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lukeprog comments on How to Beat Procrastination - Less Wrong
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Comments (147)
In general, this post looks useful and well researched, so upvoted. This is my only problem with it:
For me personally, this is a really bad idea because it'll kick me into pain motivation mode and uselessly cause me more stress (decreasing my effectiveness.) You've clearly read much more then me on the subject, and so this may work for some people, but I think that it has a chance to significantly backfire for others.
Making failure painful is a way of pre-committing. There is some research that shows the effectiveness of pre-commitment, but I'm not aware of experimental studies on that particular kind of pre-commitment, so perhaps you're right. On the other hand, a great many people have found such "penalty" methods of precommitment very useful. And, if I have to bet on advice between a leading researcher in the field and a guy whose website looks like this, I'll bet on the former.
The kind of pain is probably important. "Fail and you've just proven you're a really bad person" is not helpful.
I expect that there might be a great deal of difference between an externally imposed threat and a self-imposed threat. "Start working, or I'll do something nasty to you" never seemed to motivate me very much if the task was at all difficult. Threats tend to make me less inclined to attempt whatever task it is that I am being threatened to do, rather than more.
And it seems stupid to precommit to a penalty for not achieving a goal that I think I'm likely to fail at.
Then induce a penalty for not trying.