Two forms of procrastination
I noticed something about myself when comparing two forms of procrastination:
a) reading online discussions,
b) watching movies online.
Reading online discussions (LessWrong, SSC, Reddit, Facebook) and sometimes writing a comment there, is a huge sink of time for me. On the other hand, watching movies online is almost harmless, at least compared with the former option. The difference is obvious when I compare my productivity at the end of the day when I did only the former, or only the latter. The interesting thing is that at the moment it feels the other way round.
When I start watching a movie that is 1:30:00 long, or start watching a series where each part is 40:00 long but I know I will probably watch more than one part a day, I am aware from the beginning that I am going to lose more than one hour of time; possibly several hours. On the other hand, when I open the “Discussion” tab on LessWrong, the latest “Open Thread” on SSC, my few favorite subreddits, and/or my Facebook “Home” page, it feels like it will only take a few minutes—I will click on the few interesting links, quickly skim through the text, and maybe write a comment or two—it certainly feels like much less than an hour.
But the fact is, when I start reading the discussions, I will probably click on at least hundred links. Most of the pages I will read just as quickly as I imagined, but there will be a few that will take disproportionally more time; either because they are interesting and long, or because they contain further interesting links. And writing a comment sometimes takes more time than it seems; it can easily be a half an hour for a three-paragraphs-long comment. (Ironically, this specific article gets written rather quickly, because I know what I want to write, and I write it directly. But there are comments where I think a lot, and keep correcting my text, to avoid misunderstanding when debating a sensitive topic, etc.) And when I stop doing it, because I want to make something productive for a change, I will feel tired. Reading many different things, trying to read quickly, and formulating my answers, that all makes me mentally exhausted. So after I close the browser, I just wish I could take a nap.
On the other hand, watching a movie does not make me tired in that specific way. The movies runs at its own speed and doesn’t require me to do anything actively. Also, there is no sense of urgency; none of the “if I reply to this now, people will notice and respond, but if I do it a week later, no one will care anymore”. So I feel perfectly comfortable pausing the movie at any moment, doing something productive for a while, then unpausing the movie and watching more. I know I won’t miss anything.
I think it’s the mental activity during my procrastination that both makes me tired and creates the illusion that it will take less time than it actually does. When the movie says 1:30:00, I know it will be 1:30:00 (or maybe a little less because of the final credits). With a web page, I can always tell myself “don’t worry, I will read this one really fast”, so there is the illusion that I have it under control, and can reduce the time waste. The fact that I am reading an individual page really fast makes me underestimate how much time it took to read all those pages.
On the other hand, sometimes I do inverse procrastination—I start watching a movie, pause it a dozen times and do some useful work during the breaks—and at the end of the day I spent maybe 90% of the time working productively, while my brain tells me I just spent the whole day watching a movie, so I almost feel like I had a free day.
Okay, so how could I use this knowledge to improve my productivity?
1) Knowing the difference between the two forms of procrastination, whenever I feel a desire to escape to the online world, I should start watching a movie instead of reading some debate, because thus I will waste less time, even if it feels the other way round.
2) Integrate it with pomodoro? 10 minutes movie, 50 minutes work, then again, and at the end of the day my lying brain will tell me “dude, you didn’t work at all today, you were just watching movies, of course you should feel awesome!”.
Do you have a similar experience? No idea how typical is this. No need to hurry with responding, I am going to watch a movie now. ;-)
have you tried tracking your time? RescueTime, Tagtime, manual logging...? They help you to pinpoint the problem, some people can keep it up forever but I couldn’t. it still taught me a few things about my use of time though.
I think the point is not to know how much time it takes. He seems to know quite well. The point is about how it feels.
Do not underestimate the power of feedback. Sometimes it doesn’t feel to amount to much exactly because you don’t have a clear measure on how much time you’ve spent on a particular site.
I tried LeechBlock, but I missed some options there. Such as “let me do anything I want, just keep a big timer displayed showing how long am I already doing that”. I don’t want the software to prevent me from reading Facebook; sometimes I do have a good reason to look there. I just want the software to tell me “hey, did you know that you have already spent 30 minutes there? just saying...”
The movie tells me clearly how much time did I spend watching it.
There’s a Firefox add-on called Mind the Time that does more or less that.
I have roughly two kinds of procrastination, too—reading whatever when I know I might have to attend to my kid at any moment (lots of time, yet not very pleasant due to the anticipation) and reading whatever when I could be working (also lots of time, but then I feel like I really have a choice.) The “oh, yeah, work” moment does occur once in a while (say, when I am called to prepare a set of chemicals for a demonstration or to wash up after one), but however long it takes, it passes at last…
On the other hand, when I tutor someone it feels wonderful, like work and leisure all at once; I forget that I want to read anything.
At the moments when you are happy with your life, the desire to escape from reality reduces dramatically. So I guess a high-level approach might be to optimize your life to be more happy, even if it seems like it would reduce your productivity, because you may get the side effect of procrastinating less.
This article was about the low-level approach, when your life already kinda sucks and you cannot fix it at the moment, only try to reduce the damage.
In your case, the obvious question seems to be: “Can you arrange things so you would tutor more, and do whatever is the other thing less? And perhaps hire some babysitter to help with the kid.” Alternatively, could you somehow optimize your environment (or more precisely, your kid’s environment) so that less of your attention is needed?
(My high-level approach is to change my frustrating job, and I am already doing some interviews. Also, some other frustrating things will go away in the future; unfortunately the changes take time that I can’t speed up, so it’s approximately two more months.)
I think most of my own procrastination has always had more to do with the desire to escape, and feeling bad about low expectancy/value of the work at hand, rather than the procrastinating activity itself being highly entertaining.
Being productive can feel terrible because it is a constant reminder of not just what you want to achieve, but also of the fact that you have not achieved it, depressing stuff really.
Oh, it’s alright, really, about the kid, and I get helped a lot. And the job used to feel like a godsend when I had just left a PhD program. It is just—I’m thinking of procrastinating darning or mending, or listening to podcasts—when I feel more secure about having needles with me or not immediately hearing any change, I’ll try that.
Does it? Do you really feel that way? Let me suggest that maybe that’s not an accurate description of what you feel.
I feel like I’m not committing to more than a few minutes, even though if I had thought of it, I would estimate I’d be spending more than a few minutes.
To me, the problem is in incrementalism. I read a tweet. I read another. No particular tweet is a huge time investment. (Just like no particular M&M makes you fat). So it’s tweet after tweet after tweet. I’m never facing one tweet that is going to be a big time investment. So it’s tweet after tweet after tweet.
Hmmm. And maybe that’s the secret. Getting fat eating M&Ms is easy to visualize. And conceptualize. I need a similarly meaningful vision of the lacking in accomplishment me, that eating tweets will turn me into.
I like that. I saw it as procrastinating having fun with work. I would see the problem in that of making sure that work occurred while you didn’t watch the movie, instead of some useless past time. That’s not a problem for you?
There’s a similar strategy of “procastinating later”. “I’ll goof off a little later.” I think some argue that you get the satisfaction of the goof off in the anticipation of it, and that helps you continue.
This does sound like planning fallacy. This is probably obvious in hindsight, but there’s research suggesting that you can make your estimates more accurate by imagining ways that it could be an underestimate, in advance. This is useful if you strictly want to increase the accuracy of your time estimates.
This doesn’t seem as amazing as it is because this is a domain where you can use reference class forecasting (outside view) to cure planning fallacy like people usually do. It’s notable that there is at last seemingly some way to mitigate planning fallacy on tasks that lack an obvious reference class; it always seemed like a weakness to me that we can only avoid planning fallacy if we have past examples to look at.
I think you can’t estimate the amount of web surfing. This is a bit tongue in cheek but a naive modelling of web surfing as a process that that leads to more surfing (links leading to links) leads to a heavy tailed distribution and that has a variance of infinity and thus a low mean doesn’t mean much (ahem).
Maybe this is behind the feeling that it takes a short time…
For interesting long articles you can use pocket or a similar app to save it for when you have more time.