The Procrastinating Caveman: Human Evolution and Procrastination

http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/07/10/the-procrastinating-caveman-what-human-evolution-teaches-us-about-why-we-put-off-work-and-how-to-stop/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StudyHacks+%28Study+Hacks%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

by da5e • 15 years ago

122 30 15 years ago

calnewport.com

skarayan• 15 years ago

I think calling it evolutionary is a guess, however, I do see a link between procrastination and being uncertain how to proceed. In my case, I am very determined when I have a sound plan and tend to procrastinate when parts of my plan are questionable. Good read.

jayzee• 15 years ago

I said this before in another post, but this article that I read in the New Yorker really hit home for me:

The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”

In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point.

And when you are in school often you are given tasks which seem to have no discernible purpose or meaning other than perhaps to take you off your parent's hands while they go make a living.

From: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/10101....

markbao2• 15 years ago

>the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point.

Kind of like when I watched the Atlantis space shuttle launch and then go back to working on the code for a social bookmarking service.

All joking aside, is he talking about an existential crisis, or something else? A common cause of existential crises is some kind of negative experience that prompts reflection and thinking as to why it happened, which sometimes leads to questioning the meaning of it all. The experience of which, if you went to school, you probably know pretty well. Most frequently after walking out of class after bombing a test.

Working link for the aforementioned article: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/10101...

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

... then go back to working on the code for a social bookmarking service

SpaceX is proving that if you want to do more than make a social bookmarking service, you can get involved in the future of space. Just sayin :)

If you can't get them to hire you, figure out what they need. Contract out for them. There's possibilities.

TeMPOraL3• 15 years ago

> the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point.

I feel this description feels much closer to my problems with procrastination than the idea from the article.

gbeeson• 15 years ago

Very good article from a very good site. I WILL read the whole article later, of that you can be sure.

BoppreH• 15 years ago

I'm sorry, but I'm unconvinced. It's just too easy to use "human evolution" to explain all sort of behaviors. I think the problem is that you don't have to validate anything, you just tell a convincing story.

The nearest the author got to validating it was:

"[...] only a small minority of the fifty hyper-organized students I interviewed reported procrastination as a serious problem"

I don't know how this study was carried down, but it seems as self selecting as it could possibly get.

The author went from "early humans' advantage was complex planning" to "procrastination is your brain silently rejecting your ideas" in little more than a handwave. Here's what I think was lacking:

a) Why does the idea selection characteristic had to be an unconscious process?

b) If it had evolved to save lives, how can we be sure it would still kick off when lives aren't at risk?

c) Why would it manifest itself as a lack of motivation instead of more efficient alternatives such as fear, or simply losing interest?

d) If the brain is rejecting the idea, how do people cling to them for so long? Are we consciously overriding our brain?

Shenglong• 15 years ago

a) Why doesn't it? Unconscious is simple, and procrastination by nature avoids conscious reasoning, no?

b) Can you clarify? I'm not sure I understand this question, and how it pertains to natural selection.

c) I don't see a reason for fear. I don't want to edit my friend's grade 11 paper, not because I'm afraid I can't do it, but because it's probably boring... or I feel I have better things to do. If you pick extreme examples, you might be able to reason in favor of fear, but I feel that's very selective criteria.

d) There's a subconscious and conscious element to a lot of things we do. When my friend tried to teach my hypnosis, he stressed that hypnotists act on the subconscious by breaking down preconceived resistances to ideas. This isn't as much an overriding as it is symbiosis, with one force pushing just a little harder.

bluekeybox2• 15 years ago

The arguments in this article are indeed poor, but just because someone uses poor arguments to support X doesn't imply that X is wrong. I found the main point raised in the article to be very interesting because it supports a view that I arrived to independently, by thinking about why I myself was procrastinating in college (I was a pre-med student and of course I had a heavy course load -- but I never deep down wanted to be a doctor -- my real love was math, technology, computers, and believe it or not philosophy).

a) The entire consciousness/unconscious separation is somewhat bogus (our "unconscious" is simply the part of our brain that evades introspection, but degree of introspection is hard to measure for obvious reasons). The main point to gather is that there is a process of self-criticism that manifests itself as lack of motivation, at least as stated by the article.

b) Our lives are always at risk -- being outcompeted by others of our kind is equivalent to being trampled upon by a mammoth.

c) I don't see how lack of motivation to do X is a less efficient alternative to fear. Fear is rarely an efficient mechanism (except in very time-constrained situations) -- it forces us to focus all our energy on a single task, it prevents us from thinking broadly and seeing new opportunities, and finally it forces us to make decisions towards increase of security instead of increase of opportunity. And the "loss of interest" you mention is technically the same as lack of motivation.

d) It makes perfect sense that we are conflicted about complex decisions for a long time. If we made up our minds quickly instead, it would prevent us from gathering enough information to make the aforementioned complex decision correctly. Complex decisions are complex for a reason.

TeMPOraL3• 15 years ago

b) Unless it's subconscious, I disagree. I procrastinated my way through the high school and at this age I had zero fear for my life or competition with anybody. Things do change when one gets older, but at that point I didn't cared about being outcompeted by others (actually, right now, I don't really care that much either).

c) Sometimes forcing us to focus on a single task is beneficial. Multitasking is usually bad for productivity, at least from what I've seen so far both in my life and on discussions at HN.

JackdawX• 15 years ago

I agree completely, but if you ignore the pseudoscience and take the post as an analogy I think it's thoughtful and insightful.

markbao2• 15 years ago

Are you rejecting an option just because it's simply bad, or also because there's a better option available? So in essence, you'd reject the idea of charging the mammoth, because you could throw the spear. Likewise, you'd reject the idea of sitting down in the library with a quadruple-tall mocha (and probably your study materials), because it doesn't seem viable. So, you procrastinate. But what's the better option, in this case?

The alternative route (procrastination) is also not a better option. Everyone that procrastinates (so that means everyone) knows when they're procrastinating, and have that 10% of their status quo thinking about the fact that they're procrastinating and shouldn't be procrastinating. I don't buy it—that means your brain thinks procrastination is better than just trying to do the work, because in the long run, we know procrastination is worse than just doing the work.

My argument only holds if you believe the brain is functionally logical, which... probably isn't true.

astrofinch• 15 years ago

"Everyone that procrastinates (so that means everyone)"

When I find myself unable to work, I generally make a conscious choice to take a break so that I can be rejuvenated by my down time to the greatest extent possible. Does that count as not procrastinating?

"My argument only holds if you believe the brain is functionally logical, which... probably isn't true."

Yes, of course it isn't true. The best example of this is the fact that people sometimes give up (succumb to learned helplessness). If people were purely rational agents, having their plan fail would be an indicator that they need try something new. But in real life, they tend to do things like feel depressed and watch more TV.

sehugg• 15 years ago

You say procrastination, I say lazy evaluation.

TeMPOraL3• 15 years ago

There's something in that concept. I sometimes don't do things people request immediately, knowing that they most likely don't really need it. Then either they repeat the request (forcing the computation ;)) or (more often) realize it was superfluous.

darnton• 15 years ago

The best thing I've read on this topic is The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel (http://www.amazon.com/Procrastination-Equation-Putting-Thing...).

He concludes that different people procrastinate for different reasons and that those reasons boil down to:

- learned helplessness (you have a low expectation of success)

- boredom (you don't value the task), and

- poor impulse control.

He then gives specific advice for working out which applies to you and then for dealing with each of these, which is far more useful than either saying, "Just do it," or telling an impossible-to-apply just-so story about mammoths and frontal lobes.

goblin89• 15 years ago

Here's a quick summary of scientific research on procrastination by the same author: http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Ste.... No specific advices for fighting it, but interesting nevertheless.

ignifero• 15 years ago

Doesn't seem like an evolutionary adaptation from his remarks. It seems more like a physiological balancing act. Could be a slow homeostatic process to prevent certain brain cells from burning out. And I will present my data when I m done customizing my terminal color theme.

nostromo• 15 years ago

If there's an evolutionary cause for procastination, I'll offer a much simpler one:

It's best to conserve your energy unless you really want/need to do something.

The author's example of spearing a mammoth works perfectly: only bother if you're actually hungry, or if you think you'll be very hungry in the future.

zyfo• 15 years ago

Except that it doesn't: His point with the example lies in the difference between going straight at it and risking ones life verus figuring out a safer alternative.

If it was just about energy, both methods would be deemed just as valid, and they'd work for both sapiens and erectus.

Also we don't really need bridges and tv and space shuttles. I'm not saying his reasoning is flawless either, but this doesn't seem to be more convincing.

Retric• 15 years ago

Except that cavemen can't preserve food for long periods of time. Cat's spend a lot of their time asleep because hunting is risky behavior and hunting at the wrong time can easily waste energy. Granted I think the amount of time early humans spent hunting is over estimated by most people, but even still if there is easy energy sources to scavenge going hunting is a bad idea.

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

Conservation of energy would still favour the latter strategy. It's less work to walk up to some distance from a mammoth and hurl a spear at it than to run right up to the thing.

jamesbkel• 15 years ago

Not to be a jerk, but if you're going to start offering opinions on evolution, at least get it right and not refer to the "Homo sapien" species.... it's the "Homo sapiens" species. Again, not trying to give you hard time, but at least for me, that stuck out like a sore thumb.

nazgulnarsil• 15 years ago

these are known as "just so" stories and have plagued eve-psych since its inception.

convulsive• 15 years ago

This is not the 'evolutionary perspective' as you claim it is. This is just your perspective dressed in evolutionary terminology so that the reader will believe that if you accept human evolution, you MUST accept this conclusion. But the fact that you came up with a possible evolutionary past and thought of a constraint that could've pushed us to develop the adaptive behavior of procrastination doesn't in any way imply that this is actually the way things happened. Procrastination might've been a fitness-maximizing adaptation (or even just a spandrel [1]) for so many other equally convincing reasons.

It's really strange that while for molecular & morphological phenotypes we use rigorous methods to measure evolutionary relatedness so we can determine possible sequences of evolutionary adaptations that led to them, when it comes to behavioral phenotypes people think that conceivability arguments coupled with very inconclusive evidence are sufficient to demonstrate that some evolutionary story is true.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)

sanj• 15 years ago

Procrastination is the basis of one of only two optimizations that exist:

1. Do it late (because you may not need to do it at all).

vs.

2. Do it early (because you know it'll need to get done, over and over, and you've got the data onhand right now).

AlexCP• 15 years ago

Damn, I am procrastinating right now

JamieEi• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptationism

The Procrastinating Caveman: Human Evolution and Procrastination

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