Low Skills Cause Procrastination

Avoidance is a well known coping mechanism. The author's reasoning is valid in that a person whose responsibility it is to solve problems, when facing a task that is beyond their skill level, will feel anxiety about delivering. In that scenario, avoidance is common. That is not to say that it is the only cause of procrastination.

Hence design strategies now tend towards ultra-gradual tutorialization with areas of instant gratification. Designs relying primarily on player discipline to master the content or make optimal decisions(notetaking, mapping, manual arithmetic) have all but disappeared, leaving those mechanics that allow success to feel intuitive and perpetually within reach.

Once basic mastery appears, something else happens: Players start willingly doing boring, tedious things in an effort to carve out the "last bits" of improvement. Micromanagement, speed-runs, grinding, statistical analysis, etc. The key thing is that these aspects only appear towards the back-end of the game's skill progression, after players already have confidence in prior technique.

And as it happens, the same is true of most technical endeavors - building on the fundamentals is how you grasp more complex stuff.

For me, there's usually a long period of "book study" where I nibble around the edges before I go in and attack a learning problem head-on with lots of practice. This process, though it has some caveats, lets me work from preexisting relationships more easily and adds "insurance" that I can retrieve value from all practice time.

It's the browser idiosyncrasies which suck...

Sometimes it is better to slow down and procrastinate rather than to hammer out something that just barely works. The creative part of the brain keeps working even if you're NOT actively thinking about the problem at hand.

If it is a genuinely difficult problem I've found that the most productive approach for me is to ensure I have all the facts in my head and then go and do something else completely unrelated. Usually some kind of solution will present itself at 3am or while I'm having a shower....

Of course, this approach doesn't work with all problems but it certainly beats hitting your head off a brick wall.

My other friend replied, "You say that like it's a bad thing."

Procrastination gets a bad rap. I think of it as "late-binding for ideas". Like late-binding in software there's some overhead and it's not always the best choice, but demonizing it is bullshit Protestant work ethic run amok.