There’s a specific type of procrastination that is due to a ‘fake pre-requisite’ - I’ve started noticing these more often, and this has led to me unblocking myself a lot more.
Recently someone emailed me to ask about my postdoc plans, when I’m graduating, etc. That was a lot of stuff! I sat on it, because replying seemed to require having my whole future figured out first. So I let it go unread in my inbox.
It sat there for a while. I’d go back to it and see it often but not really know how to deal with it. It felt like it required a lot of mental energy to reply to this email.
~2 weeks later I decided I was being really silly and I should probably just reply to this person. But doing so still felt pretty impossible—which felt really jarring.
Talking to Claude for a bit made me realize—I’d silently attached a fake prerequisite to it — “first, resolve [huge open question]” — that wasn’t actually essential to the thing.
Once I reframed the ask to “what am I excited to do? and what do I currently know for sure?”—it became really easy to write the email. Effortless, in fact. And actually this was probably what was being asked in the first place
So tl;dr
There is a tendency to think about vague, fuzzy tasks as monumentally large
Aversion is a pretty rational response to these tasks—it protects against burnout
Scoping down / reframing the task makes the aversion go away naturally!
i strongly feel this as well. my guess is the causal direction is at least a little bit that aversion causes fake prereqs, or at least that it’s bidirectional causality. my theory is answering this email involves some kind of slightly unpleasant emotion (maybe social anxiety or something), and your brain, to avoid you from thinking about it, attached it to another thing that it knows you’re even more averse to, to ensure you won’t think about it.
I sat on an email for two weeks because I didn’t have any coherent thoughts about how to reply. A few days ago I replied to say “I don’t have any coherent thoughts about this.” The other person seemed to appreciate it.
Nice example! My procrastination often takes the form of mentally hugely inflating the stakes for no reason and I have definitely noticed this specific fake pre-requisite thing happening to me pretty frequently
There’s a specific type of procrastination that is due to a ‘fake pre-requisite’ - I’ve started noticing these more often, and this has led to me unblocking myself a lot more.
Recently someone emailed me to ask about my postdoc plans, when I’m graduating, etc. That was a lot of stuff! I sat on it, because replying seemed to require having my whole future figured out first. So I let it go unread in my inbox.
It sat there for a while. I’d go back to it and see it often but not really know how to deal with it. It felt like it required a lot of mental energy to reply to this email.
~2 weeks later I decided I was being really silly and I should probably just reply to this person. But doing so still felt pretty impossible—which felt really jarring.
Talking to Claude for a bit made me realize—I’d silently attached a fake prerequisite to it — “first, resolve [huge open question]” — that wasn’t actually essential to the thing.
Once I reframed the ask to “what am I excited to do? and what do I currently know for sure?”—it became really easy to write the email. Effortless, in fact. And actually this was probably what was being asked in the first place
So tl;dr
There is a tendency to think about vague, fuzzy tasks as monumentally large
Aversion is a pretty rational response to these tasks—it protects against burnout
Scoping down / reframing the task makes the aversion go away naturally!
i strongly feel this as well. my guess is the causal direction is at least a little bit that aversion causes fake prereqs, or at least that it’s bidirectional causality. my theory is answering this email involves some kind of slightly unpleasant emotion (maybe social anxiety or something), and your brain, to avoid you from thinking about it, attached it to another thing that it knows you’re even more averse to, to ensure you won’t think about it.
I sat on an email for two weeks because I didn’t have any coherent thoughts about how to reply. A few days ago I replied to say “I don’t have any coherent thoughts about this.” The other person seemed to appreciate it.
Nice example! My procrastination often takes the form of mentally hugely inflating the stakes for no reason and I have definitely noticed this specific fake pre-requisite thing happening to me pretty frequently