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.
(article seems to be down right now, so I have no idea what it's saying.)
>>requires two forms of self discipline
Anyway, I've tried the pure willpower self discipline approach for a long time with mixed results. Not like I never got anything done, but I wasn't as productive as I would've liked.
And the thing is, I thought that willpower was the only thing that could possibly work. All those other things people did? Gimmicks. Trying to trick yourself into being productive? Guess they didn't have the... willpower.
Well, that kind of attitude didn't improve things for me. Willpower is nice. Some willpower is needed. But there are ways to make whatever willpower you have go farther.
For instance, one thing that made more of an improvement than all the "I'm going to be disciplined starting tomorrow!" mantras was just keeping a to do list with very tiny tasks. So instead of buying a programming book and then planning to read it all in a weekend by sheer willpower and then usually never starting or giving up after five chapters, I set up my to do list manager to show me "read one chapter" as a task every day. Now I'm working through 1-2 programming books a month in my spare time whereas that used to take me half a year before.
(I realize that you weren't promoting pure-self-discipline-and-nothing else and the low barrier to entry thing you mentioned is in a similar vein... just thought I'd emphasize that discipline is the starting point, not the end all solution.)
Absolutely. Yeah, the "I'll will myself into doing this" approach doesn't work for long. There have been a handful of psychology articles on attention and self-control being limited mental resources (e.g., http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc281e.pdf -- [PDF]).
I was just saying that even with all kinds of tricks and fooling yourself and convincing yourself and whatnot, you still have to make yourself stop pushing that reward button and do some work. The key, for me, is to make it easier and easier to switch from procrastinating to getting work done.
But here's where his idea helps you combat the desire for immediate rewards without "willpower".
Let's look at the impact on what sort of respect others will give you with your three options:
1. Studying for a degree: high - hard worker, smart
2. Going out: medium - friends like you, but you're a party-person and don't really do anything respectable.
3. Video games: low - lazy bum.
I think the argument is that the part of your brain that is trying to procrastinate understands enough about society to realize that making yourself a better and more respectable person is a worthy goal and will help you work towards it. The trick is having that goal in mind. With the goal in mind, not making progress is an immediate negative reinforcement.
I used to play video games all day instead of working. Now I feel almost dirty if I do that. I know that the person I want to be is not someone who sits around and reads HN and gets no work done in a day.
Of course, there's a balance. If I'm ahead on a deadline, good luck getting me to finish it early.
The challenge is explaining the brain why exactly is making yourself a better and more respectable person a worthy goal. And then, how getting a degree would help you on that road (also not obvious, with lots of counterexamples and without a solid explanation of what does being a good person mean). Or maybe it's just my brain that doesn't understand enough about society.
Yeah, but I think that message will resonate more with the HN crowd than with just about any other crowd. There are an awful lot of people that aren't motivated to be a better person or a more respectable person -- nor could I, for one, tell them that they should be.
I agree with your view of procrastination. I think there's a good portion of it that is due to the points you make.
However, there's something else to be added to the discussion about procrastination that has to do with people's temperament and unhealthy ideas they have of work (and themselves).
For example, one problem people might have is they tie their self-worth to the outcome of their goals. You can see why that could cause a lot of anxiety and stress. Using your examples, if you needed to win every time you played video games, and it was a source of great confidence and self-esteem for you - the moment you're in a situation where you know there's a chance you might loose, it will become a lot harder to get the energy to practice/play. It has nothing to do with enjoying video games in and of itself - it has to do with connecting your worth to the outcome. Even hanging out with friends can become a hassle if people think they need to control the outcome somehow.
This happens in school (in college,where for the first time people may not be getting the top grades and in highschool grades were the source of great pride and acceptance and popularity), and at work (if you screw something up you think you'll be considered an idiot and possibly be fired). A lot of people, somehow and at some point, develop some sort of inner drill sergeant who tells them they are no good until they get X done - and this works well enough when you're young and use to being forced to do things by other people anyway and are looking for approval from adults and peers. But as people grow independent they realize they really don't like the way they talk to themselves or at the least, they start not to care about what the drill-sergeant in them wants.
To people who do not have these cognitive traps, these problems are invisible. They are likely to think procrastinators are inherently lazy/undisciplined because that is what they can visually conclude (and it also reinforces the idea they are not lazy and are disciplined).
Another trap is not viewing work in the correct context. People feel they are being 'forced' to do something. That reinforces the idea that the work isn't very pleasant, and they would be doing something else if they could. Well, thats the wrong way to frame the problem. It focuses on your feelings, transient and often miscalculated. A healthier way to frame work is to consider cost vs reward. We tend to highlight the cost of work and compare it to the rewards of procrastination.
Also, people who procrastinate may also not take breaks when working, or set aside time to enjoy their life - they are stuck in a perpetual grind where they feel like crap/imposters if they take their attention off work. That very pressure is what renders them unproductive.
Anyway, if this stuff seems interesting to anyone, I recommend checking out "The Now Habit" by Neil Fiore. I found it to be one of the few books that frames procrastination as a symptom rather than a cause. It has a lot of interesting insights if you don't feel the you lack discipline or are lazy, but may not be framing things (or talking to yourself) in the healthiest way.
Very interesting, reminds me of the conflict between Freud and Adler. You answered on a post who explains procrastination with desire, but added the self-esteem element. I am with you on this, i suppose the problem is a combination of desire and self worth problems.
I also can recommend "The Now Habit", this is really a book that stands out on this topic.
A simple example: if running your development server requires remembering several parameters for the command and possibly also requires starting up a database, that's annoying and may require you to look it up. Not a good starting-work experience
It feels unnecessary, but have a script called run in the root of your project that does that startup stuff. Then you just run ./run and it's time to code. No friction
>"have a script called run in the root of your project"
// Bleurgh. Why not give it some sort of descriptive title? "./run-startup-actions-initialise-database.sh" would only need an extra keypress to start with shell completion active.
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.