Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

> Impulsiveness. This refers to your sensitivity to delay. The more impulsive you are, the less willing you are to delay gratification. The more impulsive you are, the more you value immediate rewards over long-term rewards.

> Delay. This indicates how long you must wait to receive the expected rewards, benefits, payouts. The longer you have to wait, the less motivated you’ll be and the more likely you are to procrastinate.

This may sound convincing at the surface, but I feel it is not a good model of what was happening when I procrastinated a bit e.g. as a doctoral student. I observed that if I was expected to work on X, I suddenly had great ideas (and motivations) to do Y, where Y was also some piece of scientific work, just not in the realm of what I was supposed to work on (Y != X). So explanations in terms of impulsiveness or instant gratification don't seem to be what was going on there. Also, if you are smart, you know that procrastination activities defer your gratification even further.

The best ways to beat procrastination turned out to be (for me, at the time):

1. write up any ideas briefly so you can tell yourself "I've preserved it, I can get back to it later."

2. chop your main work into little chunks, get the first one done and then reward yourself (book shopping and chocolate work miracles), then onto the next one.

3. if a TO DO list had 10 sub-pieces of work on it, try to pick one that seems the least effort instead of necessarily doing them in the default order (where this is possible). This helps get you into work mode; once completed, see reward yourself.

I agree. For me, procrastination is purely about the emotions I have regarding the task - uncertainty, disgust, or fear of failure. It has nothing to do with the delay or size of the reward, because I’m already dealing with a large and immediate emotional penalty.

"Surely the me of tomorrow will be more emotionally competent to handle this burden than the me of right now."

It isn't that. It is just "working on this makes me feel bad, so I will avoid doing it." There isn't an expectation that tomorrow it will be easier. I just want to work on a different thing that doesn't make me feel bad right now.

Where for me, "feels bad" starts at the body getting tensed up and the gut being twisted, and goes up from this to becoming nearly paralyzed and tortured, with higher cognitive functions shutting down and even the simplest incremental action on the task requires forcing my own limbs to move.

It's like the physically painful stress of suddenly having to make a very difficult choice, except it doesn't go away until I finish the task, give up on it, or... just do something else. So it's less of a "I will avoid doing it", and more of the mind giving up under torture.

This heavily contributes to what I've heard as the Adversity Paradox: we don't like adversity, but find meaning in the overcoming of it.

Unfortunately, from my own experience, my feelings of inadequacy and unease about what I can't know constantly cloud my higher-order reasoning.

Bad thinking is also, tragically, habit-forming.

My issue with procrastination is that my reward circuits seem kind of broken. My dopamine system is not motivated much even by fairly extreme future positive rewards. It's almost entirely rewarded by removal or reduction of certain types of future negative outcomes. (Primarily, these are either social, or safety/security related in nature.)

I'm not sure how to self-structure a reward system around that without being kind of a psycho.

Your steps are also good practice for getting things done in general.

I would add that part of the main work is to further subdivide any chunks that are poorly defined, and that the time spent elaborating and subdividing chunks is a productive work activity.

Ideally, at the end of a workday I like to have at least one or two chunks sufficiently defined that when I show up the next morning I can just sit down and complete them without having to put any thought into it.

The ideas that you mention are discussed in the book, and fit in the procrastination equation. For example, when you chop up your main work into little chunks and reward yourself for each chunk, you are decreasing the delay factor of the equation, by decreasing the time it takes to get the first taste of a reward. You are also increasing the value factor, by adding additional rewards, and increasing the expectancy factor, but making the first baby steps seem more achievable.

In my experience/understanding, one's emotions are a better explanation of procrastination than an insufficient ability to "delay gratification".

For example if you feel anxious/hopeless/overwhelmed, you might not perceive the theoretical eventual gratification as a potential outcome, or might avoid thinking much about a task at all. Seen through this lens, the subdivision trick is more of a way to manufacture a provisional motivation framework and engage with a task in a less emotionally threatening way. (With the hope that this framework can either carry you through the task or can be discarded after your negative emotions have been reduced)

I realize this doesn't directly contradict any points you made, but to me the procrastination equation doesn't feel like the most fruitful mental model of procrastination to start with.

Yeah. Except that isn’t what is happening in my experience.

Task avoidance (even at the cost of doing many other undesirable tasks) is a better model for many people.

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