gwern comments on Fighting Akrasia: Incentivising Action - Less Wrong

8 Post author: gworley 29 April 2009 01:48PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (56)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwern 01 May 2009 07:01:40PM 2 points [-]

I'll procrastinate forever if I have little to do, and will become a zealous workaholic when I have endless work piled up.

Reminds me a lot of Structured Procrastination:

"All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important."