Procrastination often seems less about avoiding things you don’t want to do, and more about failing to overcome petty obstacles that prevent you from carrying things out.
I think of this as a breadth-first pay-off assessment. I’d rather go out than sit inside and read Reddit, but at this level of the decision tree, Reddit has more immediate pay-off than putting my shoes on.
Some people may have problem with introspection (knowing what they really want, instead of what they should), some people may have problem with navigating the decision tree (choosing the path with maximum total payoff, instead of choosing highest immediate payoff at every branch), and maybe it’s often the combination of these two. Also we have hyperbolic temporal discounting of the value, difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self, and internal conflicts between different parts of our brains.
I suspect that with so many problems involved, there is probably nobody doing it right; there are just different kinds of doing it wrong (i.e. not optimally), and some of them give higher total payoff and/or seem more impressive from the outside.
Procrastination often seems less about avoiding things you don’t want to do, and more about failing to overcome petty obstacles that prevent you from carrying things out.
I think of this as a breadth-first pay-off assessment. I’d rather go out than sit inside and read Reddit, but at this level of the decision tree, Reddit has more immediate pay-off than putting my shoes on.
Some people may have problem with introspection (knowing what they really want, instead of what they should), some people may have problem with navigating the decision tree (choosing the path with maximum total payoff, instead of choosing highest immediate payoff at every branch), and maybe it’s often the combination of these two. Also we have hyperbolic temporal discounting of the value, difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self, and internal conflicts between different parts of our brains.
I suspect that with so many problems involved, there is probably nobody doing it right; there are just different kinds of doing it wrong (i.e. not optimally), and some of them give higher total payoff and/or seem more impressive from the outside.