Why do humans procrastinate?
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http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Bra...
And there was a very interesting Metafilter thread from a few years ago that found that a small amount of alcohol overcame procrastination:
http://ask.metafilter.com/22924/Why-does-alcohol-overcome-my...
It's probably time to start studying these kinds of things as genuinely biological phenomena.
But: next time I feel like procrastinating, might self-prescribe a Red Bull with vodka plus some music at 120bpm. Let's see what happens.
(Warning:I am not a doctor,and you must fully understand the side effects before using even a mild amphetamine)
Here is a very good quora thread on the long term effects http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-long-term-effects-of-Adder...
Also nearly 3.3 million Americans age 19 and younger used an ADHD drug last year, according to Medco Health Solutions Inc.I think there is enough data to conclude that there are not really any serious and irreversible long term effects.Would love to be proved wrong on this?
"After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[12] Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use."
Probably the most useful bit or research (also described much less technically in that book) is this:http://books.google.com/books?id=7CeE67IrVDUC&pg=PA130&#...
Procrastination was higher on my to-do list, Than achieving all the things that I otherwise wished. Aspiration blew motivation a farewell kiss, And said a sad goodbye, "you will be missed"
Now i'd be lying if i said i was a drop-out who hasn't achieved anything in the last ten years - i've done remarkably well, putting myself through university, graduating, getting a good job - but there's so much i want to do when i'm not working that i just put off because i get home, get stoned and suddenly nothing is boring - i could probably stare at a wall for hours without a hint of tedium. And therein lies the real point, that cannabis eliminates boredom. Without boredom people don't feel the need to push themselves, try new things, achieve what they want etc.
I've just been postulating on the issue of procrastination so much recently, this post really struck a chord. Also it was a strange coincidence that i wrote a poem on topic yesterday, as i literally never write poems; and i hoped someone might like the excerpt.
I agree that infrequent use is not worrisome, perhaps even beneficial - I always found when I was a less frequent user it made me more conscientious, more constructively critical of my actions/behvaiour and allowed me to see through life's issues with greater clarity (at least that was my perception!).
I'd be happy to get to that stage where my use is recreational and infrequent, which i think i will eventually, it's my next milestone
But I think in timely administered, individual-dependent dosages the sativa enhances concentration and imagination/visualization skills, not to mention relieves depression and pain. And it's not habit-forming!
I can't underestimate how paralyzing depression can be, fucking with your self-esteem and making you stay at home for weeks. Depression is extremely anti-motivational. Severe depression leads to suicide and that definitely does not make a person reach his true potential.
Now, depression is linked to HIGH DOSES of cannabis in here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071023183937.ht... ("Cannabis: Potent Anti-Depressant In Low Doses, Worsens Depression At High Doses").
Now I'm wondering if they got the demotivational syndrom from high-volume smokers, basically diagnosing them with cannabis-induced depression.
100% agree with your assertion of heightened imagination and visualisation, it also changes your thought patterns in such a way that your train of thinking may lead to interesting perspectives that you would have never otherwise arrived at. It's what drew me to cannabis in the first place; intellectually i was intrigued by the creativity cannabis brought on. That said, a creative mind does not a productive person make! it's one thing to visualise etc. but it's the doing/execution part that seems so far out of reach when you're under the influence of cannabis. At least that's what i've come to realise.
As for habit-forming, I've always smoked cannabis with tobacco, but never smoked tobacco alone. This puts put me in quite a unique position in that after ten years i clearly have a nicotine addiction, meaning my use of nicotine is so entwined with my cannabis use that it's hard to mentally separate the two. Over time it occurred to me that i could never be sure whether i wanted to get stoned because i enjoyed the sensation, or whether it was purely for want of nicotine, with getting stoned being a proxy for that. Interestingly, i have recently quit smoking cannabis inasmuch that i now use a vaporiser to get high, which means i have also cut out tobacco completely. It's been around 5 weeks since i last smoked cannabis with tobacco, and i definitely have less of a want to get stoned, so i guess my suspicions were correct - nicotine was fueling my cannabis habit to some degree.
That link was intriguing, especially the inverse proportionality of benefits vs. dose size. It must be remembered however that the drug administered was a synthetic form of THC, not actual THC - presumably there were modifications to the molecular structure else they would have just used a THC extract straight from the plant. I'm sure it can still be taken as indicative of potential benefits of actual THC as a therapeutic drug though.
I think overall i'm just going through a transition period in my life, a slight epiphany; realising that i've been abusing cannabis and that my use has been detrimental to other areas of my life. My recreational use grew into habitual use, which brought with it a constant lack of boredom, leaving me unproductive and demotivated. I expect that i'll have all but given up cannabis within a year, if my current trend of usage continues. Maybe i'm just growing out of it, or that perhaps my desire to be productive is finally outweighing my desire to get high. Either way, i feel good about the changes.
I think there's a dosage where cannabis actually makes you more functional by making things more interesting and killing pain/anxiety.
I really think a lot of people misinterpret "weed is healthy and good" as "SMOKE AS MUCH AS YOU PHYSICALLY CAN ALL DAY EVERYDAY". And that almost always leads to dysfunction. At some point you will pass out or become paralyzed by hallucinations, so again, dosage does matter in functional vs non-functional addicts' cases.
And I should add that weed is very forgiving in this case, again, if you were to do the same "take as much as I can!" thing with Aspirin or opiates you would die. With weed, you just pass out and eat everything.
I really feel like many people do not know the basics of pharmacology or neurochemistry and try to make intelligent arguments based on hearsay and anecdotes. And it pisses me off a little bit. Omfg, seriously, there's a reason medicine is usually packaged in specific, very precise containers.
I think that's the whole reason hard drugs are illegal -- because people are mostly ignorant when it comes to drugs. It would be like giving chainsaws to 3-year old kids.
It is or should be any hacker's goal in life to do something that you love, not to accept drudgery for some supposed long-term benefit. Which means that any procrastination that remains is likely to be of the kind that I describe here, which must have different origins. I like the "procrastination as a function of faith in a decision" theory.
Of course the issue is success isn't a linear thing, it has peaks and valleys, but its sometimes hard to rationalize this as you're actually going thru it - you really just have to push going through those feeling like a loser phases.
I guess I also want to point out that these things are really complicated dynamics. How do I know how much I should deny myself the instant rewards? What do I really know about the worth of this task I have setup for myself and its benefits? Why do we procrastinate? Well, because we don't know, because we're uncertain, because we doubt.
What about the people who don't know and don't procrastinate?
What's bad about uncertainty and doubt? What are you afraid of if it "goes wrong"? If it was uncertain what would happen but any outcome was exciting, you wouldn't procrastinate, right?
I guess they got God's blessing. I don't understand your point.
If it was uncertain what would happen but any outcome was exciting, you wouldn't procrastinate, right?
That's exactly the time I would procrastinate. Or am I missing something?
People procrastinate because they're doing something they don't like.
I procrastinate when I'm doing homework. But wouldn't you know, I always get motivated when hacking on an open source project or when working on a freelance project.
Procrastination often has no reward at all. If it has a reward, why call it procrastionation? You actually do something useful, if it has a reward. The thing is, that "not procrastinating" is considered work, thus related with stress, concentration and energydepletion. So "not procrastinating" has a cost, which humans overestimate. There is some research (that I can't quote right now, but psychological material here on HN often cites some good sources about that) that people value a cost of an objective value X around 2 or 3 times higher then a reward of the same objective value (so losing $100 might feel as bad, as winning $200 might feel good). So most humans prefer instinctively to avoid or minimize costs before they maximize the (stochastic) expected value of an action. Doesn't avoiding cost (stress, "work") seem much more reasonable then missevaluating the reward for procastination? Well, what the truth is can nobody know, because the science also doesn't know yet. But for me it sounds way more reasonable, especially because I know how much I like to not work and to have no stress compared to getting anything done.
So, now why do I think that temporal discounting even is a good thing? Time can change the reward we gain from an object. An object might increase or decrease in value over time. With money we can even be sure that it decreases over time. Also our preferences might change according to our changing situation. Whatever we do now, we can be sure that our situation will be very different one year in the future. And last but not least, the risk increases drastically, that we don't get any reward at all. Dying in a car accident is a very unlikely thing if you sit at home in front of your comuter now. But if you think about that risk again for this point in time + one year it is not that unlikely anymore. All risks increase with a bigger time frame. All this leads to a situation in which gaining something now makes it much more rewarding then gaining it somewhere far in the future.
I think the big problem about that article is that it mixes truth with false assumptions. For example saying humans act irrational is true. It is also true that humans discount rewards over time. But both doesn't mean time discounting is something irrational. This article shows clearly that having some right arguments doesn't make your assumption correct. (this might also be correct to say about my arguments)
In fact, it is often wildly different from the known rational answer. In other words, we have some hardcoded responses to scenarios that are probably built on evolutionarily rational behavior, but which don't apply well to specific scenarios in which the "correct" rational behavior is easily determined.
Temporal discounting is just something we do. It's a heuristic[1] sometimes gives good results, sometimes doesn't. When it doesn't, the redditor suggests, that's what we call procrastination. When it works well, we generally don't even notice, because it seems so natural.
Procrastination often has no reward at all. If it has a reward, why call it procrastionation? You actually do something useful, if it has a reward.
That's setting a higher bar for "reward" than what is meant. Pleasurable activities like watching television or playing video games are "rewarding". That's why people do them. That's why people continue doing them even when they "have more important things to do". Yes, in the end, you might not get anything material out of them, but if it truly had "no reward at all", nobody would do them.
losing $100 might feel as bad, as winning $200 might feel good
That's known as "loss aversion", another cut from Kahneman & Tversky's Greatest Hits.
But if you think about that risk again for this point in time + one year it is not that unlikely anymore.
Notice that you say if you think about.... When people procrastinate, are they really thinking of those sorts of things. Suppose you're a student that has a paper due soon and opt to play video games instead. You'd probably be thinking something like "I'll play games now and do the paper later." rather than something like "I might die before the end of term, so why bother with the paper?"
That's not to say you're wrong: only to bring it back to the original context.
[1]: A heuristic, in other words, being a way of "avoiding cost" of doing the rational (maximizing) computation. So it's not really different from what you're saying.
It's over-discounting that's irrational.
If I have a school paper due in a month, the probability that I won't have to do the paper is certainly non-zero (I could die, my professor could get sick, etc)... but it's likely something less than a .01% chance that an event like that will happen. It's not rational to put off a paper until the last couple days if there's still a 99.99% chance you will have to turn it in. I over value my current reward of being able to watch more TV now, while under discounting the future cost of having to do the paper in the future. I treat it more like there's a 10%+ chance that I won't actually have to do the paper.
Would you take 1 dollar today or 10 in a year? I think what matters more than the actual answer is that the choice has zero impact on your life either way. Would you take 1 billion today or 10 billion in a year? Is that even the same question? In terms of supposedly "rational" financial accounting it is, but I think it would be totally irrational for an average person not to think about these choices in completely different terms.
At some point a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference and it would not be rational to act as if this leap didn't exist just because the original quantitative model is unsuitable to account for it. I believe nonlinearity in things like these is the core of what we call intelligence and calling it irrational is nonsense. (Not sure if that theory does that, but it sounds like it might)
The other example they give, studying for an exam earlier or keep playing a game is a different matter altogether. It's a multi factor optimization and there is no way to transform it to a single factor problem (unlike the financial example). Is the pleasure gained from playing the game worth more or less than reducing stress and risk ahead of the exam? On what scale should that be determined?
It's not. The question is how you factor time into your discounting. Take the $1 vs $10 example. There are several risk factors at play here, and we can discount for each of them.
First is the time value of money. Let's be generous and give you a 5% risk free rate of return. That $10 is now worth about $9.50.
Next is just the default risk. What if the guy asking you the question doesn't pay in a year? This risk, however, is artificial. We can modify the experiment to compensate for it: the guy can put it in an escrow account guaranteed to pay you in a year. No discount.
Catastrophe risk: what if the bank underwriting the escrow account goes under / what if the entire banking system is destroyed / what if dollars are no longer valuable / what if I'm too dead to enjoy the dollars? Let's be generous and say the combined possibility that some catastrophe will render the $9.50 worthless to you is 20%. Now the money is worth about $7.6.
Now the question is, what is this money actual worth to you in terms of utility. Suppose your total wealth was $100,000. $1 is 0.0001% of your wealth. The $7.6 is 7.6 times that value. That means that in order for the $7.6 to have a smaller impact on your life than the $1, your wealth would have to increase by over 7.6 times in the next year. If you're in a situation where the probability that your overall wealth will increase by over 7.6 times in the next year, then your decision to take the dollar now is likely rational. If not, your decision is not utility maximizing (and thus irrational).
multiplying everything by a billion does change things, but it doesn't say anything about the rationality of the people who choose 1 dollar now over 10 in the future. we're also not comparing 100 billion dollars to the love a woman. we're comparing 1 dollar now to 10 dollars in a year.
my argument is that if you have any kind of sane (rational) discounting system, comparing 1 dollar now to 10 in the future is at worst like comparing 1 dollar now to 7.6 dollars now, with the only uncertainty being your changing utility preferences for dollars. if you honestly believe that the probability that your utility preference for marginal dollars will change by more 7.6 times in one year is greater than 0.5, then choosing 1 dollar may not be irrational. but for most people, that is highly unlikely. thus, your discounting system and thus preferences may be irrational.
For a more rounded perspective on the subject of procrastination I suggest reading someone who observed a few hundreds of cases and helped in fixing most of them:
http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-G...
How do you figure? Our behavior is driven by powerful forces, and rational analysis is a relatively new factor. The book "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely explores how our cognitive biases (such as anchoring and many others) often remain in place even after we are told that they exist and how to identify them.
Kahneman won a noble prize in Economics for his work. Sadly, Tversky passed away in 1996 before he could be awarded.
Prospect Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory
I was rather under the impression that prospect theory was descriptive and not normative. Prospect theory ain't gonna save you and your hyperbolic discounting from being money-pumped, and one of the interesting bits of Ainslie's book, IIRC, was discussing how economic incentives and penalties did shift people closer to normatively-correct discounting and away from preference reversals.
I think the temporal aspect of decision making is a red herring and the real issue is the confidence in the decision; which is harder to gauge the farther out it is.
Some people have a great sense of confidence in their decisions and subsequently may procrastination less as their lack of faith in their decisions are not impacted by temporal locality.
This explanation happened to fit my tendency to procrastination to a T, as opposed to decisions simply being farther out on a timeline.
1. Fewer context switches. A true procrastinator only works on the single next thing they have to get done, so they don't have to switch between tasks as often. Imagine the simplicity of popping tasks off of a priority queue compared to some sort of coroutine setup.
2. Saves work. Occasionally, the things that people have to do get cancelled. The procrastinator never has to do these things that got cancelled at the last minute, while the person who works ahead does.
3. Some kinds of work are easier later. Particularly in collaborative environments, getting things done is much easier when other people have already done some/most of the hard works. Examples of this include my problem sets for school. However, there is less reward for doing things after others. For instance, there is less intrinsic reward for being aided by others than for just doing everything myself on my problem sets, and it is much easier (and much less valuable) to do something like building a light bulb now than it was 100 years ago.
Think to startup solopreneurs: their reward is far in time and uncertain. So they often and periodically have motivation drops.
This is why I'm working on a productivity-focused community for startup founders and would-be ones, full of mechanisms that will try to leverage human cognition weaknesses:
How fitting :)
If I had to choose between 1 dollar now and 10 a year later, I'd choose $1 now. If the choice stood between $1 now and $10 a week later, I'd take the $10, since I wouldn't be waiting long and getting $1.40 for each day of waiting. I'm also one of those people who think days and weeks go by too damn fast (I know people who think time is flowing too slow and weeks are like ages to them).
Also, there are a lot of people who'll take Skyrim AND the ice cream NOW, simply because they can or because getting an A is not a priority (and any passing grade would do). I can't decide if that's a choice or just an impulsive action...
I highly recommend it!
Not sure if you're associated with this book, but I think I'm sold.
As I pore through subsequent chapters, it strikes a chord with me and is based on well researched psychological experiments conducted at various universities. It's worth a buy imho.
Apart form that I really like the post and the conclusion of the research. Still, I dislike the example and can't imagine this is true for a majority of people.
Taleb's "The Black Swan" has a nice discussion of scorn of the abstract, though not in the context of procrastination.