Comment by zachallaun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zachallaun | Hacker News Reader

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The author postulates three character vignettes, each one based upon an identified predictor of procrastination. There exists, however, a forth:

Zach stares at a blank document in Microsoft Word. His essay assignment on municipal politics, due tomorrow, is mind-numbingly dull. He decides to take a break, texts some friends, watches a show, and finds himself even less motivated to write the paper than before. At 10PM, he finally dives in, but the result is... well, it's great.

This forth case is strange, because it does not suffer from the generally proposed downfalls of procrastination. This is because the author has ignored an entire segment of procrastinators: Those that operate better under an impending deadline.

This is how I completed nearly every task in school thus far, and assignment grades less than an A are few and far between despite the fact that I put in, in many cases, a small fraction of the time it took my classmates to complete this assignment. I operate this way because stress is my friend. My output quality/time ratio is never greater than when I'm working with a looming deadline.

My entire life I was told that procrastination is bad. Procrastination is bad. Procrastination is bad. It's only recently that I've realized that procrastination is actually one of the greatest contributors to my success.

I thought the same of myself when I was in school. However, it really isn't better. It just so happens that you have more skill than your classmates in writing essays, and are able to cover up a lack of effort with skill.

My boyfriend is working on his Ph.D and I read his students' term papers on occasion. 90% of them are mind-bogglingly bad, but the school in general has a low expectation of "excellent." Thus, these people get A's.

Don't kid yourself; it's still mediocre. Read a graduate school paper in comparison. Ask a graduate school student to honestly grade your paper. ;) Better yet, watch a graduate school student write a paper. They go through ideas, delve into research, and realize they can't adequately prove their idea, so they retreat. And they read, and read. And write. And when they are done, they are fully aware of how limited their paper really is, because they know where they want it to be, but such leaps require original research, and that's what the dissertation is for. :) ___

Further, many of us (myself included) make decisions on which corners to cut when we only have limited time to work on a task. These are decisions we are less hasty to make when we have more time, thus the task looks bigger and we are more likely to procrastinate. Sometimes, like school essays, the 80% solution is exactly what is warranted. I'd suggest you look up timeboxing.

The research that has been done in this area seems to indicate that while you might believe you work better under pressure, that may not actually be the case. Rather, you only work under pressure when faced with a task for which you have little internal motivation to complete:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/200808/in-sea...

My younger sister refers to this as "Percolation", as do others (http://www.learningassistance.com/2005/june/percolation.html).

Sometimes, I need to sit with an idea for a week or so before taking action, and the product is great, albeit somewhat rushed. This gets me in trouble on occasion, but less often than one might think.

I've found lately that working piece by piece well before deadline gets about the same quality of work done, but I also have bigger projects and more generous deadlines now.

Though I'm very sympathetic to eustress as a wonderful motivator of good work, it falls on its ass when you suddenly lose external deadlines. This occurs in varying degrees depending on your life path, but almost always you're expected to take more personal responsibility of your schedule in any challenging (desirable) job.

So it's just worth noting that combining eustress/percolation with aggressive personal goal-setting might be necessary to keep this sort of thing up.

I definitely agree with this. I bounced from deadline to deadline for seven years in late high school and university. Addiction to deadline-driven activity is now causing me tons of grief when it comes to anything not required by an immediate deadline at work. Career development, outside-of-work life planning, calling companies about that wrong bill...

This is definitely the case and was actually something I was going to plan on addressing in my initial comment about procrastination before deciding that I could put it off. :)

While I did not make it clear, the formula presented within the essay remains applicable whether or not someone is motivated by eustress, except that the formula changes slightly:

                   expectancy x value
  motivation  =  -----------------------  +  eustress
                  impulsiveness x delay

Using this formula, an incredibly low-value task (in my case, school assignments) can still have an acceptable (or greater than) outcome when complimented by a high level of eustress. (In my case, this is often in the form of an impending deadline.)

Other than school, however, I have been working with a friend, attempting to launch my first startup. This is an incredibly high-value task for me, which leads to greater motivation despite a lack of solid deadlines. In this case, I procrastinate very little.

That's not, of course, to say that every task related to launching is high-value. In those instances, you are correct, aggressive goal-setting is absolutely necessary. I'd add, though, that it's not simply an attempt to "keep this sort of thing up," but rather a simple acknowledgement of how I function.

I need deadline pressure as well, so I assign myself personal deadlines to follow that tend to precede the real one by 50%. I tend to find that while I finish before deadline, I'm always able to improve the product before the real deadline.

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