Inside Search

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Procrastination

People have this tendency to explain things in terms that are unhelpful. For instance, many people consider procrastination a problem they have.
But what is procrastination? It seems to just be that they're doing stuff they consider worthless. If by definition it's a matter of judgement, then what exactly are we even talking about? It's just a way to put yourself down, but doesn't tell you what to do.
A more useful thing to have is a model of the mind that explains why things happen, both the ones we want and don't want.
From that perspective, a solution arrives quickly.
The idea is that whenever we finish one thing, our mind brings up a list of things to do, organized by cost-efficiency. If for whatever reason we can't do the most cost-efficient thing, we'll just keep trying the next one until we do something.
Procrastination from that perspective is the result of some activities that are at least somewhat profitable being extremely cheap. It is always easy to procrastinate, but the reasons we feel bad about it are duty and lack of reward.
Thus the solution to procrastination is to change either cost or reward of any activity in the list, such that the things you consider worthless don't come up first.
One way to do this is to make the worthless activities more difficult. For instance, if you play games, you can uninstall the game. It doesn't prevent you from playing the game, just makes it harder. Turns out in many cases that's enough.
Another thing this model of the mind gives us is explanations about other situations. For instance, people who are surrounded by too many things tend to have trouble focusing. Everything is difficult to do, because their attention is already half-filled at any time.
To deal with that, the logical thing to do is reduce the amount of stuff around. At least the ones in sight. Perhaps some things should be thrown away, but a lot can be achieved even by just making them harder to see. For instance, a million little doodads on the desk take more attention than the same ones in a drawer, because you don't see inside the drawer unless you specifically look there.
Reducing unneccesary effort is one of the core ways to motivate yourself more.

No comments:

Post a Comment