing yourself to examples of people applying this skill in useful ways. Third, identify the set of specific student tactics that will help you succeed in this leveraging. In our above example, this thinking might lead you to the concrete strategies I espoused in my romantic scholar series. This process provides a more personal and concrete answer to the fundamental question being posed by your ancient brain. “Why should I expend all this difficult energy?”, it asks once again. “Because it’s part of a well-thought through plan for leading a good life,” you now respond. “Sounds good,” it agrees while you head to the library. As I noted in an earlier post on this subject, this self-reflection is not an easy process. But college really is a fantastic time to face these basic questions. Deep procrastination, once you understand its source, doesn’t have to a Jobian affliction. It can instead be seen as the prompt you need to get your internal shop in order. If you’ve had success combating deep procrastination with answers to these basic questions, please share your experience. Concrete examples help deep procrastinators commit to a way out.

smcl 15y ago

503 error - "Please try again later" Oh the irony

lincolnwebs 15y ago

Conversely, sometimes you decide it isn't worth it. My senior year of high school, I was being pushed to take 3 AP courses. I thought about what I wanted out of my senior year, and decided I already had what I needed to get into college and wanted to enjoy it. I took 1 AP course instead - and procrastinated in it horribly, but at least my GPA didn't suffer horribly from 1 course. Sometimes you don't need to convince yourself of anything, you need to change course.

squasher 15y ago

If you liked/needed this post, you'll LOVE The Now Habit: http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-Guilt-Free/dp/1585425524/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310753244&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-G...

MaxGabriel 15y ago

Hmm, Cal is the only one who has pinpointed a very real, seemingly unexplored phenomenon. The problem is, he's just one person and seems to really struggle to grasp this phenomenon. Not struggle like he doesn't have any clue where he's going, but a kind of grappling with the essence of dp. So, his theories sort of feel like hypotheses that hes refining over time. This is very much how I read Cal, as if I'm reading a log of his ongoing research and suspicions

btcoal 15y ago

"Deep procrastination usually strikes students later in their college career, when the difficulty of their courses ratchets up. At this stage, their work load gets harder and harder, and at some point some powerful part of their brain says “no more!”" My mileage definitely varied. I found that after my second (Sophomore in the US) year in college I rarely procrastinated. It was getting through the required classes the first two years, where the why at the end of a long chain of questions was "because you have to to graduate from MIT." That's not as motivating as it sounds. Eventually I was taking only classes I wanted to be in. And if I didnt want to do an assignment and wasnt going to destroy my GPA I just didnt do it. Fast-forward to the real world and it returns. Deadlines from bosses help to avoid procrastination but if the work isn't too challenging and expectations are low enough you can still do some deep procrastinating. But then again, maybe the reasoning my work isn't challenging enough is because I didn't get the most amazing job in the world because I didn't just push through those assignments in college that I really didn't want to do. Hmmm...that's some meta-circular evaluation right there[1]. [1] No it isnt.

bborud 15y ago

I added it to my Read-It-Later queue. I win.

Produce 15y ago

As an alternative explanation for why we procrastinate, I'd like to introduce the idea that modern society is fundamentally broken. If we have social structures (software) in place which go so deeply against the grain (wetware) then the problem is not the grain but the direction that we are sanding in. In essence, modern society is trying to run ARM instructions on an x86 CPU. It's a testament to how broken it is that someone would suggest that the effect is the thing to be cured, as opposed to the cause. The fact of the matter is that we have orders of magnitude more knowledge about how we work and what makes us happy than even 50 years ago. Yet we do not apply it. It's the same as the issue in software development where we have accepted industry standards for producing quality work yet relatively few teams use them, and hardly any use all of them. Ofcourse, the reason for these inefficiencies at processing new information is the same as the one which causes procrastination - the wetware simply isn't built for it. And so we have a vicious circle. There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel. Whatever we are aware of at a given point in time will shape the next moment. Yes, our wetware is at odds with the environment it has created, but our wetware is capable of self-modification, hence the author's suggestion being a perfectly good one until we can reach the tipping point as a collective. But I still argue that curing procrastination is putting a bandage on a rotting limb which desperately needs to be amputated and replaced with a tentacle.

qaexl 15y ago

The general doctrine sounds great. The specific solution outlined sucks. My hypothesis: easier to get in touch with primal survival instincts and twiddling that directly. The author is still answering those self-reflection questions with abstract thoughts that has nothing to do with survival instincts. Meaning: Interrupt yourself every time you feel procrastination -- that heavy, draining, depressing, oppressing feeling -- that sudden drop in energy when thinking about taking the next step -- or even planning and deciding the course of action to take you to your goal. Catch yourself feeling this. Then directly manipulate that.

thaumaturgy 15y ago

o-f'r-cryinoutloud. I can't believe everyone's actually discussing this as though it were insightful. Look, you're sitting at home, you're a student, and you have, let's say, three things you can choose to do right now: 1. You can study for your class tomorrow, working towards a degree. Effort required: high. Reward: far future. 2. You can go out with friends. Effort required: medium to low. Reward: near future. 3. You can play a video game. Effort required: low. Reward: immediate. So which one do you really want to do? Before you answer that, let's add one more little piece to our hypothetical: let's imagine that you have all the time in the world. You're immortal. There is absolutely no rush to get your degree. Whether you do it this year or in thirty years will make absolutely no difference. So which one do you do? This is procrastination. I should know. I'm an expert procrastinator. There are about eleventy-seven things I should be doing right now -- and they are all things which require a lot of effort right now, and won't pay off today. What am I doing instead? I'm wasting time on HN: low effort, immediate reward. If I couldn't be on HN, I'd probably be in my garden. Again: low effort, quick reward. This guy's a book author. He wants to sell more books. He probably wants to make a little extra money doing speaking engagements. So he has to set himself up as an expert, and to do that, he's put together this notion about "ancient brains" and evolutionary psychology (which is mostly bunkem) and the "wasting" of energy. And it sounds sort of OK, except that it skirts around the basic notion that we're largely reward driven, and all of these distractions that we have today are really good at pushing our little reward button, and we'll keep triggering our reward button for as long as we can -- until we become that little mouse that starved itself to death pushing its feel-good button. Short-circuiting this requires two forms of self discipline: one, you have to tear yourself away from pushing the reward button occasionally (and no amount of telling yourself why you're trying to get a degree will do that). You have to have enough self-awareness to realize that you've just blown your entire afternoon on a game or online and you have nothing to show for it, and maybe you should try to squeeze in some actual work before the day's over. Two, you have to have the discipline to recognize the things that make you procrastinate, and engineer around them. For me, it's barriers. Once I get working on something, I'll plow through it like a bullet through jelly. But, if I'm not yet working on it, and there's the merest little speed-bump of a barrier to overcome before I can work on it ... then I don't want to start. So, for that reason, I put a lot of extra effort into making it really convenient to get things done. I write scripts that do things for me with a single command. I keep things organized so that I don't have to find things (which is a barrier) before I can get started. I try to keep things simple. But that's just me. Maybe it's different for you. But I seriously doubt that the approach in this guy's article will actually help anybody.

bitwize 15y ago

"Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing like that> I chose not to choose life; I chose something else."

gwern 15y ago

> In my previous post, I introduced a dubious evolutionary explanation for an otherwise very real phenomenon: procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don’t have a believable plan for succeeding at what you’re trying to do. In this post, as promised, I want to apply this evolutionary perspective to help better understand, and therefore better combat, the deep variety of this common issue. Instead of fumbling with folk intuitions and deeply dodgy evolutionary psychology (hard for even the experts to not embarrass themselves doing), why not look at what the psychologists have actually found? http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/ covers the literature. (You will notice that the equation includes 'expectancy' as only one of the related variables. This is a simplified form; the full equation with the details can be found in all the linked PDFs. http://lesswrong.com/tag/procrastination/ http://lesswrong.com/tag/procrastination/ also has a lot of interesting reading which are much better than this guy.) And heck, while I'm at it, the overview of research on how to be happy: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/

swah 15y ago

Now I'm curious about the Good Will Hunting email.

bukavu 15y ago

I don't think you can ever completely cure it<a href=http://beststand-mixer.com/kitchenaid-600/kitchenaid-600>.</a&#62 http://beststand-mixer.com/kitchenaid-600/kitchenaid-600&#62...; You are either driven or you aren't.

sardonicbryan 15y ago

How to stop procrastinating: 1) Stop reading articles about procrastination. 2) Start doing what you're supposed to be doing, you lazy asshole.

mannicken 15y ago
Define procrastination. Perhaps I'm working on research for procrastination articles, or studying design of that web-page. I understand what you're trying to do but a bit of advice for the future: do not offend your reader. You can offend something else they might hate, e.g. "fuck procrastination". I just downvoted you solely on the lazy asshole comment because I took it personally, because I'm reading this. If you were to say it personally to someone, in certain cliques, you would've gotten the shit beaten out of you for saying things like that unless you aren't their teacher. I would personally just flip you off, told you to go fuck yourself, and then never spoke to you again. Just friendly advice.

checoivan 15y ago

Do something you love.

bugmenot 15y ago

I look forward to his follow-up piece, "How to Cure Human Nature".