The Student Syndrome: Delaying until right before deadlines
solvingprocrastination.com
solvingprocrastination.com
As a manager, this is something I make sure to cover/be aware of with more recently graduated hires, as I've noticed many others are just like I was and would tend to just soldier quietly on towards the deadline.
except it's not exactly the same - you can't do it the same way and you can't be honest if so. ("I procrastinated until it was almost due, then found a problem, so now we will slip")
Signed, an academic working on an article that was due last month :)
All of the work gets done in the last three weeks. Every school. Every time.
Things that people say or appear to be "important" that are weeks or months away very often turn out to not be so important.
In IT, we all have first or second hand stories of absolutely critical deadlines delivered under stress and duress and suddenly upon delivery, management decides they weren't that important.
And college courses really don't enable students to get ahead / prework. They do sometimes publish a lecture subject schedule, and maybe now have previous class semesters partially videotaped, but they really are bound to the lecture content of the professor, and the whims of the takehome/homework assigned that day for the next session.
So that leads to a work-on-demand for the majority of day-to-day labor in school, with lots of short term high-priority assignments leeching labor from a long term goal, until the long term goal becomes the short term goal, just a harder one.
It's the other way around. Professors usually pace the work out so the students are always spending some time studying their subject.
The idea of students getting ahead is completely opposite to class-based teaching.
It's easy to rationalize but in hindsight, it was far from optimal "result for the value of time" (in the sense of financial value of time or time value of money). In particular, multi-tasking from much earlier - still in hindsight - lets you (1) distribute time available in function of difficulty of the project as discovered rather than guessed. And (2) at the cost of a little more time - allows plenty more brainstorming and background thought cycles for not all that much more real time. And (3) allows several drafts for significant improvements in quality (and not much extra real time). And (3) saves massive amounts of stress which is objectively not fun - both stress from having to do a large project at once and stress from the threatening deadline.
Delaying was more a response to the work being imposed and not fun (or not the fun part of the project). It did result in less time spent for the result - but that was not the optimal time distribution.
Conveying this to current students has - as far as I can tell - always resulted in zero change. I am myself a little better at this by now. A little.
> "For example, a college professor might... Similarly, a manager who..."
And a turtle could... And a basketball player will... And a movie star may...
> "Focus on your goals instead of on your tasks. For example, if you need to work on a task that you find boring, then instead of focusing on the task, try thinking about your goals"
That is not an example! That is the same sentence again!
I hate this future built on charlatanism and wasting other peoples' time.
Also all of the leading sentence adverbs:
> Furthermore, ... (used six times)
> Finally, ... (used three times)
> Accordingly, ... (used three times)
> Overall, ... (used two times)
> Similarly, ... (used six times)
> In addition, ... (used five times)
> For example, ... (used 34 times)
Lots of writing is, because generations of people have been trained that "grammatical but formulaic and bland" is the way to write. AI writing is reinforced by the training process, the human trainers were probably trained by they English teachers in a certain way.
But LLMs are good at generating text, not understanding the implications of what they said.
I'm not convinced it can be expected to cause negative outcomes. It certainly can cause negative outcomes, but I wouldn't say that's my default expectation. I've exhibited the tendency to procrastinate until a deadline looms my entire life. I'm here on HN, doing it right now. But I've never missed that deadline, and would immodestly say the results have always been pretty acceptable to excellent in every case I can recall. I'd rather treat it as a way of approaching prioritization—worthy of study, but not to be treated automatically as a problem except on a case-by-case basis.
In the same way a company isn't going to pay out a million dollar financial obligation early, you wouldn't expect a person to perform a 10 hour work obligation early.
And it's relatively easy to think of rational reasons to attach a discount factor to free time later. Certainly on a long enough time horizon future free time is very likely to have no marginal value at all :)
>> [Procrastination] certainly can cause negative outcomes, but I wouldn't say that's my default expectation.
I think that, by default, you have better results with more time, but that doesn't mean inadequate with less. On the other hand, there's a kernel of truth in the witticism: "If you wait until the last minute to do a thing, that thing will take one minute to do".
for 2 - 3 day trips (personally or professionally) i always pack the morning of a flight after making a list the night before. the one time i actually packed the night before... i nearly forgot my wallet / missed my flight (i didn't)
It worked for me, so why not just do it in my midday down time? Class that morning, few hours off, lab in the afternoon. I just scheduled it into time I would have spent goofing off otherwise. Freed up my evenings for more fun things.
In the workplace though, sometimes people will not keep coming back to you for the result - but they will still remember that you did not deliver. Have to be careful about that one. Was it really "not needed", or were you chosen as the convenient reason why it did not happen?