How to Beat Procrastination

One obvious way to inject more value into a task is to reward yourself for completing it.

Research shows that this doesn’t work for most people (but maybe it does for you). The reason seems to be that most people normally go and get what they want if they can. In order to turn something that you can always have into a reward, you would have to suppress this. Instead of rewarding yourself, you end up punishing yourself.

To use your example, you are not bribing yourself with Pinkberry frozen yogurt at all; you know that you can have your Pinkberry frozen yogurt whenever you want. You are actually denying yourself the Pinkberry frozen yogurt until you’ve finished the task. After the completion of the task you just restore normality. Every time your subconscious asks you, “I want Pinkberry frozen yogurt, why am I doing this to myself?”, your conscious comes back saying “Because I need to motivate myself to do this task I hate.” You begin to associate the task with Pinkberry-frozen-yoghurt deprivation and you start hating the task even more. Motivation goes down.

Furthermore, there’s the side-effect of having Pinkberry frozen yogurt at a time when you would normally not actually want it. You only have it in order to “reward” yourself for that task. Having Pinkberry frozen yogurt now itself becomes a task! You run the risk of compromising your love for Pinkberry frozen yogurt by forcing it instead of letting it happen naturally. Before you know it, Pinkberry frozen yogurt is no longer a reward. As soon as you realise this, you stop having it after the task, then you stop having it altogether because you associate it with the task you hate, and then you hate the task even more for destroying your fondness for Pinkberry frozen yogurt. Motivation goes down.

The only times this “self-imposed reward” system works on me is when the reward is intrinsically unavailable until the task is completed. For example, you could reward yourself for doing the shopping by buying Pinkberry frozen yogurt. You can’t have it until you bought it. But for other tasks (like writing an essay), that doesn’t work.

Awesome article as always. I really like your recent high-quality posts, Luke.

A few additional notes.

1) I was already more or less aware of this research through the language learning community, mostly the Japanese one. For example, Khatzumoto has been advocating this for some time now, see this article for an explanation or this trilogy in 9 parts for practical advice how to fix it. (Because LW isn't really about learning languages, I'll just leave it at this.)

These techniques try not to fix your own attitude (like, giving you lower Impulsiveness, changing the Value you assign or affecting your optimism), but instead change the learning strategies in such a way that they work regardless of these problems. So instead of learning how to tackle larger goals, they instead choose really tiny ones. Khatz for example strongly advocates timeboxes of 90 seconds or less, or changing the learning material to intrinsically fun stuff (manga instead of textbooks). This is something that the traditional procrastination literature doesn't really address very much. It has helped me a lot, in addition to all the approaches you already described.

2) I strongly agree with this model, but I'm not sure that this covers all of procrastination. I have seen additional (albeit not nearly as common) failure modes where all 4 variables given seem to be just fine, but still nothing got done. For example, I know quite a few experienced meditators that were horrible procrastinators in certain domains (e.g. Shinzen Young, see part 2 of this interview). (This includes myself, too, but I'm not nearly as experienced as I wish I was.) Through strong concentration meditation, you can easily make any task fun by going into Flow at will (or even stronger states than that), through variants of metta meditation, failure becomes no big deal and someone that can sit an hour or more paying detailed attention to pain (physical or emotional) doesn't really have a problem with Impulsiveness per se. I'm not sure that these factors are really the main cause here.

To give a personal example (a fairly common one among advanced vipassana practitioners) of such a failure mode, there's all-consuming nihilism, where you still have high concentration, lots of pleasure and so on, but find every possible action intrinsically empty, so you can't be bothered at all to do anything. In the extreme case, people simply lie around all day, doing nothing. (This is distinct from depression in that pleasure and motivation still exist as sensations, but are rejected, although from the outside it looks very similar.) The fix to this is not to try to arbitrarily assign Value to activities again, as the equation would predict (because activities are already enjoyable, but that doesn't help at all), but instead to turn this nihilism on itself and realize that "wanting meaning" is just as meaningless as everything else. So in that case, more specific insight and the uprooting of beliefs is necessary, not a better technique. (PJ Eby provides plenty of practical examples and great fixes for related situations, imo.)

3) Rewards can backfire horribly if done wrong. I have tried to use operant conditioning for not-so-pleasant, but necessary tasks. (Similar to taw's point system and strongly influenced by Don't Shoot The Dog.) The problem is that I came to replace my intrinsic (albeit limited) motivation entirely with an external one. Now once I either found a way to game the system (get the same reinforcements in an easier fashion) or skipped the rewards for some reason, all my motivation was gone completely. (Gabe Zichermann in his talk on gamification gives another example of this replacement.) So I'd highly advice against using reward systems except maybe for short, one-off goals.

(However, I have successfully exploited this to stop behavior. Don't Shoot The Dog explains this in detail. Essentially, you practice the behavior you don't want to do, put it on a reward system, give it an explicit cue and then you don't give the cue, ever. It's a bit tricky and dark-artsy, but works.)

In general, this post looks useful and well researched, so upvoted. This is my only problem with it:

Another method is to make failure really painful.

For me personally, this is a really bad idea because it'll kick me into pain motivation mode and uselessly cause me more stress (decreasing my effectiveness.) You've clearly read much more then me on the subject, and so this may work for some people, but I think that it has a chance to significantly backfire for others.

Since there is usually little you can do about the delay of a task's reward

It seems like delay is a factor that can be manipulated in some ways. For example, one might set a sub-goal of having the term paper written in an acceptable draft form halfway through the semester, to be reviewed by a teacher or peer. This would be processed differently from the end goal of having the final version ready at the end of the semester.

I've had this page in a tab in my browser for days intending to read it, and still haven't. Seriously.

It's nice to know my acrasia has a sense of humour.

Thank you so very very much for hosting pdfs of the journal articles you cite. Tracking those down between 20 different academic paywalls would have been very painful for me.

Note that there's an Anti-Akrasia technique in here waiting to happen: If you can increase the delay of a rewarding but unproductive task that otherwise has no delay at all then you reduce your motivation to do it.

Internet browsing comes to mind. I think the XKCD author has done something to this effect (check out the comic's comment here: http://xkcd.com/862/). To quip, he wrote a script that made his computer freeze for thirty seconds every time he opened unwanted material.

Very nice review here. Any better and I would say you needn't bother buying the book. About the equation, it is indeed a simplification of the full model -- trying to balance completeness with making sure it is understandable. As the book (and for those super keen, Temporal Motivation Theory described in my Academy of Management Review article "Integrating Theories of Motivation"), we add a constant in the denomenator to prevent the entire thing sky rocketing to infinity when delay approaches zero (in joke, one of the characters has a kid named Constance in reference to this).

lukeprog: This is amazing, and I learned a lot from this. You're awesome.

I think the biggest problem with procrastination is that it results from fairly rational formulae, give or take a little outdated evolved psychology. The rewards that are far in the future are intrinsically less certain as the probability of drastic change accumulates over time, especially for impulsive individuals; the rewards of studying are many years into the future, and the utility of those rewards is very, very low on the biological scale of things, for the people living in rich countries.

As far as biology is concerned, human is a system with 1 ultimate goal: reproduction. Other behaviours (e.g. pursuit of status) are only means to an end. Studying in the developed countries, in particular is an extremely ineffective form of pursuit of status which is particularly unlikely to improve reproductive success, and is likely to decrease it.

It is bloody hard to use rationality to fight for the behaviours (studying) which much of your hardware has rightfully and rationally deemed irrational and not worth the time expenditure.

The conscious 'mind' is like a naive figurehead that gets fooled by everyone and everything, which is good for a honest face while repeating the lies (it repeats lies told by CEO, it repeats lies he heard on tv, et cetera). The figurehead got talked into adoption of currently-ineffective yet traditional strategy, but the CEO won't even bother to listen and produce a counter-argument, or explain it's choice. CEO just commands. The whole point of having a naive figurehead is to keep the figurehead in the dark. The CEO is a private fella, he sits in his office and lets everyone else think that figurehead is the CEO. The figurehead himself has to think so. The figurehead has barely mind of his own; he can't compare things and find inconsistencies; he keeps thinking that he's the CEO even though nothing obeys him (albeit the figurehead does make the coffee and can often wreck damage to the corporation by giving a sleeping pill to the CEO, i.e. taking the 'anti procrastination' drugs).

Now, if you are in a developing country and you are facing really bad life if you don't study - then it is different story. Then your procrastination is fairly irrational and outright dumb.

edit: to be more constructive. You can try thinking harder about what the future is going to be like - running out of oil, runaway technological progress, genetically engineered diseases, and such. Then perhaps you will at least get yourself rational-ish motivation to study hard science, as it may help you survive (a very long shot though and the improvement in survival might be negligible). Still, that won't make the 'CEO' care about the paper that says that someone thinks you ought to have learnt something after having been listening to lectures and preparing for exams (a degree paper). Studying for exam real quick then forgetting what you learnt? Forget about doing this, the only studying that will matter is the one that lasts in your head and this form of studying is much slower and might not even keep up with the courses.

Edit: Apparently not actually pseudomath, only looks like it, due to undefined scale and meaning of parameters. Although still contains a simplification made for rhetorical reasons that makes the formula wrong (see footnote 6).

This leaves us with "the procrastination equation":

I don't believe such pseudomath is a good way of evoking the relevant intuitions, given the downside of being meaningless. Isn't it strictly better to just say is as follows?

These are the factors that influence motivation the most:

• Expectancy and Value promote motivation.
• Impulsiveness and Delay decrease motivation.

Motivation = (Expectancy*Value)/(Impulsiveness*Delay)

If this equation is right, then Impulsiveness appears to be a meaningless quantity. A more impulsive person would be less motivated to perform a task, but also would be less motivated to perform competing tasks. Changing Impulsiveness scales all Motivations equally, preserving the same structure of relative Motivation.

In my personal experience, the most common cause of procrastination and lack of willpower is open-ended tasks.

Examples:
At school I would complete any short-answer or multiple choice homework in class or as soon as I got home,
but I would procrastinate over and often fail to complete any homework which involved writing essays, and
the more open-ended the essay question the more I would procrastinate over it. Similarly, if I was asked to
show workings out for my calculations I would refuse to do it, whereas I would usually comply when I was
given equally boring rote copying tasks. This is because there is often more than one way to solve a
problem, and more than one way to lay out such a method on paper, whereas rote copying does not offer any
options to choose from.

In conversation, I respond when I am asked a direct question but when I am asked an open-ended question I
procrastinate over coming up with an answer and there is an awkward silence. If I need to approach and talk
to someone who is not a close friend or family, I can motivate myself to overcome my shyness and do it if I
have what I need to say planned out word-for-word beforehand, but if there are many different ways to
phrase what I need to say then I procrastinate over deciding what to say and end up not saying anything.

I find it harder to motivate myself to clean windows than to motivate myself to vacuum. Vacuuming is a more
unpleasant task than cleaning windows - it involves listening to an irritating noise and wearing
uncomfortable heavy duty hearing protection. But when I clean a window, every time I look at it from a
different angle I see more smears. Due to the lack of a definite moment at which the window is clean I will
typically do the vacuuming first while I summon up the willpower for the window cleaning.

As I child, I would refuse to tidy my room when my mum asked me to. Whereas at school, at after-school
clubs and at church services I would always diligently help when I was asked to tidy up. This is because outside the home, there were always unambiguous rules about which tasks had to be done when tidying up.
Whereas at home I was never sure which tidying-up subtasks absolutely had to be done and which subtasks
were optional.

Actually, the Expectancy (probability of success) component is not that simple: you don't just maximize it to maximize motivation. As Robert Sapolsky shows in "The Uniqueness of Humans" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrCVu25wQ5s), motivation is proportional to the dopamin spike you get when you start to consider performing a task, and the dopamin spike is highest the closer your estimated probability of success is to (something like) 50%! The amount of dopamin produced when you consider starting a task that you have 25% or 75% chances of succeeding at will be significantly lower than for the 50%-chance task. So it's not that you need to be certain about your success, it's that you need to be pleasantly challenged, somewhere midway between "I'm so gonna fail" and "I'm so sure I can do this I find it absolutely boring" (though this sweet spot may not be at exactly 50% for everyone).

"we irrationally find present costs more salient than future costs"

Present Bias is not always irrational!

it can be rationalized (as in, "find rational cause" not "make up excuse") as hedging against uncertainty. the future is never certain. our predictions about the future aren't even probable. if you save your money instead of spending it, you might lose it all to madoff. if you don't use that giftcard to some restaurant, your tastes might change and it won't be worth anything.

in fact, Geometric Discouting maximizes average (undiscounted utility) if, every moment in time, there is some probability that you will transition to a state where you won't ever be able to get more utility. i think of it as the Apocalypse. then the discount is less about preference and more about an uncertain future.

even better, let's say you know THAT there is some "Apocalypse probability", but not WHAT it is. put a beta distribution on it, a natural prior on probabilities. then every day, when you wake up (i.e. the Coin Of Fates lands heads), it's a little more likely that the daily apocalypse is less likely (e.g. think about how unlikely flipping a fair coin 365 times is, you need to be a fool to not lower your estimate of the tails odds). update by bayes, you get laplace's rule, and Hyperbolically Discounted reward. it's like the Anthropic Principle.

i had to put in the math there to say that present bias can be rational and logical, and this can be shown formally and precisely. but really, it comes from common sense. just because a behavioral economist tells you that they'll give you money tomorrow (and you know he's telling the truth, since unlike psychology, the journals won't accept deceptive experiments), doesn't mean you'll get the money (the world changes, e.g. they forget or err in mailing the check), and it doesn't mean you'll want the money (you change, e.g. you win the lottery). shit happens. people change.

having said all that, it's safe to say that most of present bias is irrational. this is obvious from the frequent feelings of frustration with our present problems and anger against our past self for not solving them. at least, for me.

it's just i've been smelling this Fetish lately for hating heuristics, biases, and intuition. but really, these things work really well much of the time for many tasks. and that's often the first thing we hear in informed discussions, but i think people get caught up and forget about it (not saying lukeprog did, just making a big deal about one word he used).

(it's like Lazy Evaluation. haskell is often fast despite, not because of, it. but sometimes, you really didn't need to do something, and since everything is like a generator, you save big on computation.)

anyway, great post! (i stopped reading it halfway through because of the silliness of reading the internets to procrastinate my chores, and finished after :) i need to keep rereading it and thinking about it until i can figure out a way to remember and implement these things in my own mind.

ps check out "Strotz Meets Allais: Diminishing Impatience and the Certainty Effect"

If the task you're avoiding is boring, try to make it more difficult, right up to the point where the difficulty level matches your current skill, and you achieve "flow."21 This is what the state troopers of Super Troopers did: they devised strange games and challenges to make their boring job passable. Myrtle Young made her boring job at a potato chip factory more interesting and challenging by looking for potato chips that resembled celebrities and pulling them off the conveyor belts.

What do you do if the task is both boring and extremely difficult, rather than boring and easy?

Here is the procrastination equation image (since it's currently broken in the main text).

And the same equation in math:

$Motivation=\frac{Expectancy\times Value}{Impulsiveness\times Delay}$

Any number of interventions can help with a task you're procrastinating on. But if you'd prefer to start with an understanding of procrastination as a phenomenon, see my "The Last Word on Procrastination: An integration of ego-depletion theory, construal-level theory, and the irreversibility of writing."

Oddly enough, I find that the best way to get something done is to read a schedule that I made the day before. I somehow feel more obligated to stick to it than if I written it the day of. I can't fully explain why this is the case, perhaps due to the fact that I'm more fatigued by the time I've written one, but it seems to be the best way I found to hack my own procrastination. Tim Ferriss also advocates making a plan for the day or week ahead, although his reasons might be different than mine.

I really like parts of this, but other parts -- like "focus on doing what you love" and "increase your expectancy of success" -- strike me as banal or vacuous. Note that I have a very biased view of this stuff, as will be clear from my recent anti-akrasia post on LessWrong: Anti-akrasia tool: like stickK.com for data nerds

So it won't be surprising that the part of this I really love, and what I think is the part that really matters, is commitment devices and setting goals that are measurable, realistic, and time-anchored (so-called SMART goals).

Btw, I would say that StickK does commitment devices better than Beeminder but everything else about goal setting and goal tracking (per the SMART criteria [2]) worse. And more and more I feel that getting the commitment contracts perfect doesn't matter. If you're the type to cheat and weasel then self-binding websites will have no appeal to you in the first place, since, as a cheating weasel, you're unbindable!

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria

One way to keep the "Delay" high is to not have an external deadline or not commit to your own deadline. This is a real killer for me: without a proper deadline tasks are always too early or too late. When I'm "too early", the task can be started but doesn't get anywhere. Then, when I feel it's "too late", low expectations take over. Up till now I've used to think that the arbitrariness of setting your own deadline kills it (since it's arbitrary, it can be reset on a whim). Now I see that thinking carefully about a deadline can reduce the arbitrariness.

del

So this may be other-optimizing if you heed my anecdote, but contemplating my own swiftly approaching death (an idea I take from Stoicism) helps my procrastination. In the context of this article, I think it works because it decreases my impulsiveness by forcing me to view my time as a finite resource, thus reducing some (not all) hyperbolic discounting of rewards. When I get up in the morning, if I say to myself something like "I probably have less than 20,000 days left to live, and this is one of those days," I find it easier to do tasks that my rational brain knows are more valuable to me, versus tasks that generate immediate reward chemicals in my animal brain. This visualization idea drives the point home even harder. When I am dying, I don't want to look back on my life and see that I wasted days binge watching House of Cards or reading interesting articles instead of doing something worth writing an interesting article about. I think this technique gives an immediate reward through my recognition that I spent an extremely scarce resource efficiently, thus giving some immediacy to long-term goals.

Great article. One statement that really caught my eye was the reccomendation to not clutter your life. That's exactly how I would describe my life at this point. Cluttered. If anybody was any advice on how to declutter and refocus your life that would be greatly appreciated.

I thought it was comical that I clicked the O*NET link and spent a good 10min or so on that site just to come back to the next heading which was "Handling Impulsiveness"

Well played, author! Thanks for the sequence!

These are awesome ideas and techniques, thanks for compiling them Luke! I personally work with a category of people who have a hard time implementing even these - they get into meta depression/hopelessness/angst and are unable to follow through on basic positive reinforcement like smiling after completing a task - it causes them to think about all of the other tasks they haven't done and they feel bad.

For people stuck in that category, I recommend Internal Family Systems counseling with a good facilitator and/or Landmark. The problem is usually some sort of deep rooted belief about not being good enough or the world sucking, which requires accessing parts of the mind that are different than the analytic parts that can deconstruct and measure things easily.

Sadly I don't have any studies for IFS yet, Swimmer963 is currently working a study about meta-depression. I've been taking data in the form of having several clients suffering from depression track their scores on moodscope.com, so maybe I'll be able to release some results from that at some point. There were also a few studies in progress that we learned about at Positive Vector early on, so I'll try following up on how those are going.

This article is very useful and well researched. However, I do have a question regarding:

De-clutter your life, because clutter is cognitively exhausting for your brain to process all day long.

Is this true? I've never actually heard of it before, but I'd like to see the research on it. (I did read through the sources, but I could have missed it) It sounds plausible and would have some interesting implications if it is. So people who have really messy desks are just making life harder for themselves?

Interesting discussion and well put. It would be relevant here to mention though that one of the commonest tie ins between impulsivity and procrastination is ADHD. It is something that is well worth considering when anyone is faced with industrial strength procrastination & impulsivity problems - as it is usually missed in Adults. Just as modafinil can be helpful- so can the psychostimulants. They are also much older, better understood drugs with a very clearly understood safety profile.

Equally it is worth noticing on the "value " end of the equation- that sometimes we procrastinate because we are subconsciously aware that what we are proposing to do is not the most important thing we could/should be doing.

Temporal construal theory is known on LW as near/far thinking - you may want to mention/link that in fn 5.

Well, the irony that it took me over 6 years to actually get myself into reading this...

As an ADHD person for whom "reduce impulsiveness" is about as practical a goal as "learn telekinesis", reducing delay is actually super easy. Did you know people feel good about completing tasks and achieving goals? All you have to do to have a REALLY short delay between starting the task and an expected reward is explicitly, in your own mind, define a sufficiently small sub-task as A Goal. Then the next one, you don't even need breaks in-between if it goes well - even if what you're doing is as inherently meaningless as, I dunno, filling in an excel table from a printed one, you can still mentally reward yourself for each page or whatever.

The first salesman guy could set himself a task of "make three cold calls" regardless of success, and then feel good about having done them. The third guy could make a checklist at the start where tasks are listed in order and enjoy an uninterrupted checkmark row when he's not behind on anything. The student could feel really proud for making the front page, then the next part, etc.

I've finally learned the key to hacking the impulse part of the equation. Distancing, minimization and distraction are useful. As is self-deception, or perhaps it is enlightened reason: that the desire for a thing is pleasure and reward in itself, there is no need to satiate a craving, just as there is no need to avert a negative feeling or harmful stimuli.

Drink lots of water. Stop eating anything that contains wheat and other grains.

I don't think that either of these two has much evidence going for it.

Do short but intense exercise once a week.

Once a week is not often enough. The endorphins from exercise wear off fast so to sustain high energy levels I require a short burst of intense exercise is required every few hours with a longer run at least once a day.

I've personally found HabitRPG.com helpful. I'd recommend setting an 'eat that frog' daily which costs you a lot of health if I don't complete it. There's an effective altruists party that anyone's welcome to join: https://www.facebook.com/groups/560438844048626/

"but most people have the most energy during a period starting a few hours after they wake up and lasting 4 hours"

There's no way this is true. Mentally, you're much slower in the morning than the evening. In fact, for optimal intellectual functioning, your body temperature has to be at its highest, not at its lowest and thus you're most productive in the last 4 hours before going to bed rather than the first after rising. I've had other programmer colleagues confirm this to me: how they feel twice as productive at the end of the day than at the beginning and my own experience is the same.

So your statement is simply the opposite of how reality works or there's more human diversity out there than either of us realizes. :)

Well I just had an interesting opportunity to try out some of these techniques, because I was supposed to be working on a project and decided to "take a break" by reading Less Wrong. These techniques do seem to be helping.

I am a little bit leary of the first section, about trying to increase your own optimism. In general, I'm a little suspicious of trying to get myself to feel something that may not be justified. Fortunately, in my own case, I do know that I am perfectly capable of completing my current goal. I've done harder things.

For your information, Myrtle Young https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY3Lw_-bj5U is now a broken link. (sad. Sounds funny)

Apart from that, thanks. Interesting article. At least because I had no idea so much research where done on those subjects.

procrastination, there are no limits to what you can accomplish when you are supposed to be doing something else. Then again, those other things just add to a list of ongoing commitments that lead to great procrastination and the stress that comes with it which could be surmounted by just getting things done.

May I just point out some things about the equation

part of the expected utility

No, it's not that central to that at all. It's grounded in that, no the other way around. Also, it's certainly not mainstream. It's very new. Not wrong, just not very well scrutinised.

All good in theory but how would you apply this equation to procrastinating on something like exam revision?

• Increase your expectancy of success.

This isn't relevant in most cases of procrastination. I already know I can successfully revise for exams, I've done it before, it's just too boring, so I don't feel like doing it. It's the same with say, washing the dishes - I know I can do it, but it's just boring. And revision requires a lot more mental effort than washing the dishes.

• Increase the task's value (make it more pleasant and rewarding).

Flow - You misunderstood the concept of boredom. Boredom doesn't happen ONLY when you find the task too easy, it also happens when you find the task too difficult. Most people probably find maths boring because it's too hard for them, their competence level is too low for the task. Same with learning languages - people find languages boring because it's new and therefore difficult for them. From wikipedia: "In a learning environment, a common cause of boredom is lack of understanding; for instance, if one is not following or connecting to the material in a class or lecture, it will usually seem boring. "

Flow isn't about difficulty, it's about matching your competence level to the difficulty level of the task. If you find it too easy, then make it harder. If you find it too hard, then make it easier. On the other hand, when you are learning concepts that are fundamentally new to you, it is necessarily hard. What makes learning fun is not the process itself, as in playing video games or driving a car or playing musical instruments is rewarding in itself, but the OUTCOME of it. In other words, people are not intrinsically motivated to learn, as they are for video games, but they are extrinsically motivated to do learning and revision.

How do you make exam revision more rewarding without an external partner to administer rewards? Self-administering rewards is impractical because you can easily and will just give yourself the reward without doing the work. If you don't have someone overseeing you this is not a practical solution. The system reinforces cheating and punishes proper behavior by design.

• Decrease your impulsiveness.

How do you do this without meditation or medication? I know what you mean by precommitting but technically that isn't reducing impulsivity, it just makes giving into temptation much more costly. Leaving aside the philosophical objection that this option takes away your individual freedom and makes you dependent on external compulsion, how would you do this in a way that isn't easily reversible without external help? Unplugging your router - you can just plug it back in again. Also what if you need internet for revision. Blocking websites - you can just unblock them. So precommitment isn't practical most of the time.

My point is that these solutions are only good in theory and not useful in reality for common problems such as procrastination on exam revision or studying. Learning is fundamentally difficult, and you can only increase your competence level by learning, so it's a catch-22 situation. Momentum doesn't apply in this kind of situation because learning is self-punishing or self-weakening. The more you learn, the more you don't feel like learning as your mind wanders because it is not in a state of flow.

Most of the solutions you mentioned skirt around the outside of the issue and don't address the root cause of the problem, which is lack of flow. Indeed, if tasks like studying and revision created flow, there wouldn't be any procrastination associated.

Anyways, I'd like to read a point-by-point counterargument to the points I've made because I don't feel my criticism is productive in itself since I'm still looking for the solution to procrastination.

FWIW, this is one of my favourite articles. I can't say how much it would help everyone -- I think I read it when I was just at the right point to think about procrastination seriously. But I found the analytical breakdown into components incredibly helpful way to think about it (and I love the sniper rifle joke).

I get the feeling this equation would be a bit more useful if Passion was a more prominent factor in it. As it is, it's hidden in the Value variable.

It could be a bit misleading. For instance, I automatically was thinking about monetary value and usefulness and such, while completely forgetting to include the Passion factor. If the Passion isn't weighted heavily in the equation, motivation might turn out to be low regardless of how high the "Value" (besides passion) might be.

Maybe I should work on reducing the "value" part of the equation for distracting activities. (For example, reading negative reviews of "The Secret" on Amazon)

I suppose there were studies of placebo effect - which I haven't read - but just a thought: Could it be that placebo treatment induces the placebo effect not only by making the patients believe they perceive a positive effect, but by actually changing their behavior? Of course it depends on the treated problem, but placebo surely raises the patients' expectation of getting better and thus raises their motivation to help themselves (according to the procrastination equation).

Do you know about any research that relates this to the "anti-" case of this? That is, how expectancy, "value", delay and impulsiveness affects evaluation of risk and potential future punishment and how it affects one's behavior under that evaluation?
I wonder how this can be applied to action one might perform that is shunned by society, such as crime. Perhaps it's basically the same case (we incorporate the risk and adverse effects to the value and expectancy), but it seems that there are two stages in such cases which make it more complex - there's the cost of doing the action, there's the expected reward (which has its own value, expectancy, etc...) of the action, and then there's the expected punishment exerted by society (which has its own expectancy - the probability of getting caught - value/loss of value, etc.). How does the temporal relations between the reward and the punishment affect the decision? The crime might have immediate benefit which means that it comes before the punishment (if get caught), or the crime might induce permanent change to the world which might be enjoyed after the punishment (if the culprit will be able to enjoy said change) so the reward comes after the punishment. Any thoughts/research about it? I used the example of crime, but this applies to any kind of action taken "against society" or anything that calls for expected counter-action from the surroundings. Dissidents, rebels and such can be inspected similarly.

The book from steel can be previewed extensively here.

A great post - I love the quantity and quality of information you have squeezed into such a compact article.

I will be seeing how the recommendations work for me over the next week or so.

Thanks!

Which Bible translation is the St. Paul quote at the top from? The first sentence matches the Phillips translation (that I just learned about) but the rest doesn't.

I ask because (in the context of akrasia) I've seen that quote a lot, but never in the very modern, common-language phrasing you've given. I checked the more contemporary translations and couldn't find it in those either.

I would reference the behavioral economics on loss aversion to up the value of a task. Rather than focusing on increasing the positive value via upping the reward, I would increase the negative value of inaction. Personally, I've taken to fining myself for not getting things done on time (all the money goes into a jar next to my desk, which goes to charity at the end of the month). This system has worked wonders - it even has power to control my less rational selves (e.g. drunk self and just-woke-up self)

I'm curious about the equation you mentioned. Has it actually been proven that motivation is directly proportional to expectancy and value but inversely proportional to time and impulsiveness? I mean in humans rather than in ideal utility maximisers (although I don't think ideal utility maximisers are known for their impulsiveness so I'm not even sure if it applies to them).

I didn't even know it was possible to rigorously measure motivation and impulsiveness.

Voted up. I like the way your posts distill an incredible amount of material.

Impressive! (though the underspecified math did bother me a bit.) I wonder how long did it take you to write?

Could you state the actual equation? It doesn't sound like you've simplified it much; its current form bugs me. Also I assume there must be some constant of proportionality in there, since it seems unlikely the dimensions will work out otherwise... unless "impulsiveness" is chosen to have dimensions so that it does?

Edit: For that matter, how are we measuring motivation in this context? What does the output actually mean?

Very nice review here. Any better and I would say you needn't bother buying the book. About the equation, it is indeed a simplification of the full model -- trying to balance completeness with making sure it is understandable. As the book (and for those super keen, Temporal Motivation Theory described in my Academy of Management Review article "Integrating Theories of Motivation"), we add a constant in the denomenator to prevent the entire thing sky rocketing to infinity when delay approaches zero (in joke, one of the characters has a kid named Constance in reference to this).

I just read this article instead of doing my homework.

I'm going to have to sit down and read this whole essay and take notes one of these days, when I have more time.

I think motivation creates human activity ,then human activity make result. I feel this essay express function before motivation occur.

In real world there is many way to change motive to result. But in contents management system (CMS)like here, there is few wat to choose.

To writ e this essay, and gather comments , we have to use various ability. Brainstorming , correcting grammar, quoting ect... We tend to procrastinate quoting during brainstorming, because of homo sapiens are created for dedicate one thing. Malti tasker is exception. In Wierd magazine , (1)there is article about super multi tasker , that express less than 1/100 people are fit for multi task. In addition, CMS have feature , for example, twitter is good at brain storming but not good at correcting ideas and make refrence link like wiki. To slove this problem, I propose integrate all CMS with save all infomation per comments approximately 144 letters, and controlling readable editable visible per comments ,per ID. With this system ,someone who detect wierd article link ,Insert quote (1) directory. tell this link in comment , I have to edit this article again. I propose to beate procrastination , smoothing result is a solution. Conclution of this essay is ideal solution. I propose this system for I do not want effort like this conclusion. details here

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=120D5B6837379D16!819 https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=120D5B6837379D16!925

This is a wonderful article, nicely researched and quite honestly makes me jealous! Kudos to you for really driving home the point that the most important tool we have to beat procrastination is indeed our own motivation. Without that, all the productivity tricks, tools or methods will mean very little if you cannot stick with it!

Both personally and professionally I think the idea of rewards is not explored enough and given enough credit for the power it has. Even if you are using something such as Pomodoro and rewarding yourself with a fresh cup of tea or coffee during your rest period, it has a way of replenishing us even more than just that break. I actually just joined to comment on this article and look forward to joining this community! I can be reached here or at my blog http://www.chasingproductivity.com