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lionhearted comments on A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy - Less Wrong
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Your post includes a "silly" and a business-scale example, but not a personal one. In order to answer the questions about causes that you ask, it seems necessary to look at specific situations. Is there a real-life situation that you can talk about where you have two options, one almost certainly hundreds of times as good as the other, and you choose the option that is worse?
Sure. An easy one:
Commenting on nothing particularly important on Hacker News when I could be writing my second book. Commenting on HN = very small gain, minor contribution to a few people over a very short period of time. Working on a book = much more enjoyable, and much larger contribution over a longer period of time.
Have you seen the same phenomenon in your life at all Andreas? Maybe "300x" is an exaggeration - or maybe not, even, if the value of the distracting task is low enough, and the value of the good task is high enough.
Comments on HN and LW result in immediate reward through upvoting and replies whereas writing a book is a more solitary experience. If you identify this difference as a likely cause for your behavior and if you believe that the difference in value to you is as large as you say, then you should test this hypothesis by turning book-writing into a more interactive, immediately rewarding process. Blogging and sending pieces to friends once they are written come to mind.
More generally, consider structuring your social environment such that social expectations and rewards line up with activities you consider valuable. I have found this to be a powerful way to change my behavior.
Indeed, this is a good insight. I've done both, actually. I have an active blog, and actually making a public commitment helped me finish my first book. I wrote about it under "The Joys of Public Accountability"; it does work.
That's a really powerful observation. Why do you think people don't do that more often? Ignorance? Also, do you have any observations from your own life of structuring your environment? I'd be fascinated to hear, you seem very knowledgeable and astute on the subject.