The Procrastinating Caveman: Human Evolution and Procrastination
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
The nearest the author got to validating it was:
"[...] only a small minority of the fifty hyper-organized students I interviewed reported procrastination as a serious problem"
I don't know how this study was carried down, but it seems as self selecting as it could possibly get.
The author went from "early humans' advantage was complex planning" to "procrastination is your brain silently rejecting your ideas" in little more than a handwave. Here's what I think was lacking:
a) Why does the idea selection characteristic had to be an unconscious process?
b) If it had evolved to save lives, how can we be sure it would still kick off when lives aren't at risk?
c) Why would it manifest itself as a lack of motivation instead of more efficient alternatives such as fear, or simply losing interest?
d) If the brain is rejecting the idea, how do people cling to them for so long? Are we consciously overriding our brain?
b) Can you clarify? I'm not sure I understand this question, and how it pertains to natural selection.
c) I don't see a reason for fear. I don't want to edit my friend's grade 11 paper, not because I'm afraid I can't do it, but because it's probably boring... or I feel I have better things to do. If you pick extreme examples, you might be able to reason in favor of fear, but I feel that's very selective criteria.
d) There's a subconscious and conscious element to a lot of things we do. When my friend tried to teach my hypnosis, he stressed that hypnotists act on the subconscious by breaking down preconceived resistances to ideas. This isn't as much an overriding as it is symbiosis, with one force pushing just a little harder.
a) The entire consciousness/unconscious separation is somewhat bogus (our "unconscious" is simply the part of our brain that evades introspection, but degree of introspection is hard to measure for obvious reasons). The main point to gather is that there is a process of self-criticism that manifests itself as lack of motivation, at least as stated by the article.
b) Our lives are always at risk -- being outcompeted by others of our kind is equivalent to being trampled upon by a mammoth.
c) I don't see how lack of motivation to do X is a less efficient alternative to fear. Fear is rarely an efficient mechanism (except in very time-constrained situations) -- it forces us to focus all our energy on a single task, it prevents us from thinking broadly and seeing new opportunities, and finally it forces us to make decisions towards increase of security instead of increase of opportunity. And the "loss of interest" you mention is technically the same as lack of motivation.
d) It makes perfect sense that we are conflicted about complex decisions for a long time. If we made up our minds quickly instead, it would prevent us from gathering enough information to make the aforementioned complex decision correctly. Complex decisions are complex for a reason.
c) Sometimes forcing us to focus on a single task is beneficial. Multitasking is usually bad for productivity, at least from what I've seen so far both in my life and on discussions at HN.
c) Unless you are very intelligent with enough life experience (not plenty -- just enough), and have a carefully thought-out plan, wholly focusing on a single task is rarely beneficial (and could have been detrimental in the prehistoric times to other important tasks such looking out for predators/danger and finding mates). If you have a great idea for a startup -- go focus on it -- but just to put it in a perspective, great ideas/plans are so rare and hard to come by (as demonstrated by 95% of the population not being entrepreneurs) that 95% of the time your brain is probably justified in critiquing your commitment to anything. At this stage in my life (I'm 28) I feel secure and confident in myself to wholly immerse myself into the tech business, but before that I went through a long period of low motivation which was most likely due to not feeling confident enough about any particular career decision.
The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”
In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point.
And when you are in school often you are given tasks which seem to have no discernible purpose or meaning other than perhaps to take you off your parent's hands while they go make a living.
From: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/10101....
Kind of like when I watched the Atlantis space shuttle launch and then go back to working on the code for a social bookmarking service.
All joking aside, is he talking about an existential crisis, or something else? A common cause of existential crises is some kind of negative experience that prompts reflection and thinking as to why it happened, which sometimes leads to questioning the meaning of it all. The experience of which, if you went to school, you probably know pretty well. Most frequently after walking out of class after bombing a test.
Working link for the aforementioned article: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/10101...
SpaceX is proving that if you want to do more than make a social bookmarking service, you can get involved in the future of space. Just sayin :)
If you can't get them to hire you, figure out what they need. Contract out for them. There's possibilities.
I feel this description feels much closer to my problems with procrastination than the idea from the article.
It's best to conserve your energy unless you really want/need to do something.
The author's example of spearing a mammoth works perfectly: only bother if you're actually hungry, or if you think you'll be very hungry in the future.
If it was just about energy, both methods would be deemed just as valid, and they'd work for both sapiens and erectus.
Also we don't really need bridges and tv and space shuttles. I'm not saying his reasoning is flawless either, but this doesn't seem to be more convincing.
He concludes that different people procrastinate for different reasons and that those reasons boil down to:
- learned helplessness (you have a low expectation of success)
- boredom (you don't value the task), and
- poor impulse control.
He then gives specific advice for working out which applies to you and then for dealing with each of these, which is far more useful than either saying, "Just do it," or telling an impossible-to-apply just-so story about mammoths and frontal lobes.
The alternative route (procrastination) is also not a better option. Everyone that procrastinates (so that means everyone) knows when they're procrastinating, and have that 10% of their status quo thinking about the fact that they're procrastinating and shouldn't be procrastinating. I don't buy it—that means your brain thinks procrastination is better than just trying to do the work, because in the long run, we know procrastination is worse than just doing the work.
My argument only holds if you believe the brain is functionally logical, which... probably isn't true.
When I find myself unable to work, I generally make a conscious choice to take a break so that I can be rejuvenated by my down time to the greatest extent possible. Does that count as not procrastinating?
"My argument only holds if you believe the brain is functionally logical, which... probably isn't true."
Yes, of course it isn't true. The best example of this is the fact that people sometimes give up (succumb to learned helplessness). If people were purely rational agents, having their plan fail would be an indicator that they need try something new. But in real life, they tend to do things like feel depressed and watch more TV.
It's really strange that while for molecular & morphological phenotypes we use rigorous methods to measure evolutionary relatedness so we can determine possible sequences of evolutionary adaptations that led to them, when it comes to behavioral phenotypes people think that conceivability arguments coupled with very inconclusive evidence are sufficient to demonstrate that some evolutionary story is true.
1. Do it late (because you may not need to do it at all).
vs.
2. Do it early (because you know it'll need to get done, over and over, and you've got the data onhand right now).