NancyLebovitz comments on How to Beat Procrastination - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
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.