I think another reason why people procrastinate is that it makes each minute spent right before the deadline both obviously high value on net and resulting in immediate payoff. this makes the decision to put in effort in each moment really easy—obviously it makes sense to spend a minute working on something that will make a big impact on tomorrow. whereas each minute long before the deadline has longer time till payoff, and if you already put in a ton of work early on, then the minutes right before the deadline have lower marginal value because of diminishing returns. so this creates a perverse incentive to end-load the effort
If the procrastinator is a perfectionist who would otherwise work far past the point of diminishing returns, postponing until the last minute is a way of timeboxing. If you know you would spend 5 hrs on something that you could get to 90% (of your standard) in 1 hr, better to start 1 hr before the deadline, or you’ll end up wasting 4 hrs.
i mean, it’s a huge category of people, so for some box 1 and for some box 2.
for me it’s box 2. i was bewildered to realize that i knew quite a lot of box 1′ers and we had very different reasons for hurting ourselves. (i transitioned to become more of a box 1′er later)
I think another reason why people procrastinate is that it makes each minute spent right before the deadline both obviously high value on net and resulting in immediate payoff. this makes the decision to put in effort in each moment really easy—obviously it makes sense to spend a minute working on something that will make a big impact on tomorrow. whereas each minute long before the deadline has longer time till payoff, and if you already put in a ton of work early on, then the minutes right before the deadline have lower marginal value because of diminishing returns. so this creates a perverse incentive to end-load the effort
If the procrastinator is a perfectionist who would otherwise work far past the point of diminishing returns, postponing until the last minute is a way of timeboxing. If you know you would spend 5 hrs on something that you could get to 90% (of your standard) in 1 hr, better to start 1 hr before the deadline, or you’ll end up wasting 4 hrs.
Do you think these procrastinators are making a conscious choice, or more that they’re driven by a panic that only sets in at the last minute?
i mean, it’s a huge category of people, so for some box 1 and for some box 2.
for me it’s box 2. i was bewildered to realize that i knew quite a lot of box 1′ers and we had very different reasons for hurting ourselves. (i transitioned to become more of a box 1′er later)