Cached Procrastination

Here's a link to a YouTube video by pjeby describing a very similar technique.

If you look into the abyss and see turtles all the way down, perhaps it's all just the same turtle and you're not thinking with portals, turtlebro.

When I was younger and started thinking about something I wanted to do, like, say, asking out a girl, I never performed the necessary backward induction. I would always envision what the future would be like when the girl said yes and how great it would be. It was so bad that I would try to plan, but seemed to be incapable of actually doing it because I spent so much time thinking about how great the future was going to be. In reality, I didn't know what to say and the girl said no, so I concluded that envisioning the future was a bug, and tried to fight it.

I guess It's lucky that I never completely got rid of this tendency, and in the mean time I've become much better at planning, (though doing any planning is an improvement, so this means little). Now it's time to make a conscious effort at cultivating these positive emotions and see what happens.

For me, it works for the things that I believe to continue being important. I can motivate myself to start intrinsically liking doing what I believe to be important to be obsessed over. This doesn't lock me in on specific subgoals, as when a subgoal is done, it's transformed into new opportunities for the continuation of a bigger project.

But I'm afraid of starting to like things in which I don't intrinsically believe, which I only need to get out of my way before a deadline.

From reading the above comment, I explicitly recognized that it's circular: on one hand, I have a power to control the low-level emotional response, to channel it where I deliberatively believe it should go. On the other hand, I'm afraid of the emotional response taking over, leading me away from the things I deliberatively prefer in the long term. Both effects must be real, but I expect one of them is stronger, if used with sufficient cunning.

Polarizing the activities on those which I identify with, and those I apply only instrumentally creates segregated zones, in one of which deliberation channels emotion, and in the other of which deliberation is afraid of channeling emotion, as it's expected that emotion will win there. So, on a surface level, it looks like what I identify with is the area of activities where the emotion is channeled. But one step deeper, it turns out that it's actually an area deliberatively marked as being safe to channel emotions into. Emotional acceptance is the effect of the Escher-brained justification to emotionally segregate the activity, not the defining signature of the self.

And thus, I resolve to try allowing motivation where I didn't before.

I'm not sure about the refreshing part but the guilt does build up for me. In fact, I can't nap at all so I just lie there trying to rest and exactly the opposite happens - I start getting thoughts of how I should be doing my work and how I could go about it. I try to resist thinking and ideas come up. Eventually, I get too restless and can't help but get up and work. I have noticed the same thing happen when I used to meditate.

What do you do with the answer, though? I have a fair idea of why most of my procrastination occurs (if I leave something til the last minute and make a hash of it, I have a convenient excuse to protect my ego) but that has never seemed to help me actually overcome it.

We don't procrastinate for complex reasons; everything boils down to a thought that you're avoiding.

Sometimes -- rarely -- the thought you're avoiding is about the task itself. But when it's chronic, the thought is nearly always something about you, and what it "means" about you if you don't do it.

I actually wrote part of another article about procrastination, before this one, following a theory much closer to yours. I ended up determining that it wasn't going anywhere, but I think what I do have clarifies your theory immensely. So at the risk of putting words into your mouth, here it is:

In the 1950s, B.F. Skinner conducted a series of experiments which established the principle of Operant Conditioning. The canonical example of this sort of experiment is a rat in a box, which receives either a reward (food pellet) or a punishment (electric shock) when it presses a button. There is a lot of research on the effect of varying the conditions - species, target behavior, feedback type and schedule, etc - but in general, behaviors that produce rewards are promoted, and behaviors that produce punishment are inhibited.

Now, suppose an experimenter hooked you up to a mind-reading machine for a week, and every time you thought about elephants, he came and gave you $20, up to some rate limit. You would quickly become obsessed with elephants, and years later you'd still be patronizing the zoo. Reinforcement, it would seem, works for thoughts much like it does for behaviors. Now consider the opposite experiment, where every time you think about elephants, you receive negative feedback. This experiment can't be done with electric shocks (at least, not ethically), but it has been done. The Game is a mind game which some people play, with one rule: if you think of The Game, you have lost, and must annouce it to those around you. Insofar as operant conditioning applies to humans, and thought is a behavior, and embarrassment is punishment, The Game should be very easy: it conditions players to stop thinking about it. In fact, the opposite is true: players of The Game end up in a spiral where they can't think of anything else.

Clearly, the theory of operant conditioning does not apply straightforwardly to thoughts, and we shouldn't expect it to. After all, if thinking about something causes a strong reaction, positive or negative, then it's probably important enough to think about more. However, we still need a mechanism for choosing topics to think about, which means that some things will reinforce a topic and others will inhibit it. Reward and punishment can't fill these roles.

Where I got stuck was on trying to figure out just what does condition us to think more or less on a topic, and I don't think that can be answered accurately without much better instruments and experiments than are currently possible. Clearly, when people enter procrastination spirals there is some sort of conditioning going on, but negative affect alone can't be the cause; The Game seems like a strong refutation to that.

Whenever I set mental deadlines for myself I'm much more likely to get things done. It seems that when my brain queries TimeToGetThisDone(), if I set no mental deadline, it's apt to return "plenty of time" or the due date. Of course, for time management reasons, it's better to get stuff done well before the due date so you have enough time to get everything done (e.g., 3 papers due on the same day). If I set an earlier mental deadline, I'm less apt to procrastinate because "time pressure" is (artificially) increasing.

This doesn't always work though, primarily because it's hard to get the mental deadlines set. It seems that my procrastinate mode won't let my planning mode take over and think about when things should be finished. In fact, I often catch myself thinking "but if I think about when to do stuff, I won't be able to procrastinate..."

I do this with other things too. For example, when I'm about to make an impulse buy, I'll start to think "is this really worth $20 to me?" but then I'll think "I better not do the cost-benefit calculation, because then I won't buy it."

It's as if there are 2 agents battling for control of my brain. Is there a term for this? Does anyone else have this problem? What about a solution?

Agreed,

We have a very limited and weak amount of willpower. If we have a big project to finish, counting solely on willpower is futile. Instead, we should put ourselves in a position where the amount of willpower necessary is dropped. Like what Annoyance described, with time pressure, suddenly it is easier to get working (would make a nice discussion to see what tricks others use to minimize their required willpower).

Of course, it takes a bit of willpower to set up artificial pressures, but is worth it for chronic procrastinators.

Committing to a small, preliminary action is often very helpful to me. When I have to write something, I tell myself, "I'm going to open Word. That's all. I don't have to write if I don't feel like writing after I open Word." The act of starting the program gets me into the appropriate mood most of the time.

You are absolutely right that what it takes is just making a habit. The beginning is the hardest part. I actually created a small piece of software for myself to do just that: start working on something. It's called iFocus http://www.ifocusonwork.com/ and I posted it online for everyone to use. You can make it force you to work on a specific application for a fixed period of time. You can also use it to track how you spend your computer time, and set goals for how much you can use certain things (email, chat, games etc.). Basically a tool for people who want to get something done or for those who are mindful of how they spend their computer time.

So I don't know if it's always about you, I think maybe it could be arbitrary emotional impressions from earlier life,

When you're a kid, everything is about you, even stuff that's really about other people. ;-)