
Why do humans procrastinate? - ankeshk
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mkwf2/why_do_humans_procrastinate_and_how_can_it_be_beat/c31rsxx
======
ramanujan
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/Bra...](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)

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...](http://ask.metafilter.com/22924/Why-does-alcohol-overcome-my-
procrastination)

It's probably time to start studying these kinds of things as genuinely
biological phenomena.

~~~
freemarketteddy
In addition to all the four in this thread(glucose,alcohol,music and
caffeine)...another tool and perhaps the most effective
immediately....Adderall.

(Warning:I am not a doctor,and you must fully understand the side effects
before using even a mild amphetamine)

~~~
code_duck
Unfortunately, on the of the most prominent side effects of amphetamines is
tolerance and habituation, then a massive crash in the other direction that
can last weeks or months when you stop taking it. I generally find stimulants
take more out of me than they give.

~~~
freemarketteddy
yes..one way to avoid developing tolerance is to not use it regularly....in my
case I try to alternate between periods of relaxation(lots of
procrastination!) and intense work periods when I use 10 mg XRs on weekdays!

Here is a very good quora thread on the long term effects
[http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-long-term-effects-of-
Adder...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-long-term-effects-of-Adderall-
Dexedrine-or-Ritalin-use)

Also nearly 3.3 million Americans age 19 and younger used an ADHD drug last
year, according to Medco Health Solutions Inc.I think there is enough data to
conclude that there are not really any serious and irreversible long term
effects.Would love to be proved wrong on this?

~~~
code_duck
Adderall is a mixture of dextroamphetamine and amphetamine. It is not all that
different than methamphetamine - you don't have to look very far to find that
long term use of amphetamines can be very dangerous.

------
stdbrouw
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
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.

------
arketyp
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
_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
_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?

------
ggwicz
"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
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
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
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
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.

~~~
prawn
No, they're pretty important, but they aren't absolutely crucial (make or
break) and so I can put them off.

------
erikb
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)

~~~
sheeps
Exactly. Distance in time means greater uncertainty of reward, and greater
uncertainty means lower motivation to go after it in the first place.

~~~
wycats
Except that this factor isn't consistent with the known uncertainty discount,
even if we _and_ the person in question understand the discount rationally.

In fact, it is often wildly different from the known rational answer. In other
words, we have some hardcoded responses to scenarios that are probably built
on evolutionarily rational behavior, but which don't apply well to specific
scenarios in which the "correct" rational behavior is easily determined.

------
fauigerzigerk
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
> 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).

~~~
fauigerzigerk
The problem with your concept of utility maximization is that utility is
subjective and non linear. Non linear is not the same as irrational. For me,
10 billion isn't nearly 10 times as useful as 1 billion. And if I had 10
billion and you offered me another 100 billion for debugging your 1990s style
Word Basic macro I wouldn't do it. But all of that would change in an instant
if I was in love with a woman who adored men with a net worth of more than 100
billion. Is that irrational? I believe not.

~~~
andylei
my comment doesn't assume too much about the shape of your utility curve
except that it is continuous and monotonic.

multiplying everything by a billion does change things, but it doesn't say
anything about the rationality of the people who choose 1 dollar now over 10
in the future. we're also not comparing 100 billion dollars to the love a
woman. we're comparing 1 dollar now to 10 dollars in a year.

my argument is that if you have any kind of sane (rational) discounting
system, comparing 1 dollar now to 10 in the future is at worst like comparing
1 dollar now to 7.6 dollars now, with the only uncertainty being your changing
utility preferences for dollars. if you honestly believe that the probability
that your utility preference for marginal dollars will change by more 7.6
times in one year is greater than 0.5, then choosing 1 dollar may not be
irrational. but for most people, that is highly unlikely. thus, your
discounting system and thus preferences may be irrational.

~~~
im3w1l
How much effort do you have to put in to get those dollars in a year? An
email, a call, actually going somewhere? This could easily render the value of
those 10$ below 0

------
DenisM
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-G...](http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-
Procrastination-Guilt-Free/dp/0874775043)

~~~
wycats
"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.

------
andre3k1
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>

~~~
gwern
> 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.

------
rkalla
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.

------
lightcatcher
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.

------
ma2rten
For those who, didn't see it three month back. There was a great threat about
procrastination:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886187>

------
vanni
> (...) 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>

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

~~~
nekojima
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. :-)

------
jconnop
"Why do humans procrastinate?"... with a link to reddit.com

How fitting :)

------
jakeonthemove
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...

------
hvass
I'm surprised nobody has given this link from LessWrong: How to Beat
Procrastination: <http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/>

I highly recommend it!

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

------
dusing
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.

------
mih
An interesting video on procrastination from a chapter of the book 'You are
not so smart'

<http://youtu.be/DJ2T4-rUUcs>

~~~
dangero
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
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
Yeah I bought the book last night and I have thoroughly enjoyed the first two
chapters. Thanks for the recommendation.

------
bjoernbu
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.

------
corroded
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.

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

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

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

------
junto
Because I'm reading HN!

------
funkah
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
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".

