2018-10-19 15:44![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
grok_mctanys
grok_mctanysI've been thinking a lot about procrastination recently, because I've been doing a fair amount of it.
I've revisited Tim Urban's "Wait But Why" post (part 1, part 2, and TED talk) on the Rational Decision Maker, the Instant Gratification Monkey, the Panic Monster, and his other related metaphors, and I think it's a really useful way of thinking about things. The advice he gives, of "laying one brick" as he puts it, or "just take the smallest step you can to start" (as I've thought of it before) is good, practical advice that can work.
One thought I've had recently is that, in some situations, procrastination can be a reasonable strategy.
There are some tasks which can effectively take up as much time as you want to give them. This is related to Parkinson's Law which states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".
Writing (such as a blog post) is one such example. The first 90% of the work, the "90% of the work by word length" based off your initial core idea, is fun and relatively easy. The second 90%, the "90% of the work by time invested" is hard, and isn't limited to 90% of the time. Proofreading, editing, moving things about, re-proofreading, rewording, &c is a task that can go on indefinitely. But also, your initial idea probably did not spring into your head ex nihilo; your brain probably synthesised it from a bunch of different sources, things you read, things you saw, things you heard. You realise that you should support your writing with some of these sources (like a Wait But Why post from 5 years ago, Parkinson's Law, the ninety-ninety rule, the phrase "ex nihilo", or a saying along the lines of "a book is never truly finished, but at some point you have to just send it to be published anyway" which you can't find the proper source for any more and end up not using but you spent the time looking for it), and so you have to remember enough context from your sources to be able to find them again, track them down, re-read them, figure out where to reference them in your writing, update your writing again, and re-proofread (again) to make sure that you haven't just contradicted yourself.
Other examples of work that expand to fill the time available include gardening, or tidying your house before the parents are due to visit. You could spend a couple of hours on the essentials, or you could spend 8 hours every day for a week putting in more effort to continue to make things asymptotically better.
Anyway, say you have a deadline in a week, and you have a task that you're willing to spend 3 hours on. You could spend those 3 hours doing the task at the start of the week, or you could wait until 2 and a half hours before the deadline and blitz it. I don't know about you, but if I spend the 3 hours on the task at the start of the week, I'll spend the rest of the week feeling guilty that I've had enough time to do more work, but haven't made the effort to actually do a better job. Even though I've put in as much time as I decided to, the fact that I can see that I could do more in the time remaining and am choosing not to, makes my free time less fun. On the other hand, if I leave it to the last minute, I can spend my free time up until the last minute guilt-free, because I know that I don't have to start yet. I still have enough time to do as much work as I'm willing to do, so that's OK. Then, when I've done the work, I've done as much as I planned to do, as much as I was happy to do, and there simply wasn't time to do any more, so there are no feelings of guilt.
Given that situation - a task which could take up an almost arbitrary amount of time, which part of you is willing to spend a fixed amount of time on, but another part of you will feel bad for not having done more of if you had plenty of time - procrastination can be a reasonable strategy.
Of course, the ideal strategy would be to square those two parts of yourself, to commit to only spending a fixed amount of time on a task, and then not feel guilty about only having spent that much time on it between the time that you've "finished" and the actual deadline. To be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, "I could do a better job, there's time to do a better job, but I just don't want to, so I'm going to stick with good enough", and to be OK with that.
I've revisited Tim Urban's "Wait But Why" post (part 1, part 2, and TED talk) on the Rational Decision Maker, the Instant Gratification Monkey, the Panic Monster, and his other related metaphors, and I think it's a really useful way of thinking about things. The advice he gives, of "laying one brick" as he puts it, or "just take the smallest step you can to start" (as I've thought of it before) is good, practical advice that can work.
One thought I've had recently is that, in some situations, procrastination can be a reasonable strategy.
There are some tasks which can effectively take up as much time as you want to give them. This is related to Parkinson's Law which states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".
Writing (such as a blog post) is one such example. The first 90% of the work, the "90% of the work by word length" based off your initial core idea, is fun and relatively easy. The second 90%, the "90% of the work by time invested" is hard, and isn't limited to 90% of the time. Proofreading, editing, moving things about, re-proofreading, rewording, &c is a task that can go on indefinitely. But also, your initial idea probably did not spring into your head ex nihilo; your brain probably synthesised it from a bunch of different sources, things you read, things you saw, things you heard. You realise that you should support your writing with some of these sources (like a Wait But Why post from 5 years ago, Parkinson's Law, the ninety-ninety rule, the phrase "ex nihilo", or a saying along the lines of "a book is never truly finished, but at some point you have to just send it to be published anyway" which you can't find the proper source for any more and end up not using but you spent the time looking for it), and so you have to remember enough context from your sources to be able to find them again, track them down, re-read them, figure out where to reference them in your writing, update your writing again, and re-proofread (again) to make sure that you haven't just contradicted yourself.
Other examples of work that expand to fill the time available include gardening, or tidying your house before the parents are due to visit. You could spend a couple of hours on the essentials, or you could spend 8 hours every day for a week putting in more effort to continue to make things asymptotically better.
Anyway, say you have a deadline in a week, and you have a task that you're willing to spend 3 hours on. You could spend those 3 hours doing the task at the start of the week, or you could wait until 2 and a half hours before the deadline and blitz it. I don't know about you, but if I spend the 3 hours on the task at the start of the week, I'll spend the rest of the week feeling guilty that I've had enough time to do more work, but haven't made the effort to actually do a better job. Even though I've put in as much time as I decided to, the fact that I can see that I could do more in the time remaining and am choosing not to, makes my free time less fun. On the other hand, if I leave it to the last minute, I can spend my free time up until the last minute guilt-free, because I know that I don't have to start yet. I still have enough time to do as much work as I'm willing to do, so that's OK. Then, when I've done the work, I've done as much as I planned to do, as much as I was happy to do, and there simply wasn't time to do any more, so there are no feelings of guilt.
Given that situation - a task which could take up an almost arbitrary amount of time, which part of you is willing to spend a fixed amount of time on, but another part of you will feel bad for not having done more of if you had plenty of time - procrastination can be a reasonable strategy.
Of course, the ideal strategy would be to square those two parts of yourself, to commit to only spending a fixed amount of time on a task, and then not feel guilty about only having spent that much time on it between the time that you've "finished" and the actual deadline. To be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, "I could do a better job, there's time to do a better job, but I just don't want to, so I'm going to stick with good enough", and to be OK with that.
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(no subject)
Usually, if I stop at 90% and absolve myself of responsibility for anymore creative thought, I find plenty of other people willing to help me with a myriad of improvement suggestions; whilst I can find creative new things to do and leave them to it. For example, if I reference something and leave out the source, someone else will often notice and tell me about my "mistake". If I'm lucky, they'll send me a link without being asked.
Since these people insist on making all their improvement suggestions even when I've honed my own thoughts to something I'm 100% happy with, I am quite clear that a finished piece of work isn't worth the trouble.
(no subject)
It's the personal projects I have an issue with.