NancyLebovitz comments on How to Beat Procrastination - Less Wrong

156 Post author: lukeprog 05 February 2011 06:49PM

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Comment author: Dorikka 05 February 2011 08:32:24PM 16 points [-]

In general, this post looks useful and well researched, so upvoted. This is my only problem with it:

Another method is to make failure really painful.

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.

Comment author: lukeprog 06 February 2011 03:07:44PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 08 February 2012 07:02:09PM 2 points [-]

The kind of pain is probably important. "Fail and you've just proven you're a really bad person" is not helpful.