Speaking about my own experience, but I predict it generalizes to many others:
I definitely frequently have the experience you’re describing, of building up an aversion to a task I’m procrastinating and then finding it to be a lot less unpleasant than I expected when I actually get around to it.
But I have a more gears-level model of why this happens: it’s when I have major open questions about how to approach the task in the first place.
I haven’t done the drill you’re describing intentionally, but I have definitely noticed that if I do several of these kinds of things in quick succession (e.g. when I decide today is the day to catch up on my backlog of stuff I’ve been putting off), even if each individual one doesn’t feel so bad, I end up mentally exhausted and resistant to demands.
So I think the cognitive load of figuring out how to even go about a task is genuinely costly to my brain, and it correctly feels averse to doing too much of it.
it’s when I have major open questions about how to approach the task in the first place.
I just want to add, this is my experience too. I find that when I’m not being productive, one of the principle reasons is that I have a goal or a niggling guilty sense that I should do something (and very logical reasons too for doing that) but lack the fine-grain specifics or a plan how to do it. Other times the reason I’m unproductive is that while I do have a plan, but it seems so cockamamie and doomed to fail I procrastinate because the risk/reward ratio feels too low.
When my open questions about execution and approach are answered (often from serendipitous conversations or during procrastinating on other tasks), the hesitation and procrastination tends to melt away. I may even become excited to do the task.
I end up mentally exhausted and resistant to demands.
I relate to this, but it makes me wonder if progressive overload / antifragile dynamics apply here. In resistance training you (1) expose your musculoskeletal system to stress, (2) consume nutrition for recovery, (3) rest to allow recovery beyond the initial setpoint, and (4) repeat step 1 with progressively increasing stress. So I wonder if mental stress works the same way.
I’ve tried looking into kinds of brain training such as dual-n-back and it seems like research is generally pessimistic about skill transfer. It seems if you practice one cognitively demanding task it makes you better at that task, but that doesn’t transfer to dissimilar tasks.
But I wonder if those trials have been misunderstanding mental effort. At first starting dual-n-back it feels effortful, but once you have practice, it no longer feels effortful, even as n increases, so what would be required for progressive overload would be a better model of mental effort. It seems like silentbob’s procrastination drill would come closer than any fixed cognitive test practice, but in general I would think it is the switching to cognitively dissimilar tasks that causes the cognitive stress. Feeling like you’ve been thrown in the deep end without knowing how to swim, so to speak. Once you figure out how to swim you can’t use swimming to practice figuring out how to swim anymore, then you’re just practicing swimming.
Speaking about my own experience, but I predict it generalizes to many others:
I definitely frequently have the experience you’re describing, of building up an aversion to a task I’m procrastinating and then finding it to be a lot less unpleasant than I expected when I actually get around to it.
But I have a more gears-level model of why this happens: it’s when I have major open questions about how to approach the task in the first place.
I haven’t done the drill you’re describing intentionally, but I have definitely noticed that if I do several of these kinds of things in quick succession (e.g. when I decide today is the day to catch up on my backlog of stuff I’ve been putting off), even if each individual one doesn’t feel so bad, I end up mentally exhausted and resistant to demands.
So I think the cognitive load of figuring out how to even go about a task is genuinely costly to my brain, and it correctly feels averse to doing too much of it.
I just want to add, this is my experience too. I find that when I’m not being productive, one of the principle reasons is that I have a goal or a niggling guilty sense that I should do something (and very logical reasons too for doing that) but lack the fine-grain specifics or a plan how to do it.
Other times the reason I’m unproductive is that while I do have a plan, but it seems so cockamamie and doomed to fail I procrastinate because the risk/reward ratio feels too low.
When my open questions about execution and approach are answered (often from serendipitous conversations or during procrastinating on other tasks), the hesitation and procrastination tends to melt away. I may even become excited to do the task.
I relate to this, but it makes me wonder if progressive overload / antifragile dynamics apply here. In resistance training you (1) expose your musculoskeletal system to stress, (2) consume nutrition for recovery, (3) rest to allow recovery beyond the initial setpoint, and (4) repeat step 1 with progressively increasing stress. So I wonder if mental stress works the same way.
I’ve tried looking into kinds of brain training such as dual-n-back and it seems like research is generally pessimistic about skill transfer. It seems if you practice one cognitively demanding task it makes you better at that task, but that doesn’t transfer to dissimilar tasks.
But I wonder if those trials have been misunderstanding mental effort. At first starting dual-n-back it feels effortful, but once you have practice, it no longer feels effortful, even as n increases, so what would be required for progressive overload would be a better model of mental effort. It seems like silentbob’s procrastination drill would come closer than any fixed cognitive test practice, but in general I would think it is the switching to cognitively dissimilar tasks that causes the cognitive stress. Feeling like you’ve been thrown in the deep end without knowing how to swim, so to speak. Once you figure out how to swim you can’t use swimming to practice figuring out how to swim anymore, then you’re just practicing swimming.