Trick thyself!

"Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted."

So, I'm sure I've blathered about this before, but I came across a great article about procrastination that addresses two of my pet topics about human beings - the myth of will-power and our tendency for hyperbolic discounting - and how people manage to work around these instead of hitting smack up against them. It's very long and I almost procrastinated (har har) finishing it during the long discussion about people and their netflix lists (I cycle through mine and am often out of movies before I remember to update it, so that part didn't really connect with me), so I'm going to summarize it for you:

1. Human beings suffer from something that can be called present bias. This causes us to judge our future actions within only the present context and discount that what we want and our future circumstances will change over time.

2. This is only partially mentioned in the article, but the will is like a muscle: an exercise of self-control in one arena tends to leave us more prone to succumbing to temptation later in another. For instance, you take a chewing out from your boss early in the day without yelling back and this makes it easier to yell at your kids when you get home. Or you didn't order a regular soda at lunch and this makes it easier to eat that entire cake at your friend's birthday party. I think I've heard it called The Snackwell effect, from findings that people who eat "diet foods" tend to overeat and binge on these snacks more than those who don't go for the diet food. I've also seen studies about how people who drive hybrids or recycle are more likely to excuse cheating on tests or lying and other similar findings that show one theoretical exercise of "virtue" in one arena of our lifes tends to be balanced against other exercises of "virtuous" behavior.
3. In other words, we all lack self-control. What makes some people more sucessful in overcoming temptation is metacognition. People avoid succumbing by understanding their own weaknesses and either developing tricks to distract themselves from it or removing themselves from the temptation.

4. People have an illogical bias towards present rewards, even where these yield less than the future rewards we forgo (immediate gratification!!). This probably has evolutionary roots where immediately eating prey or taking shelter may have been crucial for survival. Most people would rather have $100 today than $200 tomorrow. In the same way, our brains want the cookie today instead of the slamming body two months from now. In a really attenuated way, we may even opt for an updated facebook page today over having job security based on a great performance tomorrow.

5. People become more rational about their choices when they view them in a future-based context. If you consider whether you'd like the cookie two weeks from now or the slamming body two months from now, you'll choose the latter. This is called hyperbolic discounting, because your dismissal of the better payoff later diminishes over time and makes a nice slope on a graph.

6. People who are most sucessful also engage in metacognition about their hyberbolic discounting and tendencies towards procrastination. In a study where people could opt to either turn all three papers in at the end of a quarter or set deadlines for themselves (that would be enforced - so "late" papers would be graded down - and would provide no additional boost in grading) did much better than those who opted against deadlines.

7. "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."

Anyways, I really connect with this article, because I am extremely prone to procrastination and have tried to cope with little tricks to force future-me to behave the way now-me wants. For me, the key is planning for/with/around temptation and procrastination, so I can work those things into the plan itself. It's a bit of wu-wei, flow with the energy of my own weaknesses instead of working against it kind of thing. I may over-do it since I plan for every possible thing to go wrong sometimes, but my reason for this is that when something goes wrong, my natural instinct is to ditch the entire plan all together.
 I intentionally give myself set times to slack off, because I know I will do so anyways and this way it doesn't feel like I'm breaking my plan (apparently students who forgive themselves for procrastinating actually procrastinate less). When I'm trying to make a choice, I try to think about that choice as one I would be making in the future. I play all kinds of games I've learned in mediation to break me out of my knee-jerk thinking and portion things out into manageable sizes.

Anyways, I think these activities make me seem to have a different underlying personality than I actually feel. It certainly has changed a lot of my lifestyle patterns, and perhaps undercut some of my more exciting spontaneous moments (although despite all my best efforts, I'm still a horrible procrastinator and flaky enough to always have some emergency or other).  And this makes me wonder about other people and how they appear versus how they percieve themselves underneath it all. A lot of what appears to be my personality are coping devices and possibly overcompensations to deal with an underlying aspect of my personality. Although who's to say that these are any less my personality than the other aspect?