Procrastination
The now you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the article instead of playing the video game.
The trick is to accept the now you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future you – a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.
Some psychologists call this self-binding:
Working with the psychologists Frank Keil, of Yale University, and Katherine Choe, now at Goucher College, I recently studied young children’s understanding of self-binding, by showing them short movies of people engaged in self-binding and other behaviors and asking them to explain what was going on. The children, aged 4 to 7, easily grasped that someone might put a video game on a high shelf so that another person couldn’t get it. But self-binding confused them: they were mystified when people put away the game so that they themselves couldn’t get hold of it.
But even though young children don’t understand self-binding, they are capable of doing it. In a classic study from the 1970s, psychologists offered children a marshmallow and told them they could either have it right away, or get more if they waited for a few minutes. As you would expect, waiting proved difficult (and performance on this task is a good predictor, much later on, of such things as SAT scores and drug problems), but some children managed it by self-binding—averting their eyes or covering the marshmallow so as to subvert their temptation-prone self for the greater pleasure of the long-term self.
This embodies a philosophical problem that’s also of immense practical importance: short-term irrationality in service of long-term rationality. Say you’re depressed. Unless you have some modicum of faith that things will get better, at least enough that you’re motivated to do something about it — whether that’s exercise, a psychologist, medication, a new job, or something else — you’re unlikely to get better. Belief that things will get better is irrational: nothing about the past or present indicates it. But at the same time, this belief may be the only thing that can cause things to actually get better; so irrational belief is the rational thing, from a long-term perspective. This is philosophically troubling — foundation of rationality, etc. — but more than that, it’s practical. There are so many situations in everyday life where we need to employ short-term irrationality for long-term gain. Doing things that seem absurd, such as purposely giving ourselves less time to complete a task, can ensure that we actually spend more time on it:
[A 2002 study by Klaus Wertenbroch and Dan Arielly] set up three classes, and each had three weeks to finish three papers. Class A had to turn in all three papers on the last day of class, Class B had to pick three different deadlines and stick to them, and Class C had to turn in one paper a week.
Which class had the better grades?
Class C, the one with three specific deadlines, did the best. Class B, which had to pick deadlines ahead of time but had complete freedom, did the second best, and the group whose only deadline was the last day, Class A, did the worst.
Students who could pick any three deadlines tended to spread them out at about one week apart on their own. They knew they would procrastinate, so they set up zones in which they would be forced to perform. Still, overly optimistic outliers who either waited until the last minute or chose unrealistic goals pulled down the overall class grade.
Students with no guidelines at all tended to put off their work until the last week for all three papers.
We humans are irrational beings. As such, long-term rationality often requires us to bind our future selves through short-term irrationality.
(This post written instead of more important things, naturally. Future me will get to them.)
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/10/27/procrastination/
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