In terms of precomittment and sub-goals, this is something you can use all sorts of hacks to try to bind yourself: but often people don’t use the easier route of using other people. Possibly I’m just slow on the uptake, but I’ve been working in the same environment for about 2 and a half years, and it’s only in the last six months or so that I’ve started dealing with procrastinatey tasks simply by committing to do them to others (particularly managers, but peers as well). Suddenly, the whole ‘I suppose I could do this at another point’ diversion gets overwhelmed because while the intrinsic value of various may be around equal and hard to juggle, the ‘not failing to do that thing I said I’d do’, ‘being an effective person’ benefit outweighs it.
And, of course, if something genuinely urgent comes up, it’s revisable, but the new thing has to be sufficiently more important that I can actively justify the reprioritisation and thus delay to someone else, rather than passively justifying it to myself
In terms of precomittment and sub-goals, this is something you can use all sorts of hacks to try to bind yourself: but often people don’t use the easier route of using other people. Possibly I’m just slow on the uptake, but I’ve been working in the same environment for about 2 and a half years, and it’s only in the last six months or so that I’ve started dealing with procrastinatey tasks simply by committing to do them to others (particularly managers, but peers as well). Suddenly, the whole ‘I suppose I could do this at another point’ diversion gets overwhelmed because while the intrinsic value of various may be around equal and hard to juggle, the ‘not failing to do that thing I said I’d do’, ‘being an effective person’ benefit outweighs it.
And, of course, if something genuinely urgent comes up, it’s revisable, but the new thing has to be sufficiently more important that I can actively justify the reprioritisation and thus delay to someone else, rather than passively justifying it to myself