“The Many Reasons We Procrastinate, Including the Multiple Selves”

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I found this to be an interesting article, but the essay that it links to fascinates me. Partly for the content, but even more for the erroneous thoughts it contains. For example:

[…] procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t.

That’s not strictly true. The logical, future-thinking part of a person often wants to be doing something that has to be done for his longer-term good (like studying or exercising), but the rest of the person wants to kick back with a cold beer and watch the game on TV. Sometimes the logical part wins out, but more often it’s overpowered by the other parts.

The logical part can win out though. Resisting temptation is impossible in the long term, no matter who you are — willpower can only work for a limited time, a matter of a few weeks at best, and often just a few days. It would be great if you could use it to create the habits that would support you to reaching your goal, but habits require weeks to create or change; it’s just not that strong. The best use for it that I’ve found is to allow you to get the ball rolling, and set up your environment to support creating those habits. Want to lose weight? Using your limited store of willpower to get all the junk food out of your house will be a lot more useful than trying to stop yourself from eating it later.

The most useful trick, I’ve found, is focusing on the ultimate benefit you desire. What’s your goal? “I want to lose twenty pounds,” you might say. But while that is probably a great goal, there’s nothing there to motivate you. Why do you want to lose twenty pounds? “To feel better” is a start. “To get the amorous attention of [very attractive person A]” is even better. Focus on that, and the tasks required for it will suddenly become a lot less onerous.

(At least they should. If they don’t, then perhaps it’s not the right goal for you. Or maybe you just need to rediscover the thing that made the goal attractive in the first place.)

There’s a ton more to say on the subject — you could fill a small branch library with all the books written on how to get things done, and I’ve read a significant fraction of them — but I’ll leave it at that for now. I’ve got some programming to do that I’ve been putting off for several days… 😉

5 Comments

  1. It’s also interesting how some people find certain things easy to tackle that others find difficult and vice versa. For example, I find it easy to get myself on a treadmill every other day and run for an hour, but have a very hard time getting motivated to figure out why this new NAS dongle I just bought doesn’t work. And I know others for whom the motivation would be reversed.

  3. c-square: Yes, and I’d be one of them — I don’t mind work, physical or otherwise, but I utterly detest mindless and repetitive exercise. If I can keep my mind working at least somewhat while I’m exercising, it’s okay (though still mildly distasteful), but I’d much rather work on your NAS dongle problem.

    (I can prove that I don’t mind work: I’ve been getting plenty of it in the last few weeks, renovating our old house so we can put it on the market. Almost done now, just one more coat of paint on the kitchen ceiling and a handful of small things left. And I’ve been developing Project M at the same time… this morning I estimated that it should be ready for sale around March of 2011 (give or take a month), primarily due to all the technology that I don’t have code for yet. It keeps the competition down, at least. 🙂 )

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