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Marcello comments on Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting - Less Wrong
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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.
In the past few years a number of studies have shown that self-forgiveness reduces procrastination. You seem to have uncovered the causal mechanism that accounts for these findings.
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?"
Sounds great. Or, "what will I do now?". Obviously, with curiosity, not frustration.
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?"
This makes lot of sense to me. In the kind of meditation I'm trying, you are supposed to concentrate on your breath. Instructions usually say that, if you mind wanders, just put attention back on the breath in a non-judgemental way. Don't put yourself down.
What's more, I once read that, when you notice your mind has been wandering, you should be happy because you had a moment of awareness and an opportunity to learn concentration. That's like saying "Huzzah! I caught my mind wandering!"
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.
Agreed! I started using this response to criticism several years ago, and actually got a compliment on it. I never thought of applying it to my own criticisms of myself, though...good idea.
If I did this I'd be shouting "Gotcha!" all the live long day.
Let me tell you about this morning. I mostly work from home, but showing up at the office is very useful. So much stuff works better face to face. It saves a lot of faff on IRC. And the connection is faster.
I got up in good time, had a proper breakfast, very nice cup of tea thank you, got myself ready, got on a curiously uncrowded tube train with no copies of Metro (that's your foreboding, I shall point out), got to work, and ... the large iron gates were chained shut.
Because today is the New Year bank holiday.
If I'd procrastinated, of course, I'd have been in bed till eleven like I'd much have preferred to be.
This was a pretty much mathematically perfect example of doing exactly the right things to get something done, except for the fact of doing it at all.
Edit: And today I showed up when people were actually here. My co-workers find me having shown up yesterday hilarious. The perfect employee: dedicated and stupid. The Book of the SubGenius does say that when you foul up, you should crow about it and call great attention to it and you will be thought of as a creative genius.
Another possibility, accidentally just discovered by me right now, was that simply reading the title of this article in my RSS feed got me to realize that my desk was a total mess (that's been bothering me for months now), so instead of reading it, I cleaned my desk. Then I read it.
So just reading the title of this post could be enough to get some things done.