This is a distillation of and reflection on O’Donoghue and Rabin’s “Doing it now or later” (see citation below)^[1].

Many people struggle with procrastination or self-control. Critically, we struggle with the mismatch between current preference and future preference. Procrastination arises in situations that are unpleasant to perform but create future benefits: they have “immediate costs.” Similarly, indulgent behaviors (e.g. eating unhealthy foods) have “immediate rewards” (they taste good), while stashing away future costs. Both have a mismatch between present-self and the future-self.

The best way to “kick” this issue is to develop time-consistent preferences, placing no special value on what’s happening now–thus our choices around procrastination or indulgence will be more rational and no longer skewed by a current self-control limitation. But…that’s hard to achieve.

O’Donoghue and Rabin introduce a neat distinction (1999). A naive procrastinator, they write, expects that in the future, they won’t have the same self-control issues that they’re having now. A sophisticated procrastinator expects their imperfection: they expect their future self to also have procrastination or indulgence tendencies. With their model of time-inconsistent preferences, they demonstrate that sophisticates procrastinate less than their naive peers! This model suggests that I shouldn’t plan on having good self-control; actually, expecting my own irrationality may improve my performance. But…not so fast, because the model also indicates that sophistication may make me more likely to indulge now at a time when I’m better off waiting. The lesson for new rationalists, who haven’t yet cracked time consistency: when facing immediate costs, be realistic (like the “sophisticate”), but when facing immediate rewards, stay idealistic (like the “naif”).

Let’s get into it with an example!

You choose…you must either endure:

Three hours of an unpleasant activity today
Four hours of it one week from today

If you still prefer today, congrats on beating your procrastination tendency. As for the rest of us, people overwhelmingly prefer incurring the higher cost in a week to the lower cost today. But what if I posed it this way–the same unpleasant activity…. Would you rather endure:

Three hours on March 24th
Four hours on March 31st

Barring specific circumstances around these dates, most of us have ...

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments