10 ms·

Why do humans procrastinate?

264 points by ankeshk 15y ago

mih 15y ago
An interesting video on procrastination from a chapter of the book 'You are not so smart' http://youtu.be/DJ2T4-rUUcs http://youtu.be/DJ2T4-rUUcs
- dangero 15y ago
  That was an amazing hook and I feel like the book was talking exactly about me. It was actually very reassuring to know how normal I am. Not sure if you're associated with this book, but I think I'm sold.
  - mih 15y ago
    Just to make it clear, I am not associated with the book in any way, but impulsively bought it on Amazon after seeing this video. As I pore through subsequent chapters, it strikes a chord with me and is based on well researched psychological experiments conducted at various universities. It's worth a buy imho.
    - dangero 15y ago
      Yeah I bought the book last night and I have thoroughly enjoyed the first two chapters. Thanks for the recommendation.
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andre3k1 15y ago
It is worth noting that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are the fathers of modern-day behavioral economics. Their biggest contribution is called Prospect Theory. It goes against everything they teach you in Econ 101 -- the expected utility theory is wrong. Kahneman won a noble prize in Economics for his work. Sadly, Tversky passed away in 1996 before he could be awarded. Prospect Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory
- huherto 15y ago
  This is a great example why understanding Math is important. It can even help you understand psychological aspects like, why we make the choices we make.
- gwern 15y ago
  > It goes against everything they teach you in Econ 101 -- the expected utility theory is wrong. I was rather under the impression that prospect theory was descriptive and not normative. Prospect theory ain't gonna save you and your hyperbolic discounting from being money-pumped, and one of the interesting bits of Ainslie's book, IIRC, was discussing how economic incentives and penalties did shift people closer to normatively-correct discounting and away from preference reversals.
arketyp 15y ago
How does cases of workaholism suit into this? That is, specifically, persons focusing too much on their career for big parts of their lives and then later regretting never having spent time with their family, enjoying a slow day etc. Isn't this almost reverse procrastination? Somehow you have deluded yourself that the future reward is worth the short term costs. And I guess in the end the habit would be so hard to break that it is indeed a sort of short-term procrastination kind of deal once again. You keep working all days because it is the easiest choice to deal with. Stepping down is such a drastic choice and a big commitment and scary and so on. I guess I also want to point out that these things are really complicated dynamics. How do I know how much I should deny myself the instant rewards? What do I really know about the worth of this task I have setup for myself and its benefits? Why do we procrastinate? Well, because we don't know, because we're uncertain, because we doubt.
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  Well, because we don't know, because we're uncertain, because we doubt. What about the people who don't know and don't procrastinate? What's bad about uncertainty and doubt? What are you afraid of if it "goes wrong"? If it was uncertain what would happen but any outcome was exciting, you wouldn't procrastinate, right?
  - arketyp 15y ago
    What about the people who don't know and don't procrastinate? I guess they got God's blessing. I don't understand your point. If it was uncertain what would happen but any outcome was exciting, you wouldn't procrastinate, right? That's exactly the time I would procrastinate. Or am I missing something?
- huherto 15y ago
  IMHO, workalcoholics get short term rewards by working. And they get it every day and with every action that they take.
DenisM 15y ago
I think this simplistic explanation does not do justice to the complex subject which is procrastination. If it were that simple, we wouldn't be having those problems, would we? For a more rounded perspective on the subject of procrastination I suggest reading someone who observed a few hundreds of cases and helped in fixing most of them: http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-Guilt-Free/dp/0874775043 http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-G...
- wycats 15y ago
  "If it were that simple, we wouldn't be having those problems, would we?" How do you figure? Our behavior is driven by powerful forces, and rational analysis is a relatively new factor. The book "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely explores how our cognitive biases (such as anchoring and many others) often remain in place even after we are told that they exist and how to identify them.
rkalla 15y ago
In addition to the temporal aspect of decision making given in the top reply, there was a study recently (posted on HN maybe 8 months ago) that found procrastination was a function of confidence in a decision. I think the temporal aspect of decision making is a red herring and the real issue is the confidence in the decision; which is harder to gauge the farther out it is. Some people have a great sense of confidence in their decisions and subsequently may procrastination less as their lack of faith in their decisions are not impacted by temporal locality. This explanation happened to fit my tendency to procrastination to a T, as opposed to decisions simply being farther out on a timeline.
tryitnow 15y ago
It is unsurprising that this gets so many upvotes since HN is where many go to procrastinate (myself included).
- nekojima 15y ago
  I'm currently multi-tasking my procrastination. Reading HN & watching football, while avoiding yardwork and if I do that, between games, then "real" work will lie ahead, which I should really be doing instead. Btw, its not a holiday here. :-)
erikb 15y ago
Hm. I never saw this as a bad attribute nor can I accept it as the reason for procrastination. Yes, sure. People work more for goals that are closer in time then for goals that are further away. But that is not irrational, nor is it the reason for procastination. First let me explain how I see the procastination thing and then let me say a word or two about why I think that temporal discounting is something rational and useful. Procrastination often has no reward at all. If it has a reward, why call it procrastionation? You actually do something useful, if it has a reward. The thing is, that "not procrastinating" is considered work, thus related with stress, concentration and energydepletion. So "not procrastinating" has a cost, which humans overestimate. There is some research (that I can't quote right now, but psychological material here on HN often cites some good sources about that) that people value a cost of an objective value X around 2 or 3 times higher then a reward of the same objective value (so losing $100 might feel as bad, as winning $200 might feel good). So most humans prefer instinctively to avoid or minimize costs before they maximize the (stochastic) expected value of an action. Doesn't avoiding cost (stress, "work") seem much more reasonable then missevaluating the reward for procastination? Well, what the truth is can nobody know, because the science also doesn't know yet. But for me it sounds way more reasonable, especially because I know how much I like to not work and to have no stress compared to getting anything done. So, now why do I think that temporal discounting even is a good thing? Time can change the reward we gain from an object. An object might increase or decrease in value over time. With money we can even be sure that it decreases over time. Also our preferences might change according to our changing situation. Whatever we do now, we can be sure that our situation will be very different one year in the future. And last but not least, the risk increases drastically, that we don't get any reward at all. Dying in a car accident is a very unlikely thing if you sit at home in front of your comuter now. But if you think about that risk again for this point in time + one year it is not that unlikely anymore. All risks increase with a bigger time frame. All this leads to a situation in which gaining something now makes it much more rewarding then gaining it somewhere far in the future. I think the big problem about that article is that it mixes truth with false assumptions. For example saying humans act irrational is true. It is also true that humans discount rewards over time. But both doesn't mean time discounting is something irrational. This article shows clearly that having some right arguments doesn't make your assumption correct. (this might also be correct to say about my arguments)
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ggwicz 15y ago
"Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment." - Nassim Taleb People procrastinate because they're doing something they don't like. I procrastinate when I'm doing homework. But wouldn't you know, I always get motivated when hacking on an open source project or when working on a freelance project.
- prawn 15y ago
  Reminds me of this Twitter comment: "Suddenly realized the problem with all to-do lists: they are filled with things we don't want to do. Everything else is already done."
  - Mz 15y ago
    Personal anecdote: I once came across some months-old to-do list. It included some furniture rehabbing project. The piece of furniture in question had since been gotten rid of, so I rolled my eyes and removed the project from my to-do list. My sons teased me about being a failure for not accomplishing it.
    - prawn 15y ago
      I found my old Wunderlist account which has stuff on it from at least nine months ago. I've done a lot of related things since, but 90% of the items on the list, I've still not done and still need to do. If anyone ever needs to study procrastination, get in touch because I am a pro.
      - Mz 15y ago
        Or perhaps you need a better problem-solving paradigm. If you have too many things that you "need" to do that you can't seem to make yourself do and if life has not simply forced your hand or led to catastrophe after nine months or more of not getting them done, maybe some of those things aren't really as important as you think they are.
        15y ago
stdbrouw 15y ago
What that comment doesn't get is the anguish that sometimes accompanies procrastination. I don't want to start real work, often for a reason I can't quite fathom, so I go play Skyrim, and while I'm playing it I feel really really bad for not working even though I can't quite force myself to quit playing either. There's no joy in this particular kind of procrastination, and so it can't be explained by the lure of immediate gratification. It is or should be any hacker's goal in life to do something that you love, not to accept drudgery for some supposed long-term benefit. Which means that any procrastination that remains is likely to be of the kind that I describe here, which must have different origins. I like the "procrastination as a function of faith in a decision" theory.
- brandall10 15y ago
  You bring up a good point... I think what you describe is attributable to fear of failure, or perhaps even just failed expectations. That is, the more effort you put into something there is some expectation of success to follow. When that doesn't match up to expectations... if you already have a fragile self-esteem or had self-doubt going into whatever venture, you just feel it all the more. Of course the issue is success isn't a linear thing, it has peaks and valleys, but its sometimes hard to rationalize this as you're actually going thru it - you really just have to push going through those feeling like a loser phases.
- Fliko 15y ago
  I've experienced this form of procrastination a lot and I've found out that the best way to overcome it is to clean my desk, remove everything that isn't relevant to the work I want to get done and then dive into it. I'll usually be put in the zone within a few minutes after doing this.
jconnop 15y ago
"Why do humans procrastinate?"... with a link to reddit.com How fitting :)
dusing 15y ago
Sometimes (not often) procrastination saves me from making a bad decision because my during my delay something plays out that would have negated or been worsened by my planned action.
ma2rten 15y ago
For those who, didn't see it three month back. There was a great threat about procrastination: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886187 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886187
funkah 15y ago
Simple, scorn of the abstract. The hour spent watching tv is valued more highly, right now, than the consequences that come some point in the future. The tv-watching hour presses the brain's reward buttons harder than the abstract notion of having your work done ahead of time. Taleb's "The Black Swan" has a nice discussion of scorn of the abstract, though not in the context of procrastination.
- ruang 15y ago
  One manifestation of this is to break down a semi-abstract concept such as "finish coding shopping cart" to concrete tasks such as "install rails gem".
ramanujan 15y ago
There was a recent highly cited paper describing the concept of willpower as a measurable, physiological, depletable quantity, strongly affected by glucose levels: http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Brain/Self-control%20relies%20on%20glucose%20as%20a%20limited%20energy%20source%20willpower%20Is%20more%20than%20a%20metaphor.pdf http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Bra... And there was a very interesting Metafilter thread from a few years ago that found that a small amount of alcohol overcame procrastination: http://ask.metafilter.com/22924/Why-does-alcohol-overcome-my-procrastination http://ask.metafilter.com/22924/Why-does-alcohol-overcome-my... It's probably time to start studying these kinds of things as genuinely biological phenomena.
- mmaunder 15y ago
  You've just covered my four tools to overcome a slump. I've coded when buzzed. The trick is to not commit and diff the next morning. [Looks like you edited and removed caffeine and "loud thumping music". I recommend streaming ah.fm for the latter]
  - splicer 15y ago
    Or, use Git and make a ton of commits locally, then diff in the morning ;)
    - mmaunder 15y ago
      And the true genius in git's design emerges.
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  - ramanujan 15y ago
    Yes, for me personally caffeine and loud music also work. Didn't have a cite, which is why I removed it. But: next time I feel like procrastinating, might self-prescribe a Red Bull with vodka plus some music at 120bpm. Let's see what happens.
captainaj 15y ago
Lack of motivation to do what's important? or lack of priority list.
TGJ 15y ago
I could die any minute. I should enjoy myself now.
vanni 15y ago
> (...) human motivation is heavily influenced by expectations of how imminent the reward is perceived to be. Think to startup solopreneurs: their reward is far in time and uncertain. So they often and periodically have motivation drops. This is why I'm working on a productivity-focused community for startup founders and would-be ones, full of mechanisms that will try to leverage human cognition weaknesses: http://asaclock.com http://asaclock.com
corroded 15y ago
I could provide a one sentence answer to this that will enlighten you all, but I'll do it later after I finish reading all the articles in the front page.
lightcatcher 15y ago
Before reading the content behind this link, I thought for a few minutes about why people procrastinate. I came up with a few reasons: 1. Fewer context switches. A true procrastinator only works on the single next thing they have to get done, so they don't have to switch between tasks as often. Imagine the simplicity of popping tasks off of a priority queue compared to some sort of coroutine setup. 2. Saves work. Occasionally, the things that people have to do get cancelled. The procrastinator never has to do these things that got cancelled at the last minute, while the person who works ahead does. 3. Some kinds of work are easier later. Particularly in collaborative environments, getting things done is much easier when other people have already done some/most of the hard works. Examples of this include my problem sets for school. However, there is less reward for doing things after others. For instance, there is less intrinsic reward for being aided by others than for just doing everything myself on my problem sets, and it is much easier (and much less valuable) to do something like building a light bulb now than it was 100 years ago.
shawndrost 15y ago
Another thing that gives you "high level executive functionality": meditation.
fauigerzigerk 15y ago
This theory makes very little sense to me. First of all, I don't believe that it is rational to ignore time or impact on your life. Would you take 1 dollar today or 10 in a year? I think what matters more than the actual answer is that the choice has zero impact on your life either way. Would you take 1 billion today or 10 billion in a year? Is that even the same question? In terms of supposedly "rational" financial accounting it is, but I think it would be totally irrational for an average person not to think about these choices in completely different terms. At some point a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference and it would not be rational to act as if this leap didn't exist just because the original quantitative model is unsuitable to account for it. I believe nonlinearity in things like these is the core of what we call intelligence and calling it irrational is nonsense. (Not sure if that theory does that, but it sounds like it might) The other example they give, studying for an exam earlier or keep playing a game is a different matter altogether. It's a multi factor optimization and there is no way to transform it to a single factor problem (unlike the financial example). Is the pleasure gained from playing the game worth more or less than reducing stress and risk ahead of the exam? On what scale should that be determined?
- andylei 15y ago
  > I don't believe that it is rational to ignore time It's not. The question is how you factor time into your discounting. Take the $1 vs $10 example. There are several risk factors at play here, and we can discount for each of them. First is the time value of money. Let's be generous and give you a 5% risk free rate of return. That $10 is now worth about $9.50. Next is just the default risk. What if the guy asking you the question doesn't pay in a year? This risk, however, is artificial. We can modify the experiment to compensate for it: the guy can put it in an escrow account guaranteed to pay you in a year. No discount. Catastrophe risk: what if the bank underwriting the escrow account goes under / what if the entire banking system is destroyed / what if dollars are no longer valuable / what if I'm too dead to enjoy the dollars? Let's be generous and say the combined possibility that some catastrophe will render the $9.50 worthless to you is 20%. Now the money is worth about $7.6. Now the question is, what is this money actual worth to you in terms of utility. Suppose your total wealth was $100,000. $1 is 0.0001% of your wealth. The $7.6 is 7.6 times that value. That means that in order for the $7.6 to have a smaller impact on your life than the $1, your wealth would have to increase by over 7.6 times in the next year. If you're in a situation where the probability that your overall wealth will increase by over 7.6 times in the next year, then your decision to take the dollar now is likely rational. If not, your decision is not utility maximizing (and thus irrational).
hvass 15y ago
I'm surprised nobody has given this link from LessWrong: How to Beat Procrastination: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/ I highly recommend it!
- verroq 15y ago
  Isn't impulsiveness the temptation from the presence of another task with a high value and expectancy?
junto 15y ago
Because I'm reading HN!
jakeonthemove 15y ago
I find that generalizing in anything related to human intelligence is a mistake - there's just too many variables. If I had to choose between 1 dollar now and 10 a year later, I'd choose $1 now. If the choice stood between $1 now and $10 a week later, I'd take the $10, since I wouldn't be waiting long and getting $1.40 for each day of waiting. I'm also one of those people who think days and weeks go by too damn fast (I know people who think time is flowing too slow and weeks are like ages to them). Also, there are a lot of people who'll take Skyrim AND the ice cream NOW, simply because they can or because getting an A is not a priority (and any passing grade would do). I can't decide if that's a choice or just an impulsive action...
bjoernbu 15y ago
Is the very first example really true? Would most people really take a dollar now over 10 dollars in a year? I wouldn't (except I need the money right now because otherwise I'd have to turn around, look for an ATM and come back later - which I don't thinks is implied here). Apart form that I really like the post and the conclusion of the research. Still, I dislike the example and can't imagine this is true for a majority of people.

264 points by ankeshk 15y ago

mih 15y ago

An interesting video on procrastination from a chapter of the book 'You are not so smart' http://youtu.be/DJ2T4-rUUcs http://youtu.be/DJ2T4-rUUcs

dangero 15y ago
That was an amazing hook and I feel like the book was talking exactly about me. It was actually very reassuring to know how normal I am. Not sure if you're associated with this book, but I think I'm sold.
- mih 15y ago
  Just to make it clear, I am not associated with the book in any way, but impulsively bought it on Amazon after seeing this video. As I pore through subsequent chapters, it strikes a chord with me and is based on well researched psychological experiments conducted at various universities. It's worth a buy imho.
  - dangero 15y ago
    Yeah I bought the book last night and I have thoroughly enjoyed the first two chapters. Thanks for the recommendation.

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andre3k1 15y ago

It is worth noting that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are the fathers of modern-day behavioral economics. Their biggest contribution is called Prospect Theory. It goes against everything they teach you in Econ 101 -- the expected utility theory is wrong. Kahneman won a noble prize in Economics for his work. Sadly, Tversky passed away in 1996 before he could be awarded. Prospect Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory

huherto 15y ago
This is a great example why understanding Math is important. It can even help you understand psychological aspects like, why we make the choices we make.
gwern 15y ago
> It goes against everything they teach you in Econ 101 -- the expected utility theory is wrong. I was rather under the impression that prospect theory was descriptive and not normative. Prospect theory ain't gonna save you and your hyperbolic discounting from being money-pumped, and one of the interesting bits of Ainslie's book, IIRC, was discussing how economic incentives and penalties did shift people closer to normatively-correct discounting and away from preference reversals.

arketyp 15y ago

How does cases of workaholism suit into this? That is, specifically, persons focusing too much on their career for big parts of their lives and then later regretting never having spent time with their family, enjoying a slow day etc. Isn't this almost reverse procrastination? Somehow you have deluded yourself that the future reward is worth the short term costs. And I guess in the end the habit would be so hard to break that it is indeed a sort of short-term procrastination kind of deal once again. You keep working all days because it is the easiest choice to deal with. Stepping down is such a drastic choice and a big commitment and scary and so on. I guess I also want to point out that these things are really complicated dynamics. How do I know how much I should deny myself the instant rewards? What do I really know about the worth of this task I have setup for myself and its benefits? Why do we procrastinate? Well, because we don't know, because we're uncertain, because we doubt.

jodrellblank 15y ago
Well, because we don't know, because we're uncertain, because we doubt. What about the people who don't know and don't procrastinate? What's bad about uncertainty and doubt? What are you afraid of if it "goes wrong"? If it was uncertain what would happen but any outcome was exciting, you wouldn't procrastinate, right?
- arketyp 15y ago
  What about the people who don't know and don't procrastinate? I guess they got God's blessing. I don't understand your point. If it was uncertain what would happen but any outcome was exciting, you wouldn't procrastinate, right? That's exactly the time I would procrastinate. Or am I missing something?
huherto 15y ago
IMHO, workalcoholics get short term rewards by working. And they get it every day and with every action that they take.

DenisM 15y ago

I think this simplistic explanation does not do justice to the complex subject which is procrastination. If it were that simple, we wouldn't be having those problems, would we? For a more rounded perspective on the subject of procrastination I suggest reading someone who observed a few hundreds of cases and helped in fixing most of them: http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-Guilt-Free/dp/0874775043 http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-G...

wycats 15y ago
"If it were that simple, we wouldn't be having those problems, would we?" How do you figure? Our behavior is driven by powerful forces, and rational analysis is a relatively new factor. The book "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely explores how our cognitive biases (such as anchoring and many others) often remain in place even after we are told that they exist and how to identify them.

rkalla 15y ago

In addition to the temporal aspect of decision making given in the top reply, there was a study recently (posted on HN maybe 8 months ago) that found procrastination was a function of confidence in a decision. I think the temporal aspect of decision making is a red herring and the real issue is the confidence in the decision; which is harder to gauge the farther out it is. Some people have a great sense of confidence in their decisions and subsequently may procrastination less as their lack of faith in their decisions are not impacted by temporal locality. This explanation happened to fit my tendency to procrastination to a T, as opposed to decisions simply being farther out on a timeline.

tryitnow 15y ago

It is unsurprising that this gets so many upvotes since HN is where many go to procrastinate (myself included).

nekojima 15y ago
I'm currently multi-tasking my procrastination. Reading HN & watching football, while avoiding yardwork and if I do that, between games, then "real" work will lie ahead, which I should really be doing instead. Btw, its not a holiday here. :-)

erikb 15y ago

Hm. I never saw this as a bad attribute nor can I accept it as the reason for procrastination. Yes, sure. People work more for goals that are closer in time then for goals that are further away. But that is not irrational, nor is it the reason for procastination. First let me explain how I see the procastination thing and then let me say a word or two about why I think that temporal discounting is something rational and useful. Procrastination often has no reward at all. If it has a reward, why call it procrastionation? You actually do something useful, if it has a reward. The thing is, that "not procrastinating" is considered work, thus related with stress, concentration and energydepletion. So "not procrastinating" has a cost, which humans overestimate. There is some research (that I can't quote right now, but psychological material here on HN often cites some good sources about that) that people value a cost of an objective value X around 2 or 3 times higher then a reward of the same objective value (so losing $100 might feel as bad, as winning $200 might feel good). So most humans prefer instinctively to avoid or minimize costs before they maximize the (stochastic) expected value of an action. Doesn't avoiding cost (stress, "work") seem much more reasonable then missevaluating the reward for procastination? Well, what the truth is can nobody know, because the science also doesn't know yet. But for me it sounds way more reasonable, especially because I know how much I like to not work and to have no stress compared to getting anything done. So, now why do I think that temporal discounting even is a good thing? Time can change the reward we gain from an object. An object might increase or decrease in value over time. With money we can even be sure that it decreases over time. Also our preferences might change according to our changing situation. Whatever we do now, we can be sure that our situation will be very different one year in the future. And last but not least, the risk increases drastically, that we don't get any reward at all. Dying in a car accident is a very unlikely thing if you sit at home in front of your comuter now. But if you think about that risk again for this point in time + one year it is not that unlikely anymore. All risks increase with a bigger time frame. All this leads to a situation in which gaining something now makes it much more rewarding then gaining it somewhere far in the future. I think the big problem about that article is that it mixes truth with false assumptions. For example saying humans act irrational is true. It is also true that humans discount rewards over time. But both doesn't mean time discounting is something irrational. This article shows clearly that having some right arguments doesn't make your assumption correct. (this might also be correct to say about my arguments)

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ggwicz 15y ago

"Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment." - Nassim Taleb People procrastinate because they're doing something they don't like. I procrastinate when I'm doing homework. But wouldn't you know, I always get motivated when hacking on an open source project or when working on a freelance project.

prawn 15y ago
Reminds me of this Twitter comment: "Suddenly realized the problem with all to-do lists: they are filled with things we don't want to do. Everything else is already done."
- Mz 15y ago
  Personal anecdote: I once came across some months-old to-do list. It included some furniture rehabbing project. The piece of furniture in question had since been gotten rid of, so I rolled my eyes and removed the project from my to-do list. My sons teased me about being a failure for not accomplishing it.
  - prawn 15y ago
    I found my old Wunderlist account which has stuff on it from at least nine months ago. I've done a lot of related things since, but 90% of the items on the list, I've still not done and still need to do. If anyone ever needs to study procrastination, get in touch because I am a pro.
    - Mz 15y ago
      Or perhaps you need a better problem-solving paradigm. If you have too many things that you "need" to do that you can't seem to make yourself do and if life has not simply forced your hand or led to catastrophe after nine months or more of not getting them done, maybe some of those things aren't really as important as you think they are.
      - 15y ago

stdbrouw 15y ago

What that comment doesn't get is the anguish that sometimes accompanies procrastination. I don't want to start real work, often for a reason I can't quite fathom, so I go play Skyrim, and while I'm playing it I feel really really bad for not working even though I can't quite force myself to quit playing either. There's no joy in this particular kind of procrastination, and so it can't be explained by the lure of immediate gratification. It is or should be any hacker's goal in life to do something that you love, not to accept drudgery for some supposed long-term benefit. Which means that any procrastination that remains is likely to be of the kind that I describe here, which must have different origins. I like the "procrastination as a function of faith in a decision" theory.

brandall10 15y ago
You bring up a good point... I think what you describe is attributable to fear of failure, or perhaps even just failed expectations. That is, the more effort you put into something there is some expectation of success to follow. When that doesn't match up to expectations... if you already have a fragile self-esteem or had self-doubt going into whatever venture, you just feel it all the more. Of course the issue is success isn't a linear thing, it has peaks and valleys, but its sometimes hard to rationalize this as you're actually going thru it - you really just have to push going through those feeling like a loser phases.
Fliko 15y ago
I've experienced this form of procrastination a lot and I've found out that the best way to overcome it is to clean my desk, remove everything that isn't relevant to the work I want to get done and then dive into it. I'll usually be put in the zone within a few minutes after doing this.

jconnop 15y ago

"Why do humans procrastinate?"... with a link to reddit.com How fitting :)

dusing 15y ago

Sometimes (not often) procrastination saves me from making a bad decision because my during my delay something plays out that would have negated or been worsened by my planned action.

ma2rten 15y ago

For those who, didn't see it three month back. There was a great threat about procrastination: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886187 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886187

funkah 15y ago

Simple, scorn of the abstract. The hour spent watching tv is valued more highly, right now, than the consequences that come some point in the future. The tv-watching hour presses the brain's reward buttons harder than the abstract notion of having your work done ahead of time. Taleb's "The Black Swan" has a nice discussion of scorn of the abstract, though not in the context of procrastination.

ruang 15y ago
One manifestation of this is to break down a semi-abstract concept such as "finish coding shopping cart" to concrete tasks such as "install rails gem".

ramanujan 15y ago

There was a recent highly cited paper describing the concept of willpower as a measurable, physiological, depletable quantity, strongly affected by glucose levels: http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Brain/Self-control%20relies%20on%20glucose%20as%20a%20limited%20energy%20source%20willpower%20Is%20more%20than%20a%20metaphor.pdf http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Bra... And there was a very interesting Metafilter thread from a few years ago that found that a small amount of alcohol overcame procrastination: http://ask.metafilter.com/22924/Why-does-alcohol-overcome-my-procrastination http://ask.metafilter.com/22924/Why-does-alcohol-overcome-my... It's probably time to start studying these kinds of things as genuinely biological phenomena.

mmaunder 15y ago
You've just covered my four tools to overcome a slump. I've coded when buzzed. The trick is to not commit and diff the next morning. [Looks like you edited and removed caffeine and "loud thumping music". I recommend streaming ah.fm for the latter]
- splicer 15y ago
  Or, use Git and make a ton of commits locally, then diff in the morning ;)
  - mmaunder 15y ago
    And the true genius in git's design emerges.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 15y ago
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- ramanujan 15y ago
  Yes, for me personally caffeine and loud music also work. Didn't have a cite, which is why I removed it. But: next time I feel like procrastinating, might self-prescribe a Red Bull with vodka plus some music at 120bpm. Let's see what happens.

captainaj 15y ago

Lack of motivation to do what's important? or lack of priority list.

TGJ 15y ago

I could die any minute. I should enjoy myself now.

vanni 15y ago

> (...) human motivation is heavily influenced by expectations of how imminent the reward is perceived to be. Think to startup solopreneurs: their reward is far in time and uncertain. So they often and periodically have motivation drops. This is why I'm working on a productivity-focused community for startup founders and would-be ones, full of mechanisms that will try to leverage human cognition weaknesses: http://asaclock.com http://asaclock.com

corroded 15y ago

I could provide a one sentence answer to this that will enlighten you all, but I'll do it later after I finish reading all the articles in the front page.

lightcatcher 15y ago

Before reading the content behind this link, I thought for a few minutes about why people procrastinate. I came up with a few reasons: 1. Fewer context switches. A true procrastinator only works on the single next thing they have to get done, so they don't have to switch between tasks as often. Imagine the simplicity of popping tasks off of a priority queue compared to some sort of coroutine setup. 2. Saves work. Occasionally, the things that people have to do get cancelled. The procrastinator never has to do these things that got cancelled at the last minute, while the person who works ahead does. 3. Some kinds of work are easier later. Particularly in collaborative environments, getting things done is much easier when other people have already done some/most of the hard works. Examples of this include my problem sets for school. However, there is less reward for doing things after others. For instance, there is less intrinsic reward for being aided by others than for just doing everything myself on my problem sets, and it is much easier (and much less valuable) to do something like building a light bulb now than it was 100 years ago.

shawndrost 15y ago

Another thing that gives you "high level executive functionality": meditation.

fauigerzigerk 15y ago

This theory makes very little sense to me. First of all, I don't believe that it is rational to ignore time or impact on your life. Would you take 1 dollar today or 10 in a year? I think what matters more than the actual answer is that the choice has zero impact on your life either way. Would you take 1 billion today or 10 billion in a year? Is that even the same question? In terms of supposedly "rational" financial accounting it is, but I think it would be totally irrational for an average person not to think about these choices in completely different terms. At some point a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference and it would not be rational to act as if this leap didn't exist just because the original quantitative model is unsuitable to account for it. I believe nonlinearity in things like these is the core of what we call intelligence and calling it irrational is nonsense. (Not sure if that theory does that, but it sounds like it might) The other example they give, studying for an exam earlier or keep playing a game is a different matter altogether. It's a multi factor optimization and there is no way to transform it to a single factor problem (unlike the financial example). Is the pleasure gained from playing the game worth more or less than reducing stress and risk ahead of the exam? On what scale should that be determined?

andylei 15y ago
> I don't believe that it is rational to ignore time It's not. The question is how you factor time into your discounting. Take the $1 vs $10 example. There are several risk factors at play here, and we can discount for each of them. First is the time value of money. Let's be generous and give you a 5% risk free rate of return. That $10 is now worth about $9.50. Next is just the default risk. What if the guy asking you the question doesn't pay in a year? This risk, however, is artificial. We can modify the experiment to compensate for it: the guy can put it in an escrow account guaranteed to pay you in a year. No discount. Catastrophe risk: what if the bank underwriting the escrow account goes under / what if the entire banking system is destroyed / what if dollars are no longer valuable / what if I'm too dead to enjoy the dollars? Let's be generous and say the combined possibility that some catastrophe will render the $9.50 worthless to you is 20%. Now the money is worth about $7.6. Now the question is, what is this money actual worth to you in terms of utility. Suppose your total wealth was $100,000. $1 is 0.0001% of your wealth. The $7.6 is 7.6 times that value. That means that in order for the $7.6 to have a smaller impact on your life than the $1, your wealth would have to increase by over 7.6 times in the next year. If you're in a situation where the probability that your overall wealth will increase by over 7.6 times in the next year, then your decision to take the dollar now is likely rational. If not, your decision is not utility maximizing (and thus irrational).

hvass 15y ago

I'm surprised nobody has given this link from LessWrong: How to Beat Procrastination: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/ I highly recommend it!

verroq 15y ago
Isn't impulsiveness the temptation from the presence of another task with a high value and expectancy?

junto 15y ago

Because I'm reading HN!

jakeonthemove 15y ago

I find that generalizing in anything related to human intelligence is a mistake - there's just too many variables. If I had to choose between 1 dollar now and 10 a year later, I'd choose $1 now. If the choice stood between $1 now and $10 a week later, I'd take the $10, since I wouldn't be waiting long and getting $1.40 for each day of waiting. I'm also one of those people who think days and weeks go by too damn fast (I know people who think time is flowing too slow and weeks are like ages to them). Also, there are a lot of people who'll take Skyrim AND the ice cream NOW, simply because they can or because getting an A is not a priority (and any passing grade would do). I can't decide if that's a choice or just an impulsive action...

bjoernbu 15y ago

Is the very first example really true? Would most people really take a dollar now over 10 dollars in a year? I wouldn't (except I need the money right now because otherwise I'd have to turn around, look for an ATM and come back later - which I don't thinks is implied here). Apart form that I really like the post and the conclusion of the research. Still, I dislike the example and can't imagine this is true for a majority of people.