Summary of “The Procrastination Equation”

> Delay. This indicates how long you must wait to receive the expected rewards, benefits, payouts. The longer you have to wait, the less motivated you’ll be and the more likely you are to procrastinate.

This may sound convincing at the surface, but I feel it is not a good model of what was happening when I procrastinated a bit e.g. as a doctoral student. I observed that if I was expected to work on X, I suddenly had great ideas (and motivations) to do Y, where Y was also some piece of scientific work, just not in the realm of what I was supposed to work on (Y != X). So explanations in terms of impulsiveness or instant gratification don't seem to be what was going on there. Also, if you are smart, you know that procrastination activities defer your gratification even further.

The best ways to beat procrastination turned out to be (for me, at the time):

1. write up any ideas briefly so you can tell yourself "I've preserved it, I can get back to it later."

2. chop your main work into little chunks, get the first one done and then reward yourself (book shopping and chocolate work miracles), then onto the next one.

3. if a TO DO list had 10 sub-pieces of work on it, try to pick one that seems the least effort instead of necessarily doing them in the default order (where this is possible). This helps get you into work mode; once completed, see reward yourself.

However, I feel this does not apply for me and greatly misses one of the main aspects of procrastination: the fear of disappointment. Can I fulfill my parents expectations? Can I fulfill my own expectations? Will I fail? Will it hurt to face my own demons and my own fears of not succeeding?

Am I just different? I thought this was what procrastination is about for everyone.

Is skipping over the fact that the industry of knowledge workers has grown exponentially. You're much less likely to procrastinate in manual work, especially in a group.

I've suffered through many books that had a very good message, but should have been 20% as long as they were. Much repetition in every possible spot, just to end up with a book of a respectable length that people don't feel bad spending $15 on. Comprehensive summaries are a great way to get around that.

On the other hand, these summaries are (by definition) derivative works that serve almost entirely as just distillations of the book. There's some opinion rolled in, but the description of the source material goes far beyond a book review to the point that it could be seen as a time- and money-saving replacement. If I were an author, I wouldn't be happy that my book was interpreted by a random third party, let alone that many folks will assume they got the value from the work and won't buy it.

Respectfully, this is a discredited scientific model of the brain. In short, emotions are "whole brain" things which cannot be localized to one part of the brain that precisely. See Barrett's book "How Emotions are Made" for more.

Once I went into the actual clinical literature of many various kinds of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy I saw significant improvement in the way how I live my life and how often procrastination encounters me.

The reason why they helped by gaining a very nuanced understanding of how the mind works. This allowed to identify the patterns from a point of understanding and self-compassion ("Ah, see, this is what they meant with perpetuation").

However, that is not enough. You also need constant awareness of these patterns in order to change them. Something that you learn in Mindfulness courses and train with meditative practices and journaling.

So, if I may present a simple equation: Go to the doctor.

MOTIVATION = EXPECTANCY x VALUE / (IMPULSIVENESS x DELAY)

I don't really like the word "motivation" because I feel as though nobody can really describe what it actually means, except that it's this mysterious power that results in you being able to do things you don't want to do. Atomic Habits describes on a more psychological level why we might be driven to perform a certain action, kind of on the basis that this mysterious "motivation" doesn't actually exist, and some people were just lucky in development to acquire good habits that yield more success.

To me, procrastination means that my mind pushed the undesirable task out of my head because it's desperate to think about or engage in something more immediately stimulating. Having mindfulness of this happening and using my inner monologue to think about what I want to do, and what I'm experiencing emotionally/physiologically, is a huge help to me in deciding what I actually want to do, rather than my executive function autopiloting straight past the important task.

I’m a work procrastinator (I feel bad about it), but I can read book.

Which book you read in this area that helped with your procrastination problem?

There is a Further Reading in the article - any of those?

Is expectancy "estimated probability of success"? That would make it unitless, and I think impulsiveness is supposed to be unitless too: "sensitivity to <other factor>" sounds like a unitless scaling parameter to me.

That would mean, according to this equation, motivation is measured in dollars per day.

I am in this equation and I don't like it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36428968

This is actually a good thing! I think that's why procrastination is so natural. This is not a criticism of the article, but an attempt of explaining why procrastination is not just a thing to fight, more like something you need to work with.

Let's frame the problem in terms of money and games, as a simplified model. I can give you the chance to play a game in 1 year where you have a 50% chance of winning $100. How much are you ready to pay me now for the privilege? Of course, you want to make money.

The first step is to multiply the chance by the prize, here, that's $50. So if I offered you to play immediately, you will want to pay less than $50. That's the "expectancy x value" part of the equation.

Now, the delay. many things can happen in a year, one of us may die and you will never get to play and win your prize, and you'd want to take interest rates into account. Let's say you go with 10%/year, so that's down to about 45%, that's your "expectancy x value / delay".

Now "delay" factor always increases with time but it is not linear, for example, I used interest rates for my toy model, which is an exponential. This is where we introduce "impulsiveness", which is more like a function than a factor, so I would rewrite the equation as "expectancy x value / impulsiveness(delay)". As a function, impulsiveness is always increasing and depends on many factors, but generally, the more impulsive you are, the faster it will climb. In my toy model, it is represented by an interest rate.

So, the "procrastination equation" actually maximizes value!

A more practical example would be the famous marshmallow experiments where a kid is offered a single marshmallow, and if he doesn't touch it for 10 minutes, he gets a second one. It can be seen as a test of delayed gratification, but it can also be seen as a test of trust. The experimenter may come back to steal the first marshmallow instead of giving a second one, and to be fair, outside of an experiment, if you see a plate with a single marshmallow somewhere and leave it alone for 10 minutes, it is more likely that someone else will eat it than someone putting a second one next to it.

Won't IMPULSIVENESS be the same for every task, a neutral scaling factor, so you may as well remove it?

The expected value is value times probability. And then the time aspect is just discounting future value back to today, like you would a cashflow. Your impulsiveness is then how much you discount tomorrow vs today.

(Expectancy * value)*(impulsiveness)^time

This way you can put a number on your impulsiveness probably from 1.001 to 2

I learned decades ago that what I thought was dirty shameful procrastination was a complex and important process of negotiating with my unconscious to get work done. For some kinds of things, my reluctance to get going is evidence that something is not right about the work itself-- I should not have agreed to do it in the first place and I should unagree to it. For other kinds of things, it's just a sign that my unconscious is still working on the problem and I should let it do its thing.

I use a method I call "procrastinate and push" which means I spend a little while trying to get the word done and if I feel resistance, I let it go until tomorrow. Then I try again. I alternate between pushing and completely ignoring the work, until at some point, either I conclude I will never do it, or more likely the wall suddenly gives way and I find I have the answers.

It's like my brain is in the kitchen, cooking, and it unlocks the door when the soup is more or less ready.

I think we need to draw a distinction à la economics’ “revealed preference” here, because there’s the famous divide between importance and urgency and “motivation” compacts the two.

My version of this is agnostic to the reason why, it's the maxim, “Never top priority, never happens.” If you find yourself never cleaning up tech debt, then as a matter of “revealed priority” I can assert that it was never your top priority, but I can't say exactly why, that's for you to find out. Makes it really easy to solve some of those problems, “we have 13 weeks in the quarter, that will be allocated as 5 two-week sprints and 3 “refactor weeks,” hey, now it will be top priority at some point!

> The reward for writing, on the other hand, is distant at the beginning of the semester.

The Goldratt book Critical Chain talks about this in the context of one-off projects like software has to deal with, calling it “Student Syndrome,” the idea that we actually build a lot of safety buffer into our project deadlines and then we immediately waste it all because the urgency becomes so low. I have an experiment called Hot Potato Agile that would in theory fix this, I wrote it up in a Google Doc somewhere, if you have a team struggling with deadlines and looking for a better way, let me know and I can share it.

> And so, you’re faced with a decision between what you want and what the monkey wants, between immediate gratification and long-term success.

There's a bit of research showing this to be kind of a naive take, coming from the obesity side where the willpower is viewed as being used to eat healthy things and the impulse is to eat crappy snack food. And the core finding is just that it is an environment that you sign yourself up for. So if you go to the grocery store and say “I’m not going to bring those junky foods into my house,” then that is very easy for your willpower to do at the time, assuming you don't go there hungry. And these are the so-called high-willpower people. But they didn't have more willpower overall, they just shifted it left. The people who struggle with willpower are the people who don't use the little bit earlier and instead fill their houses with junk food and then when they need to grab a bite between tasks, that's the natural thing to choose.

So for example my shell scripts often involve the OSX “Say” command, so that if I'm waiting on a long running process and I give myself permission to start browsing Hacker News or whatever, I don't leave it on my own recognizance to check back in on the work. The work comes and tells me that it's done, interrupts my flow elsewhere. Stuff like that. Stop victim blaming, recognize that you are part of these larger attention networks, redesign the flow through those networks accordingly. The monkey is on your side!

> It means we should watch our diet and eat as healthy as we can.

This is actually probably the best advice, in the whole article. The constant ensugarification of a tired person trying to stay engaged, the amount that the body needs to work to streamline all of the blood sugar variability, it literally exhausts your mitochondria, you literally have less energy. If you can radically cut down the sugar intake and up the sleep and exercise—no diet here, diets can crash your metabolism, just swap out the sugars for starches—you can give them a chance to heal and that will help with everything.