What do you do with the answer, though? I have a fair idea of why most of my procrastination occurs (if I leave something til the last minute and make a hash of it, I have a convenient excuse to protect my ego) but that has never seemed to help me actually overcome it.
What you’ve just described is a “far” explanation of the system of your procrastination, not the “near” process by which you actually perform the behavior of procrastination.
The system description may or may not be accurate, but it is in either event useless for actually changing the behavior, since it does not reflect the level of abstraction where the behavior is performed.
To put it another way, your actual decision to procrastinate is not based on “a convenient excuse to protect my ego”—it’s based on some experience you get at the moment in time where you make the decision. That experience is not the same thing as the words you use to describe the experience, or to rationalize your decision with.
If you know what the actual experience is, though, then you have the possibility of questioning the evidence behind the belief that produces the experience, similar to Eliezer’s example of questioning and revising his mental model of the serial killer behind the door. Intellectually knowing there’s no killer behind the door is not the same as experientially knowing there’s no killer.
A “far” description of a problem can’t directly fix the problem, because it’s not on the same logical level as the problem itself—i.e., merely knowing that it is mathematically improbable for a lurking killer to exist, doesn’t get rid of the fear. It has to be translated to a sensory experience.
In your particular case, you don’t actually know how you procrastinate, you only have an explanation for why you procrastinate, and these are two radically different things.
Once you know how you do it, such that you can deliberately repeat it, you can then try different standard belief-change or other self-help interventions to actually change it, and you can rigorously test whether a given technique works or not.
Asking about self-help techniques, however, is like asking about opening lines in pickup: it’s what everybody wants, but not what you NEED. As in software debugging, what you need is to know how to reliably reproduce the problem, so you can test whether you’ve fixed it!
Without that, you can’t get reliable results, no matter what techniques you use. With it, you can use any technique, or make up new ones.
What you’ve just described is a “far” explanation of the system of your procrastination, not the “near” process by which you actually perform the behavior of procrastination.
The system description may or may not be accurate, but it is in either event useless for actually changing the behavior, since it does not reflect the level of abstraction where the behavior is performed.
To put it another way, your actual decision to procrastinate is not based on “a convenient excuse to protect my ego”—it’s based on some experience you get at the moment in time where you make the decision. That experience is not the same thing as the words you use to describe the experience, or to rationalize your decision with.
If you know what the actual experience is, though, then you have the possibility of questioning the evidence behind the belief that produces the experience, similar to Eliezer’s example of questioning and revising his mental model of the serial killer behind the door. Intellectually knowing there’s no killer behind the door is not the same as experientially knowing there’s no killer.
A “far” description of a problem can’t directly fix the problem, because it’s not on the same logical level as the problem itself—i.e., merely knowing that it is mathematically improbable for a lurking killer to exist, doesn’t get rid of the fear. It has to be translated to a sensory experience.
In your particular case, you don’t actually know how you procrastinate, you only have an explanation for why you procrastinate, and these are two radically different things.
Once you know how you do it, such that you can deliberately repeat it, you can then try different standard belief-change or other self-help interventions to actually change it, and you can rigorously test whether a given technique works or not.
Asking about self-help techniques, however, is like asking about opening lines in pickup: it’s what everybody wants, but not what you NEED. As in software debugging, what you need is to know how to reliably reproduce the problem, so you can test whether you’ve fixed it!
Without that, you can’t get reliable results, no matter what techniques you use. With it, you can use any technique, or make up new ones.