In Praise of Procrastination

Ponca City writes "Every year, millions of Americans pay needless penalties because they don't file their taxes on time, forgo huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never get around to signing up for a retirement plan, and risk blindness from glaucoma because they don't use their eyedrops regularly. James Surowiecki writes that procrastination is a basic human impulse, a peculiar irrationality stemming from our relationship to time — in particular, from a tendency that economists call 'hyperbolic discounting,' the ability to make rational choices when they're thinking about the future, but, as a future event gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. Game theorist Thomas Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves a collection of competing selves, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control, where one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals. Philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: 'Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.'"

Re: Thoughts Avoided

[AliasMarlowe]

try to name one Etruscan or one Babylonian

Etruscan: Lars Porsenna
Babylonian: Hammurabi
Alas, I acquired a smattering of classical knowledge at high school (a few decades ago). Since the classics were taught the "old-fashioned" way (i.e. via sadistic brutality) this knowledge actually survived grad school in Engineering, among other things.

Re:From personal experience

[Nahor]

"I feel like saying something to her right now, I should say it." - Good.

"I want to have sex with you" - Yeah, I'm sure it will work out well.

Any present actions have future consequences. Not thinking of the future means you ignore the consequences. That can't be a good thin.
As in pretty much everything in life, moderation is key. Don't over-think things that you end up never doing anything. But you still need to think things a bit. ("There is a time for thinking, and there is a time of acting")

The other reason for over-thinking is negative target fixation [wikipedia.org] where one focuses too much on the possible obstacles, ending up scaring oneself too much to act. Fix your mind on where you want to go, keeping a peripheral view on possible obstacles.

Re:From personal experience

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Getting Things Done, by David Allen [barnesandnoble.com] takes an approach that sounds compatible with what you're saying.

His idea is to offload executive functioning to your reminder system, which dispenses atomic work units that don't have prerequisites. For example, the sort of task you'd put in your reminder system is not "do taxes" or even "do schedule A", it would be more like "find mileage records and add up volunteer mileage".

Then, don't think about all the other things you have to do while you're totaling up mileage records. You'll do the other things when you pop them off the queue in your reminder system. Total Zen flow state, living in the moment and doing addition without distraction.

Re:Hyperbolic FP

[Forty Two Tenfold]

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. -- Thomas De Quicey

Avoiding procrastination

[Anonymous Coward]

This might help:
http://antiprocrastinator.com/

Re:No time for this right now

[kvezach]

You may be closer to the answer than you think. One of the proposed explanations for hyperbolic discounting is taking the uncertainty of risk into account [wikimedia.org]. Within certain assumptions, if you don't know the actual risk level, or how likely it is you need to do the work, hyperbolic discounting becomes consistent.