
A Universal Law of Procrastination (2016) - brahmwg
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3064
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jonathanstrange
I must be an atypical procrastinator then, because I only procrastinate
activities that are less pleasant than others but have no deadline at all. If
there is a deadline, I tend to do the work as early as possible, usually much
earlier than my colleagues, so the pressure goes away and I can procrastinate
about the activities whose time I self-manage again. I've found out over the
years that the #1 reason for delaying self-managed tasks is that they are too
big, appear like huge obstacles, which causes me to turn to the easy and fun
creative parts of _other_ tasks. Divide-and-conquer works fine to alleviate
this problem, and I also use a bit of GTD when I'm stressed in order to
increase the time available for slacking. Needless to say this only applies to
activities that are slightly unpleasant, there are also aspects of my work
that don't cause me to procrastinate at all.

There seem to be different types of procrastinators, or at least two of them:
those that procrastinate when they have to manage time themselves those that
procrastinate when there are fixed deadlines. I've never understood the second
type, to be honest. If you have a deadline, why not just do it quickly, so
you're done with it?

~~~
scandinavegan
> I've never understood the second type, to be honest. If you have a deadline,
> why not just do it quickly, so you're done with it?

I listened to this podcast recently, which was very good:

[https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/beat-
procrastination...](https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/beat-
procrastination/)

There are two psychologists being interviewed, and they talk about different
reasons people procrastinate:

* Fear of failure: If you think you will fail outright or, more probable, not meet your own standards of perfection, you put off working on this uncomfortable item. It's easier to flee to something else. If you don't even try, you can tell yourself the day before the deadline that you could've done it, had you just started earlier, and so on, tricking yourself into feeling more competent than you are.

* Fear of success: If you're known as the person who gets things done, you'll be handed more difficult tasks. You might be promoted into a position of more responsibility, closer to where the decisions are made, which might not suit you. You might get people to supervise, which you're not interested in. You might make you're colleagues, or family, or friends jealous of your success, which is why you self sabotage your tasks and don't perform to your full potential. They talk about someone being the first from their family going to the university: if they succeed, they won't be able to get advice from their parents on how to finish a report, their brother might not think that problems in academia are real problems compared to being a construction worker, and so on.

* Fear of loss of control: If your manager or spouse tells you to do something and you do it, you hand over control of your time to someone else. By procrastinating, you're saying "I decide when and if this gets done", which is a confidence boost. Not doing something is a way of asserting control in a passive aggressive way.

* You may come from a family that over and over told you that you suck and is a failure, so why even try doing anything that's hard?

* Or you were teased as a kid when you were successful in school or in sports, so you sabotage you're own work to avoid imagined further abuse.

* Or you might have been praised as being super smart and competent, so as soon as something requires any effort, you avoid it to not look stupid or incompetent. Perhaps you don't know enough about the task you're supposed to do, or you don't know why you're supposed to do it, but instead of acknowledging that and asking for help, you put the task off.

* Or you might be really bad at predict how long things will take. Perhaps you have an idealized view that a task shouldn't take a competent person more than 30 minutes, so when you're still not done after 3 hours, the task has suddenly become a huge burden and pushes other tasks into the future. Or you might have a weakness (writing clear emails, making phone calls looking for information, and so on) that you don't acknowledge to yourself, so that it gets you into trouble because you put off that email or phone call instead of approaching the problem in a different way that utilizes your strengths or by asking for help.

They also talk about the difference between procrastinators who wait until the
very last second and then work furiously (this is me), pulling all nighters
(like last night) to finish doing stuff for work that they were supposed to do
a long time ago. Since you don't have enough time to do a perfect job, you
just have to deliver something, usually the first draft, but since that's
accepted by your boss and colleagues, you keep doing it. Another type of
procrastinator is the one who sees the deadline pass and still do nothing.
These people might have bills that go unpaid for no real reason, and will pay
unnecessary late fees on stuff. They might even put off filling out forms that
will get them money back for taxes, and other beneficial stuff, even though
it's hard from the outside to understand why someone would do that.

So that are a bunch of reasons why someone might procrastinate even though a
deadline is fixed. In the podcast they talk about the difference between
procrastinating and putting things off, where the latter might be a good thing
to do, but procrastination that ends up hurting you or making your life
difficult is something to try to look into and fix. Interestingly enough, they
talked about how no pomodoros or GTD systems can help you if you procrastinate
for deep psychological reasons, because you'll just ignore the systems anyway.
For me, these system only work for a day or two, never long term.

In the podcast, they talk about facing your fear. When you say that tasks
appear to big, or perhaps are too undefined, there's fear connected with
facing the task since you don't know what is required of you and if you can do
it. Divide and conquer sounds like a good approach, also giving yourself just
5 minutes to really think about the problem without making any judgments on
your own capacity or worth. I usually avoid thinking about tasks because I'm
afraid that I've already put it off for too long, so now it might be too late.
I might have to involve other people to help me out, which I'd have to do
close to the deadline, which is embarrassing because I would have to admit
I've put it off when I should have been working on it. But spending 5 minutes
to clarify the task and write some notes about what I already know and what
kind of output I have to produce usually helps make the task feel a lot more
manageable and less scary. Another option is to tell yourself you're going to
work on finishing the task for 10 minutes, and then you stop and evaluate how
you feel. If you've put something off, you expect to feel horrible, but
usually you're instead invigorated by finally having started on the task and
will keep on going.

What has helped me is the idea of 3 MITs, Most Important Tasks, that you
identify each morning. I write down three things I want to achieve that I
think I can manage during that day, even if it's less than what I would like
to finish. If I do them, I let myself procrastinate by reading Hacker News or
Reddit with a lot better conscience, because I've usually delivered some
tangible result to a colleague that day. This is also very nice when working
from home, and I'm usually more productive from a task perspective when I work
from home and can focus on my MITs without interruptions instead of being at
the office with my colleagues.

~~~
Jarwain
This is purely speaking from my own experience, but I feel like the fears are
themselves rationalizations like "oh man why can't I do X, maybe it's because
I'm afraid". They themselves aren't necessarily a root cause.

I take medication for ADHD, which actually helps a lot with this. Sometimes
those fears and anxieties aren't there, or if they are it's easier to push
through to accomplish what needs to get done.

------
Starwatcher2001
Does the date when a student hands in a piece of work (which seems to be what
they are measuring) corrolate with when they actually did the work?

It seems to me that a student who did the work early, but then sat on it for
some reason (maybe to polish it), is very different to one who did the work at
the last minute - even if they handed it in on the same day.

~~~
Bartweiss
That was one issue that stood out about the claim that most NSF proposals are
submitted shortly before deadline.

Even if you have a proposal 95% complete months early, there's no real benefit
to submitting it, and some value to waiting - to polish, or perhaps to amend
the proposal for a changing world. I've certainly seen professors go back and
rework proposals at the last minute because someone else had published related
work they needed to account for.

The other issue that came to mind is that people finish work near deadlines
with procrastinating, because work _takes time_. If there are two proposal
deadlines per year, and the average person takes ~6 months to write a
proposal, you'd see a normal distribution ramp-up of submissions, and never
see the declining count because those people missed the deadline.

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ollin
From my own retrospective notes, tasks that are "dangerous" (w.r.t. planning)
are:

* Administrative; i.e. my brain doesn't anticipate any tangible end product or outcome upon completion, and...

* Free of a strict, externally imposed deadline, and...

* Impossible to complete in one sitting, usually because...

* The method to complete them isn't clear, but it...

* Probably involves doing lots of experiments, research, contacting people, etc., and...

* The optimal time to start work has already passed.

I doubt these are universal, but I've found it useful to be able to recognize
tasks like these as a separate class from normal work, rather than being
surprised when they turn out to be different.

~~~
gnulinux
> The optimal time to start work has already passed.

This is affecting my life really bad. I've been trying to fight this for years
with next to no success. If I pass the optimal time to start a task I find it
almost impossible to start after that point. Say, sometimes I know that if I
do it a bit faster and maybe sloppier I can still make the deadline but for
some unknown reason it's so hard to do it and I go back to procrastinating.

Another similar problem I have with procrastination is "soft deadlines". When
something has a deadline but it's not the end of the world if the deadline is
passed (say you can still accomplish the task 2 days later and it'll be ok) I
find it incredibly hard to do it after the soft deadline. You have no idea how
many troubles I collected this way since I kept procrastinating sending
important documents to people, government etc... If I send them the day
they're due everything is fine; if something comes up, say like scanner
breaks, I forget etc... it takes months for me to send that document.

~~~
Jarwain
Talk to a psych. Too much in this thread is reminiscent of my own ADHD, or
some sort of executive function disorder. You might find it to be incredibly
beneficial; I know I did.

------
dexen
Worth refreshing this serious, if tongue-in-cheek paper:

Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators:
[http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf](http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf)

``We are writing this sentence two days before the deadline. Unfortunately
that sentence (and this one) are among the ﬁrst that we have written. How
could we have delayed so much when we have known about this deadline for
months? (...)''

------
alexkrycek
There can be a deep connection between procrastination and anxiety. The
following article definitely rang true for me:

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-
practice/201303/6...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-
practice/201303/6-tips-overcoming-anxiety-related-procrastination?amp)

~~~
ElijahLynn
That article resonated with me as well, thanks for sharing. I added her book
The Anxiety Toolkit to my reading list.

------
jakebaker
I’ve mentioned it before but a near magical solution for my procrastination is
an app developed by a friend called Focusmate [1]. You pair with a partner and
then have a shared co-working session via a video chat. Something about the
other person being “present” dramatically improves my ability to go
immediately into a flow state.

[1] www.focusmate.com

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romwell
On that note, a relevant read is the following:

Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators[1] _(Michael A. Bender, Raphael
Clifford, Kostas Tsichlas)_.

The paper assumes a linear productivity increase towards the deadline (note:
the article proposes a hyperbolic relation), and solves the scheduling problem
given this constraint.

The paper considers offline and online scheduling cases, and concludes with
the following:

 _" It is now several hours later, just minutes before the deadline. We were
searching for the ideal way to end the paper and circumstances have
unfortunately provided the answer. A campus-wide power failure at Stony Brook
has cut two hours from our last-minute working time and highlights the
difficulties of online scheduling for procrastinators."_

[1][https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0606067](https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0606067)

------
PeterStuer
As a procastrinator I get it, but wouldn't you get the same data from non-
procastrinators if you overload their capacity and observe them switching to
the 'highest pressure' deadline?

~~~
Bartweiss
Yes, this seems like a major flaw with the grant proposal data discussed.

Young professors and grad students are often _really_ busy during work hours,
and don't necessarily know all their deadlines well in advance. If you give
them a six-month window to write a proposal, they'll probably work on it
incrementally while fitting in as many other deadlines as they can.

Obviously procrastination happens, but it's also possible to get last-minute
submissions from _good_ time management; people use the full time available to
create more space to get other work done.

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naasking
Is it a universal law of procrastination, or a universal law of
hesitation/perfectionism? Submissions close to the deadline could also be due
to people continuously refining their submission, and not because the work
hasn't actually been done. People are just hesitating to submit because they
want to optimize their chance at success.

Real procrastination has a different character I think, speaking as a terrible
procrastinator myself. Although hesitation/perfectionism is definitely a part
of it.

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baxtr
TL;DR

There is a law for pressure before deadlines. The formula is 1/r where r is
the “distance” i.e. time left to an event.

~~~
sporkologist
I think mine's more like 1/r^2.

~~~
BobbyTable
And maybe add an +1 so its always offiset to miss the target, and deadline
appearing before reaching peak productivity

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1_player
There's so much research about procrastination, and any everybody does it, in
some form or another.

Is procrastinating the norm and being driven the exception? Is something
"wrong" with people that are more often than not doing everything on time?
Maybe raised in a certain way, or exhibiting uncommon neural patterns.

Doing research on why people procrastinate might be like researching why
people aren't running as fast as Usain Bolt.

~~~
hyder_m29
Our bodies have evolved to survive rather than sit around crunching reports.

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pnutjam
bookmarking this to read later...

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burnte
I'll read this later.

~~~
gitgud
I'll leave an insightful comment later.

~~~
vinod1073
I'll share the article later! :D

~~~
akskos
I'll think of some clever joke to add here later

