Here's a theory about one of the things that causes procrastination to be so hard to beat. I'm curious what people think of it.
Hypothesis: Many parts of the mind are influenced by something like reinforcement learning, where the emotional valances of our thoughts function as a gross reward signal that conditions their behaviors.
Reinforcement learning seems to have a far more powerful effect when feedback is instant.
We think of procrastinating as a bad thing, and tend to internally punish ourselves when we catch ourselves doing it.
Therefore, the negative feedback signal might end up exerting a much more powerful training effect on the "catcher" system (aka. whatever is activating frontal override) rather than on whatever it is that triggered the procrastination in the first place.
This results in a simple counter-intuitive piece of advice: when you catch yourself procrastinating, it might be a very bad idea to internally berate yourself about it; Thoughts of the form "%#&%! I'm procrastinating again! I really shouldn't do that!" might actually cause more procrastinating in the long run. If I had to guess, things like meditation would be helpful for building up the skill required to catch the procrastination-berating subsystem in the act and get it to do something else.
TL;DR: It would probably be hugely helpful to try to train oneself to make the "flinch" less unpleasant.
This sounds reasonable. What sort of thought would you recommend responding with after noticing oneself procrastinating? I'm leaning towards "what would I like to do?"
Offhand, I'm guessing the very first response ought to be "Huzzah! I caught myself procrastinating!" in order to get the reverse version of the effect I mentioned. Then go on to "what would I like to do?"
I've been able to implement something like this to great effect. Every time I notice that I've been behaving in a very silly way, I smile broadly, laugh out loud and say "Ha ha! Gotcha!" or something to that effect. I only allow myself to do this in cases where I've actually gained new information: Noticed a new flaw, noticed an old flaw come up in a new situation, realized that an old behavior is in fact undesirable, etc. This positively reinforces noticing my flaws without doing so to the undesirable behavior itself.
This is even more effective when implemented in response to someone else pointing out one of my flaws. It's a little more difficult to carry out because I have to suppress a reflex to retaliate/defend myself that doesn't come up as much when I'm my own critic, but when I succeed it almost completely eliminates the social awkwardness that normally comes with someone critiquing me in public.
We don't need to re-invent the wheels of research on procrastination by practicing one-sample phenomenology. Much is known about procrastination via peer-reviewed scientific research, and those interested in beating procrastination might want to employ the rationality virtue of scholarship and begin there.
A recent overview of the relevant research papers begins here.
That said, Eliezer may be on to something that should be researched by professional psychologists.
More recently, Sapadin and Maguire (1997) have also classified procrastinators into types
It would be more accurate to say that these are classifications of types of procrastination patterns; I have personally done every single one of the behaviors described in the quote!
I also don't think all procrastination is "not restful" or "doesn't really make you happy." We'd like to believe that -- just as we'd like to believe that unhealthy food doesn't really taste that good. It would make it seem that there are no real sacrifices to be made. But I don't think that's the case.
My most time-consuming forms of procrastination are socializing (online or in person) and, oddly enough, learning. I had a period when I was obsessed with learning about economic policy, and then a period when I was obsessed with learning about computer vision. Spending time with your friends, and learning interesting things in a non-stressful context, are fun. They make you feel high on life. They even make you feel productive. They're only procrastination in the sense that they're not what you're paid to do -- "Work is whatever a body is obliged to do, and play is whatever a body is not obliged to do," in Mark Twain's words.
So there's some perverse impulse to do anything but the activity labeled "work," which carries the dread association of duty, and makes you think unpleasant thoughts like "am I worthy enough?" If my job were writing policy for a think tank, I'd probably spend all day on the web reading about algebraic topology.
I think it's flinching away from the pain of the decision to do the work - the momentary, immediate pain of (1) disengaging yourself from the (probably very small) flow of reinforcement that you're getting from reading a random unimportant Internet article, and (2) paying the energy cost for a prefrontal override to exert control of your own behavior and begin working.
The second item seems like an unnecessary hypothesis. One can simply note that stopping an activity that is currently pleasurable is difficult, if the substitute is not as pleasurable. Getting out of a comfy bed, for example, or not jumping into the swimming pool.
Either way, though, it's such an utterly trivial form of procrastination that it seems like an insult to procrastinators to call it procrastination... which leads me to suspect that your formulation is omitting some other sort of pain in the decision making process, such as an "ugh field" surrounding the subject matter.
For example, if it's painful to decide to work on MoR, it might be because it primes thoughts of people clicking their refresh buttons like conditioned pigeons, or residual feelings of obligation from previous deadline commitmen...
The theory sounds good, but I think it important to test ideas before believing them. One way of testing your hypothesis—that it is really hard to over-ride the immediate discomfort of an unpleasant decision—is to look at whether aversions of comparable or greater magnitude are hard to override. I think the answer in general is 'no.' Consider going swimming and having to overcome the pain of entering water colder than surrounding. This pain, less momentary than the one in question and (more or less) equally discounted, doesn't produce problematic hesitation.
One answer I'd anticipate is that the procrastination effect (for work but not swimming) is "nearly impossible to get your brain to remember." But what about the fact that when we do remember, it doesn't solve the problem. (If it solves yours, I'll concede this point.)
Another way of testing your hypothesis is to determine how adaptive or unadaptive if, as you suggest, the bare fact of making a decision is inherently very difficult. Much of the adaptive advantage of thought is insulating the organism from the effects of carrying out the act, including, one should think, from the emotional effects. An adaptive design w...
Consider going swimming and having to overcome the pain of entering water colder than surrounding. This pain, less momentary than the one in question and (more or less) equally discounted, doesn't produce problematic hesitation.
...I just realized why I so rarely go swimming.
Well, no, it predicts the momentary pain as you stand by the pool, and you stand by the pool hesitating for ages. Eventually your brain starts to predict standing by the pool feeling awkward before you leave the house.
Consider going swimming and having to overcome the pain of entering water colder than surrounding. This pain, less momentary than the one in question and (more or less) equally discounted, doesn't produce problematic hesitation.
I usually wind up standing by the pool for a good ten minutes, or until one of my brothers shoves me in...
A similar phenomenon can occur in programming. I've learned not to worry too much about procrastination in writing code, because when I think I should be coding and yet somehow can't motivate myself to get started, nine times out of ten I realize next day that my understanding of the problem was inadequate, and any code I had forced myself to write would have had to be thrown away and redone.
When I'm procrastinating about chores, by contrast, it is indeed a matter of flinching away from the small pain of getting started, and once I do manage to get moving, it's less painful to keep moving than it was to procrastinate.
being in the middle of doing the work is usually less painful than being in the middle of procrastinating.
I've often heard people say things to the effect of work not being so unpleasant once you've actually gotten into the swing of it, but I've never found that to be the case. I generally only find the act of working less painful than procrastinating when I'm right up against a deadline. Otherwise, even a half hour or so into it, it still feels easier to stop than continue. I'm also quite terrible at creating self imposed deadlines.
In order to increase the pain of procrastination, and the reward of working, I find it extremely helpful to have someone else waiting on me to get it done. It's much harder for me to bear disappointing others than failing to meet my own goals.
I suspect that this is partly to do with the kind of work. When I'm working my current day job (computer programming), or writing, or composing music, then that's pretty enjoyable once I get started. When I was working my old job (as a nursing assistant on a psychiatric ward) or if I have to clean the toilet, or wash the dishes or something, then that's clearly less pleasant than procrastinating. I suspect that in Eliezer's case, given that he's engaged in work that is intellectually stimulating and which he considers the most important thing possible for him to be doing, that most of his work falls into the former category, rather than the latter...
How unpleasant work is, I believe, depends a lot on what part of your work it is.
My work is math. Making progress on math -- learning a new concept, figuring out a proof -- is not only fun, but so addictive that I can't stand to stop it once I'm doing it. Being stuck on math -- incomprehension or being stumped -- is absolutely miserable. You can't do anything but sit and think about how pathetic you are. It is probably not as unpleasant as cleaning toilets (math doesn't literally make your back hurt) but it's up there.
So in my case I think when I procrastinate I'm running away from the more unpleasant part of work (being stumped and confused). Even intellectually stimulating work can suck now and then because it's not always stimulating. A writer has fun writing from time to time -- but writer's block is no fun at all, and I suspect that writers procrastinate when they're blocked, not when they're inspired.
You can't do anything but sit and think about how pathetic you are.
If you mean this statement literally, then it's a problem with your beliefs, not with math. Do you believe that you should be able to solve something that you're stuck on? If so, consider switching your thought to, "I don't like it that I haven't solved this yet". This is not the same as judging yourself pathetic based on a "should" thought.
I have been observing lately that many forms of chronic stress are a special case of "not noticing that I am confused", in that they can be traced to an "is/ought" confusion.
What we believe "should" be seems to push emotional buttons calling for social signaling and protest against reality, rather than actions to change reality.
Thus, when the facts come into conflict with shoulds about ourselves, we respond by defaming/punishing the transgressor (i.e., ourselves), rather than paying attention to what behavior change(s) we need to make.
This seems like a plausible explanation for why so many self-help materials talk about the need to accept one's self as-is, and claim it to be essential for making real behavior change. That is, it might be literally true!
Yeah, it's the "should" part. Work is enjoyable -- spending time thinking "I should have been able to do this long ago" is not enjoyable.
Right -- so drop the moral outrage of the idea.
Behind that "should" is a generalized moral principle, most likely in the form of a generalization over a class of people and an assigned moral status... which could be something like, "People who can't solve easy problems are stupid", carrying a further implication like, "stupid people are pathetic", or something of that sort.
If you realize that these "morals" are not the same thing as your "values" -- i.e., that you may value being smart or capable, but this is NOT the same thing as saying you're bad/pathetic/whatever if you don't achieve some particular thing, then you can drop the "ought" part of the belief, and turn off the self-punishment reflex.
While this takes conscious effort to do, you only need to do it once for each generalized "moral precept" that you carry in relation to the subject matter. The difficult part lies in that we also have a "punish the non-punishers" reflex, and so that r...
I take it you would agree with my friend?
There are definitely similarities, but my point has nothing to do with relativism or tolerance. I have no problem with judging others to be doing the wrong thing by my values, or even by their values. ;-)
What I'm saying is, if I want someone else to actually follow my values, as opposed to merely scratching my protest-and-punishment itch, then I am better off eliminating the outrage part and focusing on what will actually convince them to follow my values... even if it might involve some sort of (consciously planned) display of outrage, protest, or punishment.
But the futility of using the punish-and-protest instinct in anything involving self-improvement becomes painfully obvious when you notice for the nine-jlllionth time that yelling at yourself doesn't actually produce any improvements, nor motivate you to do anything positive. (Somehow, we feel as if merely feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to our self-punishment!)
Somehow, we feel as if merely feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to our self-punishment!
I think that's a special case of feeling as if feeling guilty is the appropriate and sufficient response to that kind of punishment (displays of disapproval or outrage, etc.) from anyone, and that comes about because feeling guilty often is taken as the appropriate and sufficient response to that kind of punishment.
Compare to, say, a politician who's been caught selling influence or having an affair, or a religious leader who's been caught using crystal meth and gay prostitutes, etc. They always seem so sincere in their public apologies and statements of regret and remorse... yet, suspiciously, all that tearful regret and all those acknowledgements of moral failing weren't enough to get them to actually stop doing the corrupt or hypocritical things in question until they got caught and publicly shamed, and even in their admissions of guilt they will still try to avoid giving up anything of substance (political office, religious leadership, etc.) if they can. I think that's pretty much what the emotion of guilt is — it's not a feeling of regret at actually having done so...
Thank you. This is exactly what I needed right now.
Eliezer, I hope you will take it as a form of high praise rather than insult that I stopped reading your article halfway through, typed this short comment, and am now going back to do some much-needed work.
(Hopefully I'll get back to reading the rest later.)
Success and happiness cause you to regain willpower
Anyone have a citation for this? (Including citations that didn't replicate.)
This doesn't seem quite right to me.
There seem to be three kinds of relevant states:
1) Not working, and not worrying about work not done
2) Not working, and worrying about work not done
3) Working
1 is usually less painful than 3, if you can pull it off. 2 is indeed often worse than 3, but I usually handle it by trying to transition to 1 (by such means as playing an absorbing video game) instead of transitioning to 3.
I'm on board but frame it differently.
Here's my frame:
That twinge is something like anxiety. Consider this: for some the same task could be fun that for others is working. Why do you feel a twinge for a particular task? Because there's something at stake. So there's fear. And what's funny is the task itself doesn't even have to be the one you fear. It only has to be associatively related. For example, I might avoid the usually fun task of checking my e-mail because of a difficult one I keep putting off writing. (This is called Relational Frame Theory.) Or, put off an only slightly uncomfortable work task because it connects to a larger one that scares me.
"Reading internet articles" is avoidance.
There are many tricks. Fear is is a wall 1000 miles wide and a mile high, but only tissue paper thin. A la Harry Potter running through the brick wall to the train station.
The trouble can be even recognizing that you're doing it -- avoiding. Mindfulness & meditation have been helpful for me, but a lot of things can do it. Beating yourself up, making lists, and dopamine-fueled planning seem reasonable until they don't work for the 1000th time.
I agree extremely on the issue of procrastination not being restful, this is a standard theme in modern productivity writing. Procrastination (like reading blogs / tweets / etc) is a sort of worst of both worlds, it is neither useful nor restful, it passes the time and avoids immediate pain without providing pleasure or renewal.
That's why The Energy Project, Pomodoro, Zen Habits, etc. recommend that you schedule renewal breaks into your day - at a minimum midmorning, lunch, and midafternoon. I think the deliberate practice literature recommends breaks every 90 minutes. Taking a walk outside & exercise are oft-recommended, but really, just being conscious of the goal of renewal and experimenting to find things that will work is all you need. It's helped me be more productive.
Social conversations with co-workers are also good, but it's important that they be relaxed & guilt-free. One of the secrets of renewal is that it works much better if accepted as a need, for some reason guilty renewal doesn't renew. Renewal requires relaxation while guilt prevents it, something like that.
Glad to hear that you're learning (and writing about) basic productivity hacks like this, LW will get its instrumental rationality black belt yet :).
References:
http://zenhabits.net/take-lots-of-breaks-to-get-more-done/ http://www.theenergyproject.com/search/node/renewal
Social conversations with co-workers are also good
Isn't this supposed to be a major dividing line in human personalities? That is, extroverts can recharge by talking to people, and introverts need to recharge after talking to people?
So what is our brain flinching away from, if not the pain of doing the work?
I think it's flinching away from the pain of the decision to do the work - the momentary, immediate pain of (1) disengaging yourself from the (probably very small) flow of reinforcement that you're getting from reading a random unimportant Internet article, and (2) paying the energy cost for a prefrontal override to exert control of your own behavior and begin working.
I think our brains might also be flinching away from something else, at least in many cases.
Consider when you have a specific goal toward which to work. You usually have a fairly clear idea of the end product or result that you desire, whether the goal is about writing, weight loss, or anything in between. When you envision the end product, it's in an idealized form, and further, it exists in your mind not associated with the actual amount of work that will go into achieving it.
I think that we grow attached to this mental conception of the end product, both because of its idealized nature and because the image itself requires very little work to maintain. Having the plan to do something might actually feel better than we anticipate doing th...
I think my procrastination started this way years ago, but over time it turned into a vicious cycle of anxiety-inducing/induced procrastination that basically had nothing to do with the model described in the post. I was fully aware that websurfing was an anaesthetic that did nothing to recharge my mental batteries but simply kept me from thinking anxiety-provoking thoughts. Eventually I resorted to anxiolytics, and now I can say no to myself with relative ease.
If you currently deem it optimal to defer work, and the factors you deem relevant to this decision do not change, you will also deem it optimal to defer work, at each decision point, for the rest of the future.
If you do not deem perpetual deferral of work to be optimal, then consistency requires that you similarly deem your current deferral of the work to be suboptimal, and any differential appraisal of these two outcomes indicates an exploitable dynamic inconsistency.
being in the middle of doing the work is usually less painful than being in the middle of procrastinating.
Upvoted for this. How had I not figured that out yet?
edit:
reliably solvable problems which reliably deliver experienced jolts of positive reinforcement ... playing a good computer game may do this
Ah. This goes some way towards clearing up my confusion regarding such matters. Whether I was rested after resting always seemed so chaotic to me.
Whether I was rested after resting always seemed so chaotic to me.
Also notable - at least if you're autistic, but this probably applies to neurotypical people as well - is that the kind of mental energy that you have available to spend on resting - and thus the kind of restful activity that will actually result in a gain in energy - can vary over time. For example, I may find music restful one day, and find the exact same music exhausting to listen to the next, even if I'm equally tired in a general sense on both days. My theory is that this correlates with what other tasks I've been doing recently (though not in the sense that doing a lot of auditory processing will lead me to 'run out' of that kind of energy - more in the sense that if I've been doing nothing that involves auditory processing, that brainbit turns off, and can't be effectively used for recreation), but I haven't tracked the relevant things well enough yet to do more than speculate.
Hi, everybody. I'm a long time reader, first time poster.
After having read this article, and especially this part:
(Bolded because it's true, important, and nearly impossible to get your brain to remember - even though a few moments of reflection should convince you that it's true.)
I thought it would be great to have a mantra that I could recite to remind myself of Eliezer's insight, so I wrote one. If you find it useful, feel free to improve upon it or rewrite it completely.
With apologies to Frank Herbert:
Litany Against Procrastination
I must not proc...
A few months ago I stumbled across MoR, and ever since then I knew I would eventually wind up here, investigating this site to learn how to investigate myself. I've only ever done anything of the sort on a very basic, topical level and so hesitated; repulsed by a squirrely, dodgey anxiety that I have been insofar unsuccesful discerning the source of, and persists even as I type this. Procrastination has always been a very serious issue i've struggled with, so it's no wonder this post immediately drew me in. Through my teen years it was more a lifestyle tha...
Do we actually know that our discounting function is hyperbolic in the range below 5 minutes? Or is that just extrapolation from experiments done on longer intervals?
Often a good way to look at it. The most reliable technique for overcoming this kind of procrastination that I've yet discovered is, if I have several tasks (or a big one that can be broken down into several smaller ones), order them not by importance or even urgency but in increasing order of difficulty. Then expend a small amount of (scarce and valuable) willpower on doing the easiest task, use the morale boost from its completion as activation energy for the next one, and so on.
Caveat: beware this doesn't end up an excuse for cat-hoovering - tasks like cleaning up unused files on your hard disk, that feel like work but are in fact useless and shouldn't be on the to-do list at all.
Don't see a place to contact you, so I'l just post here: found the litany of geldin on your wiki. It helped me get through a rather scary medical procedure yesterday. Thank you.
I think it's flinching away from the pain of the decision to do the work - the momentary, immediate pain
I have actually thought out (but did not practice sufficiently yet) a strategy to address this very problem.
The hack is to have a "ladder" of activities that have low transition pain cost. Sample ladder: Internet->Sci Fi->CS book->Paying bills.
I expect this to differ for people; will report back when I have more results.
For anyone who also likes reading random unimportant internet articles but would prefer high quality articles that aren't necessarily "news", try http://longform.org/ .
being in the middle of doing the work is usually less painful than being in the middle of procrastinating
I agree with your conclusion, but there are selection effects at play here; presumably people are more likely to start doing and to continue doing work when it's less painful than it would be at an average decision moment.
Because nobody linked it: Raw Thought by Aaron Swartz: "HOWTO: Be more productive" http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity
For me, it is rarely the pain of working I'm trying to avoid when I procrastinate. It is almost always the pain of failing.
The part about the middle of working being less painful than the middle of procrastinating is easy to test. Just set a timer to go off every N minutes, and write down whether you're working or procrastinating and how much fun you're having.
I'm really surprised this article has such a high rating - it strikes me as one of Eliezer's worst.
Why should anyone believe anything written here?
Why do you believe it?
Eliezer,
You're back!
I'd love to see you post a review of Gary Drescher's Good and Real, a book that impressed me and for which you've had some kind words.
pain of continuing to procrastinate, which is, once again, usually less painful than being in the middle of doing the work.
I believe you meant this to be the other way around.
Mod note: This... is not an appropriate level of response for the forum. The above comment does not indicate that it's author "believes every article written about everything". Take this as a mod warning, more comments like this and we might ban you.
I'm curious about whether you still believe the model in this post. At the time it seemed plausible to me but now I don't buy it.
It seems most likely that procrastination is not aimed at avoiding pain at all. A priori we might have thought that evolutionary optimization only influences our decisions picking what we consciously want + picking what gets classified as "painful" or "pleasurable." But that doesn't seem to fit the evidence very well, we seem to optimize for many things other than what we consciously believe we want / in ways ...
There are different types of conflicts some of which can be treated with this type of thinking. If procrastinating doesn't feel worse than working, then your mental conflict is of different type. (I personally can relate to what EY is talking about.)
The bigger problem is that, depending on the type of conflict that causes the procrastination, the brain is very resistant against these types of insights. The insight works for a short while and sooner than you realize (or to be more exact, don't realize), your brain finds a way to side-step this trick.
“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”
- Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
I have extreme problem with procrastination! I tried working 10 minutes no pressure, but pain from doing work doesn't go away. I have severe ADHD, I never could do even homeworks and I was daydreaming all day in school. I have chronic pain years and I can't do anything whole day, because pain doesn't allow me!!! I Am soooooooo bored to the oblivion! Whole day I do nothing else but to try kill boredom and I procrastinate all the time. I have severe executive dysfunctions, I Am thinking about doing something all the time, but I always end up delayomg things,...
So why are you telling me this? Because it seems to me we both already agree on this :D
BTW I don't believe in free will based on assumption of materialism, but also because of what we observe. And such framework is not even imaginable, maybe if it was imaginable, but still unprovable - I would be less skeptical. But yes ultimately I don't know for sure! Which doesn't help at all to feel less depressed... There are worse things you don't want to know...
https://qz.com/627989/why-are-so-many-smart-people-such-idiots-about-philosophy/ High IQ is only par...
Never said so, I spoken both of determinism and randomness that it doesn't imply free will in any case!
I don't know how you meant this ultimate question exactly! But I wouldn't frame this ultimate question as equivalent to the free will is illusion question here! If that was the case...
First lets clarify what I mean when I say: "free will is illusion". I can't ultimately prove that right? So from pure metaphysical point of view that doesn't make sense to claim something like that! Or even pose question like that! It is because: I Am coming from empirical, ...
Yeah it is soo stupid honestly: I can't know anything for sure except: "I think therefore I Am". And even about that I Am not entirely sure :D So everything is just random coinflipp... For instance: even I technically can't disprove free will. We know that it is illusion, with high precision, I would say!
I Am just random re-ordering of particles: emergence caused by elementary particles interacting with each other (which act by physical laws) and flow of information!
Good article, I'll have to see if reminding myself of this helps at work tomorrow.
Success and happiness cause you to regain willpower;
This is dangerously incorrect - studies show willpower is only an expendable resource for people who believe it to be. People who don't think willpower is expendable have longer lasting willpower.
It seems like one could argue just as well that people who inherently have longer lasting willpower are less likely to view it as an expendable resource.
Fortunately, they controlled for that in the studies by doing one where they primed people with the relevant beliefs, as well as one where they just used people's existing beliefs. ;-)
I wonder if people with ADHD experience less pain at having to leave what one is currently doing to make a decision.
So how many others got three paragraphs in, and stopped and went to do whatever they were supposed to be doing before coming back?
So essentially we are comparing the switching cost of non-default behaviour (fear, laziness, etc) to prospective gains (novel stimuli, predicted hedonically pleasurable stimulli (light behavioural addictions)?
This is a revolutionary sugestion for me but intuitively more sound than my earlier ideas. Brilliant! I wish I had examined my assumptions about productivity more earlier so I could have realised that my model for procrastination could be so off!
Well...hedonically, why shouldn't we discount the future? I don't have much confidence in my models of the ...
True it was found that being good only in one area is bad! https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/how-elon-musk-learns-faster-and-better-than-everyone-else-a010a4f586ef
Yeah many no-name scientists, which send letters sometimes each other to advance science. Geniuses are overrated sometimes and they are only known scientists. If I Am not mistaken: even Einstein didn't base his theories from 0 and connected multiple theories of other scientists together. And his wife had to help him with math sometimes!
Yeah and elitism in math is disgusting https://bigt...
OMG I Am perfect a person to give you an anecdote ELIEZER!!! BTW this is soo weird, I just saw a great video about that! And now I check lesswrong and what do I see! Is this QM right now? Did I determine this state by observing??? Because I always see so many of same things, on places very different and distant from each other at the same time. It is just luck I guess, it is just weird feeling!
EDIT: OMG someone just downvoted because of this (I bet xD) I Am kidding can't you tell??? It was a joke geez... Or maybe because I Am too real and say how it ...
When you procrastinate, you're probably not procrastinating because of the pain of working.
How do I know this? Because on a moment-to-moment basis, being in the middle of doing the work is usually less painful than being in the middle of procrastinating.
(Bolded because it's true, important, and nearly impossible to get your brain to remember - even though a few moments of reflection should convince you that it's true.)
So what is our brain flinching away from, if not the pain of doing the work?
I think it's flinching away from the pain of the decision to do the work - the momentary, immediate pain of (1) disengaging yourself from the (probably very small) flow of reinforcement that you're getting from reading a random unimportant Internet article, and (2) paying the energy cost for a prefrontal override to exert control of your own behavior and begin working.
Thanks to hyperbolic discounting (i.e., weighting values in inverse proportion to their temporal distance) the instant pain of disengaging from an Internet article and paying a prefrontal override cost, can outweigh the slightly more distant (minutes in the future, rather than seconds) pain of continuing to procrastinate, which is, once again, usually more painful than being in the middle of doing the work.
I think that hyperbolic discounting is far more ubiquitous as a failure mode than I once realized, because it's not just for commensurate-seeming tradeoffs like smoking a cigarette in a minute versus dying of lung cancer later.
When it comes to procrastinating, the obvious, salient, commensurate-seeming tradeoff, is between the (assumed) pleasure of reading a random Internet article now, versus the (assumed) pain of doing the work now. But this, as I said above, is not where I think the real tradeoff is; events that are five minutes away are too distant to dominate the thought process of a hyperbolic discounter like a human. Instead our thought processes are dominated by the prospective immediate pain of a thought, a cost that isn't even salient as something to be traded off. "Working" is an obvious, salient event, and "reading random articles" seems like an event. But "paying a small twinge of pain to make the decision to stop procrastinating now, exerting a bit of frontal override, and not getting to read the next paragraph of this random article" is so map-level that we don't even focus on it as a manipulable territory, a cost to be traded off; it is a transparent thought.
The real damage done by hyperbolic discounting is for thoughts that are only very slightly painful, and yet, these slight pains being immediate, they manage to dominate everything else in our calculation. And being transparent, we aren't even aware that's what's happening. "Beware of immediately trivially painful transparent thoughts", one might say.
Similarly, you may read a mediocre book for an hour, instead of a good book, because if you first spent a few minutes to search your library to obtain a better book, that would be an immediate cost - not that searching your library is all that unpleasant, but you'd have to pay an immediate activation cost to do that instead of taking the path of least resistance and grabbing the first thing in front of you. It's a hyperbolically discounted tradeoff that you make without realizing it, because the cost you're refusing to pay isn't commensurate enough with the payoff you're forgoing to be salient as an explicit tradeoff.
A related note that I might as well dump into this post: I'm starting to think that procrastination by reading random articles does not cause you to rest, that is, you do not regain mental energy from it. Success and happiness cause you to regain willpower; what you need to heal your mind from any damage sustained by working is not inactivity, but reliably solvable problems which reliably deliver experienced jolts of positive reinforcement. Putting in the effort to read a good book may do this; playing a good computer game may do this; reading random Internet articles, or playing bad games, probably won't. Literal mental exhaustion might mean that you don't have enough energy left to read a good book - or that you don't have enough energy left to pay the immediate cost of searching your library for good reading material instead of mediocre reading material - but in this case you shouldn't be reading random online articles. You should be sitting with your eyes closed listening to music, or possibly even napping; if dealing with a truly exhausted brain, reading random articles is probably too much effort.
If you don't feel good while reading a lot of forgettable online articles, and you don't feel renewed after doing so, your intuitive theory which says that this is how to rest is mistaken, and you need to look for other ways to rest instead - more active ways to regain willpower, less active ways to recover from immediate exhaustion. In general, poor performance often indicates poor models; if something seems incredibly difficult to predict or manipulate, it may be that you have mistaken beliefs about it, including transparent mistakes that are nonquestioned because they are nonsalient. This includes poor performance on the problem of resting.
Hopefully publishing this post will help me live up to it.