Random personal thoughts on workload pessimism as a procrastination problem
I am in one of those moods where I feel extremely burned out and apathetic. What I am noticing about my feelings right now is that there is no short term reward system that could possibly motivate me. I don’t want any candy, food, soda, coffee, alcohol, nor even money, entertainment, sexual excitement, sleep, exercise, or play of any kind. I know that’s not an exhaustive list of potential short term rewards, but it’s fairly exhaustive for the kinds of things that I could reasonably bring about in my own life in the short term. The thing right now that makes me feel bad is the idea that my future work time horizon (FWTH), the perceived amount of future time that will have to be devoted to doing work, is very full. Whenever I perceive a full FWTH, it causes my mind to recoil and become extremely apathetic.
It seems to me that the only kind of reward system that motivates me to feel productive is having completely unabated free time: large blocks of time with literally no named obligations. I’m sure this is not profound or new, but it is interesting to me that this seems to be a dominant part of my psyche. If I think that my marginal effort put towards work right this minute will yield a large expanse of completely and utterly free time in the reasonably near future, then I feel very motivated to work hard. If I perceive that, no matter how hard I work right this minute, my future schedule is already bloated with work that I have yet to even get started on, then I feel very tired, cranky, and just want to lay in bed apathetically and watch cartoons on repeat.
I don’t know a good method for dealing with this sort of procrastination effect. It doesn’t seem to fit into the normal procrastination equation, but at first approximation there are a few ways that it might. One is that I could be very impulsive about free time. Given that I have been a grad student for the past 3 years, this is plausible. As a grad student, the time when I can truly relax and unwind from work is very random and scattered, and often even when I think that I have legitimate relaxation time, I am interrupted by email requests for work that needs to be done right away, or the revelation of a new, difficult homework assignment that will create very negative consequences if I don’t start working diligently on it immediately. Even my undergraduate college life was stressful in this random fashion, and it seems to have taken a great toll on me. I behave almost like an abused puppy, never sure whether I can actually embrace relaxation time or not; perpetually tense that the next work discharge from the Poisson processes governing my workload is going to happen when I’m not mentally ready to receive it.
This could be an impulsiveness effect, making me impatient regarding the next opportunity to have fun and relaxation. Alternatively, it could be a reward or delay problem. There are times in life where obligations are far away. The problem seems to be that they are extremely rare for me and that my personality is extremely sensitive to any potential thoughts on work. People have suggested that I attempt different exercise habits, and possibly meditation, in order to overcome this. I have earnestly tried these things many times, including reading many books and articles on them. So far at least, no specific mental relaxation technique has provided even the slightest benefit. If I perceive that there’s no short term end to my work, which can be followed by a completely obligation-free period of time, then it overrides everything else and creates a strong feeling of apathy. But then, how do you create short-term rewards that function essentially like full out vacations? That doesn’t seem like a plausible thing to hope for, yet it seems like the only thing which could possibly function as a reward. How do you shorten the delay, on a weekly basis, of large expanses of completely obligation-free time?
How do you set up such things as rewards in the first place? That seems like a reward that just logically cannot exist in the modern working environment, but at the same time it seems pretty obvious that a lot of human beings would be psychologically adapted to strongly desire such a reward and that at least some percentage would have trouble functioning properly without the strong possibility of that reward in the short term.
This is more or less just me trying to write down and articulate how I feel. No comments or advice is being solicited, but if anything comes to mind (that avoids the “you should really meditate; it will help you so much” mantra that has repeatedly not worked for me in the past), it is appreciated.
I know the feeling. The worst part is that the apathy extends the time it takes to get the work done, putting off the time when you are done.
Making a list of all that you have to do helps, because it makes the work finite. Instead of obsessing and bemoaning what you have to do—and for the most part, not doing it—instead, detail the work into 30 minute chunks. Then start crossing them off. Force yourself to take breaks after you complete a chunk.
On paper, you can see a path to it all getting done, and that path is finite. You can only focus on so much of the task at once in your head, so it feels infinite, because there is always something else off your mental stage that needs to be taken care of.
Write it down. Cross it off, a piece at a time.
One thing I would note. You talk about your desire for free time with nothing to do. Apathy really starts when you have nothing you want to do with the time you have. Find something you want to do in that free time, and completing your other work so that you can do that thing may be more motivating than getting “free time”.
How large are these blocks of free time you desire? Hours, days, weeks? Maybe it would be helpful to incorporate those explicitly into your schedule.
Personally, I find it very useful to make schedules every day (usually I’ll make a day’s schedule the night before), including everything I need to do, when to do it, and scheduled time for short breaks. I include a large block of time at the end of the day with absolutely no obligations. I also take one day a week off completely, where I don’t work at all (unless some aspect of work just seems really fun that day).
This may seem obvious and won’t work for everyone, but I suspect most people haven’t even tried this.
Edit: In this way, your free time won’t feel like procrastination (which almost never feels as good as true free time), since it won’t be procrastination. When you take time off that you scheduled the night before as being free time, you’ll see it as “everything going according to plan,” rather than “putting off work that I should be doing right now.”
For me, a large enough block of time to make it alter my productivity in a positive way needs to be at least half of a day, but probably closer to a full day.
The main problem that has caused your preferred approach to fail in my case is that my workload is extremely unpredictable. It can appear as though I have divided things up well, but then I come to what I thought was a modular piece of a project only to realize that that modular piece is more difficult than all prior modular pieces put together, and that I’ve horribly under-budgeted time to do it (even after accounting for my initial attempt to egregiously over-budget the time it would take), and that, all of a sudden, I go from believing I am on schedule to believing that I have to cancel all planned relaxation time for the foreseeable future to catch up in response to the out of proportion modular piece.
Despite doing this over and over for years, writing down my experiences often, making concerted effort to become better at estimating the time cost of the modular pieces of my workload, and reading many things on how to beat procrastination and manage stress, I don’t feel that I am able to forecast the amount of time that different modular pieces of my workload will require with enough accuracy for my planning to be trusted regularly. I think it’s truly just the nature of the work that I do / work that I am assigned that it’s largely not knowable ahead of time whether I currently have the knowledge and skills to complete it efficiently or not. I only figure this out by attempting the work and, in real time, updating my schedule to reflect how ignorant I was about how much would be required to finish this new project.
When I used to work full-time, if I was assigned something that greatly exceeded my analytic or programming skills, I could usually explain this to a group leader and the task would be subdivided, or new time would be budgeted to account for me needing to learn new skills. Graduate school is not at all forgiving in this manner (which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me). If I can’t publish continuously, then I’m a detriment to my adviser who could have found someone willing to work more hours and with skills that did allow her or him to publish continuously. No time is allocated to self-teach and there is no teammate or group member to offload work onto in the event that my time has to be reprioritized. Similarly, coursework is much the same. If you have additional obligations and realize that you are not skilled enough to solve assignments in the allotted time, then you just fail (even if you could solve them given more time). I feel that events like this happen to me at least twice per week and that I am always scrambling to keep the workload bubble going long enough for me to make it to some sort of break when I can crash. Just wanted to articulate that in writing that others could see.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
Thanks for writing this article; I often feel like this. When my following days are fully scheduled, when my freedom of choice is removed, I become very apathetic.
A thought “I have to do this” makes me feel bad, but a thought “I can do this, but I don’t have to, and I can stop anytime I want” makes me happy and productive. I would like to have a freedom to choose at any time of my life what do to next; and then I would probably be more productive than these days.
When the problem is that long to-do lists make one depressed, adding meditation or exercise to the already too long to-do list does not help. Those things can be generally helpful, but the essence of the problem is elsewhere. I guess it could be this—don’t say to yourself “I have to do this” but “I can do this”; give yourself permissions or ideas, not commands.
This is a really helpful way to re-phrase the issue and get myself to think about it differently; thanks!