The question is “What do I do first?” and the cached answer is “procrastinate more”.
That’s not the cached thought; the cached thought is what you think in between thinking about the question and deciding you’d rather procrastinate.
For example:
I should’ve started a week ago
What does it say about you that you didn’t?
IOW, the question isn’t “what do I do first?” the question is, what bad thing will happen if you DON’T?
Most of the rest of your post is just the anosognosiac ramblings of your conscious mind, making things much more complicated than they are. We don’t procrastinate for complex reasons; everything boils down to a thought that you’re avoiding.
Sometimes—rarely—the thought you’re avoiding is about the task itself. But when it’s chronic, the thought is nearly always something about you, and what it “means” about you if you don’t do it.
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 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.
We don’t procrastinate for complex reasons; everything boils down to a thought that you’re avoiding.
Sometimes—rarely—the thought you’re avoiding is about the task itself. But when it’s chronic, the thought is nearly always something about you, and what it “means” about you if you don’t do it.
I actually wrote part of another article about procrastination, before this one, following a theory much closer to yours. I ended up determining that it wasn’t going anywhere, but I think what I do have clarifies your theory immensely. So at the risk of putting words into your mouth, here it is:
In the 1950s, B.F. Skinner conducted a series of experiments which established the principle of Operant Conditioning. The canonical example of this sort of experiment is a rat in a box, which receives either a reward (food pellet) or a punishment (electric shock) when it presses a button. There is a lot of research on the effect of varying the
conditions—species, target behavior, feedback type and schedule, etc—but in general, behaviors that produce rewards are promoted, and behaviors that produce punishment are inhibited.
Now, suppose an experimenter hooked you up to a mind-reading machine for a week, and every time you thought about elephants, he came and gave you $20, up to some rate limit. You would quickly become obsessed with elephants, and years later you’d still be patronizing the zoo. Reinforcement, it would seem, works for thoughts much like it does for behaviors. Now consider the opposite experiment, where every time you think about elephants, you receive negative feedback. This experiment can’t be done with electric shocks (at least, not ethically), but it has been done. The Game is a mind game which some people play, with one rule: if you think of The Game, you have lost, and must annouce it to those around you. Insofar as operant conditioning applies to humans, and thought is a behavior, and embarrassment is punishment, The Game should be very easy: it conditions players to stop thinking about it. In fact, the opposite is true: players of The Game end up in a spiral where they can’t think of anything else.
Clearly, the theory of operant conditioning does not apply straightforwardly to thoughts, and we shouldn’t expect it to. After all, if thinking about something causes a strong reaction, positive or negative, then it’s probably important enough to think about more. However, we still need a mechanism for choosing topics to think about, which means that some things will reinforce a topic and others will inhibit it. Reward and punishment can’t fill these roles.
Where I got stuck was on trying to figure out just what does condition us to think more or less on a topic, and I don’t think that can be answered accurately without much better instruments and experiments than are currently possible. Clearly, when people enter procrastination spirals there is some sort of conditioning going on, but negative affect alone can’t be the cause; The Game seems like a strong refutation to that.
Insofar as operant conditioning applies to humans, and thought is a behavior, and embarrassment is punishment, The Game should be very easy: it conditions players to stop thinking about it. In fact, the opposite is true: players of The Game end up in a spiral where they can’t think of anything else.
There’s a different explanation for this phenomenon that I believe is a part of ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy). The idea is that, in order for you to achieve a negative goal, you have to set up a portion of your mind to watch out for that condition. But when the condition to avoid is a thought, just setting up that portion of your mind to watch for the condition, means that you’re already having the thought. In other words, trying to avoid a thought primes you for that thought.
This really isn’t related to procrastination, except insofar as you try to keep yourself from being distracted, or try to keep yourself from thinking about work while you’re procrastinating. Neither one has much bearing on the actual issue making you procrastinate, though.
That explains where the initial positive reinforcement comes from, but it doesn’t explain the lack of negative reinforcement. And I can show the absence of negative reinforcement by another example: post-traumatic stress disorder. Replaying the memory of a traumatic event causes a great deal of stress and negative emotion, which, if stress and negative emotion were enough to inhibit thought patterns, would cause traumatic events to repress themselves quickly. They usually don’t. In this case, there is no portion of the mind set up to watch for anything, so that explanation doesn’t work.
That explains where the initial positive reinforcement comes from, but it doesn’t explain the lack of negative reinforcement.
The act of avoidance is what causes a loop. No “reinforcement” is involved, positive or negative.
Replaying the memory of a traumatic event causes a great deal of stress and negative emotion, which, if stress and negative emotion were enough to inhibit thought patterns, would cause traumatic events to repress themselves quickly.
Exactly, which is why tying this to “reinforcement” in this way is a bad model. We don’t get reinforcement for our output thoughts, only our input thoughts: you’re confusing the reinforcer with the reinforcee.
In the case of the traumatic memory, you will avoid whatever reminds you of the memory, not the memory itself. Why would we ever have evolved a way to positively or negatively reinforce our own internal thoughts? That makes no sense. What we have is a memory mechanism that allows us to replay reinforcement in order to let us evaluate external things, including ones we’re just thinking about.
IOW, the negative memory is the reinforcement! The question is, what is it negatively reinforcing?
If everything reminds you of it, the answer is: everything. That’s how people get in fear/depression spirals that take over their entire lives: everything now negatively reinforces them.
There appears to be some confusion here due to a poor choice of terminology on my part; I was using positive reinforcement of a thought to mean that which causes someone to think it more, and negative reinforcement to mean that which causes someone to think it less. These terms conflict with common psych. terminology and brought in a bunch of statements about what sorts of things have that effect, which I did not intend.
We don’t get reinforcement for our output thoughts, only our input thoughts: you’re confusing the reinforcer with the reinforcee.
The brain knows no such distinction. However, this could be rephrased in terms of a time-offset—something along the lines of “a thought with strong negative affect inhibits whatever thoughts were active 3-5 seconds before”. That’s something biology could implement; and, interestingly, the time window suggests possible experiments.
But I don’t believe that thoughts with negative affect are the only things which trigger avoidance, or even the most common ones, and that is where our positions diverge. The early stages of my procrastination spirals do not include guilt, self-hate or any detectable emotion at all; those only appear later, well after the pattern has been firmly established. Avoidance is also triggered by getting stuck. In fact, I would say that thirty seconds of writer’s block will do more to induce procrastination than any amount of guilt can. This makes sense, because a lack of forward progress would normally be a sign that a line of thought isn’t worth pursuing further; it’s only when outside factors force us to continue that it becomes a problem. For me at least, this is the dominant factor, not guilt.
Of course it does. Otherwise, remembering something would be the same as experiencing it. And remembering a thought would be indistinguishable from having the thought.
But I don’t believe that thoughts with negative affect are the only things which trigger avoidance, or even the most common ones, and that is where our positions diverge. The early stages of my procrastination spirals do not include guilt, self-hate or any detectable emotion at all;
Have you actually tested that? Here’s how you can test:
At the first moment you put something off, ask yourself, “What happens if I don’t do this?” And observe your immediate, unconscious, non-verbal or pre-verbal response.
If you get nothing negative from that, try, “What happens if I do do this?”.
My guess: you will rarely need to go to the second question to find a negative response, but if you go to the second one anyway, you will find it surprisingly similar.
The catch of course is that in order to do this you have to be able to catch your non-verbal thoughts as they go by, which can be a tough skill to learn, because everybody thinks they already know the answers, so they never really listen to themselves after they ask the question: they jump straight to making up explanations.
As I said in another recent comment: here are some clues that you’re making something up instead of actually listening:
you’re using complex sentence structure or abstract/non-sensory words
the answer is something you “already knew” or expected to find
the answer makes you look good in some way (either by deflecting blame or trying to sound humble “i.e. poor stupid me” explanations)
any verbal portion of the answer is longer than a slogan or proverb shouted in anger or other intense emotional state
the answer is unemotional
The degree to which each of these suggests a made-up answer varies, but if you’re hitting two or more of these points, you’re almost certainly fooling yourself. The real machinery that runs your brain is non-verbal (feelings, images, and sounds), emotional, and fast (brief flickers of images, short sounds, and somewhat longer flinches and feelings). Most of the rest of our thought process is just verbalizing about those other bits, other verbalizations, or just making shit up.
Have you actually tested that? Here’s how you can test
Yes, I have. Right now, there are two things I am procrastinating on. One of them produces a clear mental and physical response when I think about it. That one fits your model of procrastination perfectly. The other one doesn’t. When I think about it, I get no physical response whatsoever, and the only thoughts that come to mind are directly relevant details of the task. I’m completely unable to begin working on it. In general, if a task
Is internally generated
Can be ignored or abandoned without consequence,
Provides just enough upside if completed to prevent abandoning it, and
Requires a difficult or time consuming first step to start working on, which can’t be subdivided
Then it can trigger a procrastination spiral without generating an unconscious response. This combination of conditions is certainly atypical, which makes it a corner case, but I think it sheds some light on the general case as well.
Remember, all of your data comes from people who have sought help with their procrastination. That filters out people still in the early stages of a procrastination spiral, where it has not yet become a problem. And if the answer to “What happens if I do/don’t do this” is “not much”, then there is no reason to seek help, which filters out more cases. You only see the end result of procrastination spirals on important tasks; you don’t see the early stages, or procrastination on unimportant things.
When I think about it, I get no physical response whatsoever, and the only thoughts that come to mind are directly relevant details of the task. I’m completely unable to begin working on it.
Those two statements are, AFAICT, incompatible. How do you know you’re completely unable to begin working on it? What stops you? What would happen if you DID begin working on it?
Those two statements are, AFAICT, incompatible. How do you know you’re completely unable to begin working on it? What stops you?
Apathy. According to the attention-allocating part of my brain, it’s of lower priority than games and blogs, even though my conscious mind disagrees.
What would happen if you DID begin working on it?
Knowing what I know now, I’d make some progress. A week ago, I would’ve stared at my to-do list for awhile, unable to decide which item to start with, until the phone rang or something else diverted my attention.
Apathy. According to the attention-allocating part of my brain, it’s of lower priority than games and blogs, even though my conscious mind disagrees.
See this comment for an explanation of why that isn’t actually an answer. Brains don’t avoid things for reasons like “it’s of lower priority”—those are the explanations we use to avoid thinking about things we don’t like thinking about. Your real answer to this question won’t sound anywhere near as reasonable or logical.
Punishment presumably doesn’t work for thoughts, because it rewards the negative of the thought in the same movement. I expect that it’s rather switching to procrastination that is rewarded, not continuing on the task that’s punished. The behavior here is not static “thinking a thought”, but rather a transition between possible thoughts.
The longer you try to concentrate on the task, the more willpower you apply to it, the more rewarding the behavior of switching the attention to procrastination becomes. And so, you learn to do it automatically, thinking of nothing else whenever you start thinking of getting the work done.
That’s not the cached thought; the cached thought is what you think in between thinking about the question and deciding you’d rather procrastinate.
For example:
What does it say about you that you didn’t?
IOW, the question isn’t “what do I do first?” the question is, what bad thing will happen if you DON’T?
Most of the rest of your post is just the anosognosiac ramblings of your conscious mind, making things much more complicated than they are. We don’t procrastinate for complex reasons; everything boils down to a thought that you’re avoiding.
Sometimes—rarely—the thought you’re avoiding is about the task itself. But when it’s chronic, the thought is nearly always something about you, and what it “means” about you if you don’t do it.
So ask and answer that question first.
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.
I actually wrote part of another article about procrastination, before this one, following a theory much closer to yours. I ended up determining that it wasn’t going anywhere, but I think what I do have clarifies your theory immensely. So at the risk of putting words into your mouth, here it is:
Where I got stuck was on trying to figure out just what does condition us to think more or less on a topic, and I don’t think that can be answered accurately without much better instruments and experiments than are currently possible. Clearly, when people enter procrastination spirals there is some sort of conditioning going on, but negative affect alone can’t be the cause; The Game seems like a strong refutation to that.
You do realize you’ve just made everyone lose The Game.
No, we all won! Randall said so!
There’s a different explanation for this phenomenon that I believe is a part of ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy). The idea is that, in order for you to achieve a negative goal, you have to set up a portion of your mind to watch out for that condition. But when the condition to avoid is a thought, just setting up that portion of your mind to watch for the condition, means that you’re already having the thought. In other words, trying to avoid a thought primes you for that thought.
This really isn’t related to procrastination, except insofar as you try to keep yourself from being distracted, or try to keep yourself from thinking about work while you’re procrastinating. Neither one has much bearing on the actual issue making you procrastinate, though.
That explains where the initial positive reinforcement comes from, but it doesn’t explain the lack of negative reinforcement. And I can show the absence of negative reinforcement by another example: post-traumatic stress disorder. Replaying the memory of a traumatic event causes a great deal of stress and negative emotion, which, if stress and negative emotion were enough to inhibit thought patterns, would cause traumatic events to repress themselves quickly. They usually don’t. In this case, there is no portion of the mind set up to watch for anything, so that explanation doesn’t work.
The act of avoidance is what causes a loop. No “reinforcement” is involved, positive or negative.
Exactly, which is why tying this to “reinforcement” in this way is a bad model. We don’t get reinforcement for our output thoughts, only our input thoughts: you’re confusing the reinforcer with the reinforcee.
In the case of the traumatic memory, you will avoid whatever reminds you of the memory, not the memory itself. Why would we ever have evolved a way to positively or negatively reinforce our own internal thoughts? That makes no sense. What we have is a memory mechanism that allows us to replay reinforcement in order to let us evaluate external things, including ones we’re just thinking about.
IOW, the negative memory is the reinforcement! The question is, what is it negatively reinforcing?
If everything reminds you of it, the answer is: everything. That’s how people get in fear/depression spirals that take over their entire lives: everything now negatively reinforces them.
There appears to be some confusion here due to a poor choice of terminology on my part; I was using positive reinforcement of a thought to mean that which causes someone to think it more, and negative reinforcement to mean that which causes someone to think it less. These terms conflict with common psych. terminology and brought in a bunch of statements about what sorts of things have that effect, which I did not intend.
The brain knows no such distinction. However, this could be rephrased in terms of a time-offset—something along the lines of “a thought with strong negative affect inhibits whatever thoughts were active 3-5 seconds before”. That’s something biology could implement; and, interestingly, the time window suggests possible experiments.
But I don’t believe that thoughts with negative affect are the only things which trigger avoidance, or even the most common ones, and that is where our positions diverge. The early stages of my procrastination spirals do not include guilt, self-hate or any detectable emotion at all; those only appear later, well after the pattern has been firmly established. Avoidance is also triggered by getting stuck. In fact, I would say that thirty seconds of writer’s block will do more to induce procrastination than any amount of guilt can. This makes sense, because a lack of forward progress would normally be a sign that a line of thought isn’t worth pursuing further; it’s only when outside factors force us to continue that it becomes a problem. For me at least, this is the dominant factor, not guilt.
Of course it does. Otherwise, remembering something would be the same as experiencing it. And remembering a thought would be indistinguishable from having the thought.
Have you actually tested that? Here’s how you can test:
At the first moment you put something off, ask yourself, “What happens if I don’t do this?” And observe your immediate, unconscious, non-verbal or pre-verbal response.
If you get nothing negative from that, try, “What happens if I do do this?”.
My guess: you will rarely need to go to the second question to find a negative response, but if you go to the second one anyway, you will find it surprisingly similar.
The catch of course is that in order to do this you have to be able to catch your non-verbal thoughts as they go by, which can be a tough skill to learn, because everybody thinks they already know the answers, so they never really listen to themselves after they ask the question: they jump straight to making up explanations.
As I said in another recent comment: here are some clues that you’re making something up instead of actually listening:
you’re using complex sentence structure or abstract/non-sensory words
the answer is something you “already knew” or expected to find
the answer makes you look good in some way (either by deflecting blame or trying to sound humble “i.e. poor stupid me” explanations)
any verbal portion of the answer is longer than a slogan or proverb shouted in anger or other intense emotional state
the answer is unemotional
The degree to which each of these suggests a made-up answer varies, but if you’re hitting two or more of these points, you’re almost certainly fooling yourself. The real machinery that runs your brain is non-verbal (feelings, images, and sounds), emotional, and fast (brief flickers of images, short sounds, and somewhat longer flinches and feelings). Most of the rest of our thought process is just verbalizing about those other bits, other verbalizations, or just making shit up.
Mostly making shit up.
I so want an anti-confabulation patch for my wetware.
Yes, I have. Right now, there are two things I am procrastinating on. One of them produces a clear mental and physical response when I think about it. That one fits your model of procrastination perfectly. The other one doesn’t. When I think about it, I get no physical response whatsoever, and the only thoughts that come to mind are directly relevant details of the task. I’m completely unable to begin working on it. In general, if a task
Is internally generated
Can be ignored or abandoned without consequence,
Provides just enough upside if completed to prevent abandoning it, and
Requires a difficult or time consuming first step to start working on, which can’t be subdivided Then it can trigger a procrastination spiral without generating an unconscious response. This combination of conditions is certainly atypical, which makes it a corner case, but I think it sheds some light on the general case as well.
Remember, all of your data comes from people who have sought help with their procrastination. That filters out people still in the early stages of a procrastination spiral, where it has not yet become a problem. And if the answer to “What happens if I do/don’t do this” is “not much”, then there is no reason to seek help, which filters out more cases. You only see the end result of procrastination spirals on important tasks; you don’t see the early stages, or procrastination on unimportant things.
Those two statements are, AFAICT, incompatible. How do you know you’re completely unable to begin working on it? What stops you? What would happen if you DID begin working on it?
Apathy. According to the attention-allocating part of my brain, it’s of lower priority than games and blogs, even though my conscious mind disagrees.
Knowing what I know now, I’d make some progress. A week ago, I would’ve stared at my to-do list for awhile, unable to decide which item to start with, until the phone rang or something else diverted my attention.
See this comment for an explanation of why that isn’t actually an answer. Brains don’t avoid things for reasons like “it’s of lower priority”—those are the explanations we use to avoid thinking about things we don’t like thinking about. Your real answer to this question won’t sound anywhere near as reasonable or logical.
Punishment presumably doesn’t work for thoughts, because it rewards the negative of the thought in the same movement. I expect that it’s rather switching to procrastination that is rewarded, not continuing on the task that’s punished. The behavior here is not static “thinking a thought”, but rather a transition between possible thoughts.
The longer you try to concentrate on the task, the more willpower you apply to it, the more rewarding the behavior of switching the attention to procrastination becomes. And so, you learn to do it automatically, thinking of nothing else whenever you start thinking of getting the work done.