Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life

My own behavior baffles me. I find myself doing what I hate, and not doing what I really want to do!

- Saint Paul (Romans 7:15)

Once you're trained in BayesCraft, it may be tempting to tackle classic problems "from scratch" with your new Rationality Powers. But often, it's more effective to do a bit of scholarship first and at least start from the state of our scientific knowledge on the subject.

Today, I want to tackle procrastination by summarizing what we know about it, and how to overcome it.

Let me begin with three character vignettes...

Eddie attended the sales seminar, read all the books, and repeated the self-affirmations in the mirror this morning. But he has yet to make his first sale. Rejection after rejection has demoralized him. He organizes his desk, surfs the internet, and puts off his cold calls until potential clients are leaving for the day.

Three blocks away, Valerie stares at a blank document in Microsoft Word. Her essay assignment on municipal politics, due tomorrow, is mind-numbingly dull. She decides she needs a break, texts some friends, watches a show, and finds herself even less motivated to write the paper than before. At 10pm she dives in, but the result reflects the time she put into it: it's terrible.

In the next apartment down, Tom is ahead of the game. He got his visa, bought his plane tickets, and booked time off for his vacation to the Dominican Republic. He still needs to reserve a hotel room, but that can be done anytime. Tom keeps pushing the task forward a week as he has more urgent things to do, and then forgets about it altogether. As he's packing, he remembers to book the room, but by now there are none left by the beach. When he arrives, he finds his room is 10 blocks from the beach and decorated with dead mosquitos.

Eddie, Valerie, and Tom are all procrastinators, but in different ways.¹

Eddie's problem is low expectancy. By now, he expects only failure. Eddie has low expectancy of success from making his next round of cold calls. Results from 39 procrastination studies show that low expectancy is a major cause of procrastination.² You doubt your ability to follow through with the diet. You don't expect to get the job. You really should be going out and meeting girls and learning to flirt better, but you expect only rejection now, so ...

Procrastination