The post focuses on the fact that it's hard for us to think about our future selves. So procrastination is the result of short-term bias, and a desire for immediate gratification.
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I personally think that's irresponsibly oversimplistic. Procrastination can get much, much more complex than that.
> I personally think that's irresponsibly oversimplistic. Procrastination can get much, much more complex than that.
Well said. I find there are two main reasons I might procrastinate. Sometimes it's because I'm working on something boring or frustrating, and I just want a break from it. Sometimes it's because I'm scared I'll fail, whereas if I never start, I'll never risk that.
I'm trying (with a bit of success so far) to reshape my habits to stop the second kind of procrastination. The first kind, I don't even consider to be a bad thing. When I was a child, I learned to program and do maths because I found "school maths" boring. I read a lot of amazing books because I couldn't be bothered to memorise facts in a sub-par geography class. Now I'm (supposedly) an adult, this form of procrastination consists of deferring low-priority but necessary tasks (e.g. timesheets, marking students' work, health and safety reviews) and working on cool things that motivate me.
Yeah, I think the main thing about my procrastination is structural and habitual. This is something I've built since I was a child. I've always been averse to doing things that I don't instantly or immediately enjoy.
That said, these structures and habits were built because of some set of reasons that may seem completely irrelevant today. My parents spoiled me silly and never expected me to take any serious responsibility for anything. I used to read tonnes of books for pleasure, but I never did any of my homework because I didn't see the point of it.
Years later, I struggle to get myself to commit to doing work that I personally acknowledge as important and useful to me.
I realize this also focuses on Instant Gratification as the cornerstone of the problem, but it describes the actual struggle with much more detail and nuance.
"Sometimes it's because I'm scared I'll fail, whereas if I never start, I'll never risk that."
The idea from the article is that you are actually wrong about what you think your reasons for procrastinating are. They may feel intuitive to you, but they are inaccurate. The idea is that if you identify with your future self more often, you will align the interests. People who naturally do this procrastinate less.
Rather than thinking about fear of failure, imagine a future self that has done the thing. Even imagine a future self that has done the thing poorly and another that has done it well. Imagine a future self that just gets to talk about doing the thing poorly to someone interesting at a party. Imagine another future self that has been rewarded and recognized for having done the thing well or just got lucky. Identify with those future selves and let them compete with your current self. Each of the future selves results in doing the thing. They are way cooler than the current self who wants to not do the thing. Make it a competition between done-well and done-poorly to see who wins rather than letting done-not-at-all getting too much attention.
Out of curiosity, what are some of the things you're trying to combat the 2nd type of procrastination? I've been experimenting with habits and other organizational systems to use my time more effectively, and it's been going pretty well so far.
The main thing I do when I realize I'm frittering away time when there's something pressing that I really should be doing, I think "OK. On xxx Date in the future, you are going to be held accountable for The Thing. That date is approaching, and when it gets here, you are either going to fail or succeed, and the difference will likely be what you spend your time on right now."
This is moderately successful for important tasks with important consequences, but not so helpful when I really should, say, do my laundry. But I figure that if I can get the hard things sorted out, I'll slot the laundry in somewhere later (textbook procrastination rationalizations, yes, I recognize the irony).
I'm also playing with todo lists to help me plan better - keeping everything in my head is certainly not optimal. I sampled a bunch of methods: so far Wunderlist has been the best for just straight todos. I would like to change my habits so that when I'm too tired (physically or mentally) to do intellectual work, I default to a less demanding task - exercise, errands, whatever - instead of HN. But that's still a work in progress.
One other thing is that I've been keeping more notebooks. If something happens, and after the fact I think "Hmm, that could have gone better..." I'll jot some notes down about what I could have done instead. When the semester starts (I'm an undergrad student) I also want to start keeping a rough weekly plan in the notebook, like this: http://calnewport.com/blog/2014/08/08/deep-habits-plan-your-...
> Out of curiosity, what are some of the things you're trying to combat the 2nd type of procrastination?
Yeah, like you, changing habits/organisation is a big thing. Another is that I've set things up such that it's far easier to exile myself from the internet. I try to restrict my leisure browsing to one VM and my work to another VM. So on.
> This is moderately successful for important tasks with important consequences, but not so helpful when I really should, say, do my laundry. But I figure that if I can get the hard things sorted out, I'll slot the laundry in somewhere later (textbook procrastination rationalizations, yes, I recognize the irony).
I don't mind letting these things languish. If it takes me a long time to do laundry, so what?
Thanks for sharing your findings about todo lists. My todo list is essentially the same thing as my calendar, and I wonder if I'd benefit from separating them a bit.
Was it really "well said"? It was a personal judgement followed by an unjustified assertion. It seems you merely agree with the comment, and have mistaken that with the author saying something well.
That's not a very good summary. A more accurate TL;DR: We think of our future self as a separate person, but if you use certain tricks to manipulate someone into identifying more with their future self, they will be more considerate of that future self.
The post focuses on the fact that it's hard for us to think about our future selves. So procrastination is the result of short-term bias, and a desire for immediate gratification.
---
I personally think that's irresponsibly oversimplistic. Procrastination can get much, much more complex than that.