Why do humans procrastinate?

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mkwf2/why_do_humans_procrastinate_and_how_can_it_be_beat/c31rsxx

by ankeshk • 15 years ago

264 84 15 years ago

andre3k1• 15 years ago

It is worth noting that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are the fathers of modern-day behavioral economics. Their biggest contribution is called Prospect Theory. It goes against everything they teach you in Econ 101 -- the expected utility theory is wrong.

Kahneman won a noble prize in Economics for his work. Sadly, Tversky passed away in 1996 before he could be awarded.

Prospect Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory

huherto2• 15 years ago

This is a great example why understanding Math is important. It can even help you understand psychological aspects like, why we make the choices we make.

gwern• 15 years ago

> It goes against everything they teach you in Econ 101 -- the expected utility theory is wrong.

I was rather under the impression that prospect theory was descriptive and not normative. Prospect theory ain't gonna save you and your hyperbolic discounting from being money-pumped, and one of the interesting bits of Ainslie's book, IIRC, was discussing how economic incentives and penalties did shift people closer to normatively-correct discounting and away from preference reversals.

arketyp2• 15 years ago

How does cases of workaholism suit into this? That is, specifically, persons focusing too much on their career for big parts of their lives and then later regretting never having spent time with their family, enjoying a slow day etc. Isn't this almost reverse procrastination? Somehow you have deluded yourself that the future reward is worth the short term costs. And I guess in the end the habit would be so hard to break that it is indeed a sort of short-term procrastination kind of deal once again. You keep working all days because it is the easiest choice to deal with. Stepping down is such a drastic choice and a big commitment and scary and so on.

I guess I also want to point out that these things are really complicated dynamics. How do I know how much I should deny myself the instant rewards? What do I really know about the worth of this task I have setup for myself and its benefits? Why do we procrastinate? Well, because we don't know, because we're uncertain, because we doubt.

jodrellblank• 15 years ago

Well, because we don't know, because we're uncertain, because we doubt.

What about the people who don't know and don't procrastinate?

What's bad about uncertainty and doubt? What are you afraid of if it "goes wrong"? If it was uncertain what would happen but any outcome was exciting, you wouldn't procrastinate, right?

arketyp2• 15 years ago

What about the people who don't know and don't procrastinate?

I guess they got God's blessing. I don't understand your point.

If it was uncertain what would happen but any outcome was exciting, you wouldn't procrastinate, right?

That's exactly the time I would procrastinate. Or am I missing something?

huherto2• 15 years ago

IMHO, workalcoholics get short term rewards by working. And they get it every day and with every action that they take.

DenisM• 15 years ago

I think this simplistic explanation does not do justice to the complex subject which is procrastination. If it were that simple, we wouldn't be having those problems, would we?

For a more rounded perspective on the subject of procrastination I suggest reading someone who observed a few hundreds of cases and helped in fixing most of them:

http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-G...

wycats2• 15 years ago

"If it were that simple, we wouldn't be having those problems, would we?"

How do you figure? Our behavior is driven by powerful forces, and rational analysis is a relatively new factor. The book "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely explores how our cognitive biases (such as anchoring and many others) often remain in place even after we are told that they exist and how to identify them.

rkalla• 15 years ago

In addition to the temporal aspect of decision making given in the top reply, there was a study recently (posted on HN maybe 8 months ago) that found procrastination was a function of confidence in a decision.

I think the temporal aspect of decision making is a red herring and the real issue is the confidence in the decision; which is harder to gauge the farther out it is.

Some people have a great sense of confidence in their decisions and subsequently may procrastination less as their lack of faith in their decisions are not impacted by temporal locality.

This explanation happened to fit my tendency to procrastination to a T, as opposed to decisions simply being farther out on a timeline.

tryitnow• 15 years ago

It is unsurprising that this gets so many upvotes since HN is where many go to procrastinate (myself included).

nekojima• 15 years ago

I'm currently multi-tasking my procrastination. Reading HN & watching football, while avoiding yardwork and if I do that, between games, then "real" work will lie ahead, which I should really be doing instead. Btw, its not a holiday here. :-)

erikb• 15 years ago

Hm. I never saw this as a bad attribute nor can I accept it as the reason for procrastination. Yes, sure. People work more for goals that are closer in time then for goals that are further away. But that is not irrational, nor is it the reason for procastination. First let me explain how I see the procastination thing and then let me say a word or two about why I think that temporal discounting is something rational and useful.

Procrastination often has no reward at all. If it has a reward, why call it procrastionation? You actually do something useful, if it has a reward. The thing is, that "not procrastinating" is considered work, thus related with stress, concentration and energydepletion. So "not procrastinating" has a cost, which humans overestimate. There is some research (that I can't quote right now, but psychological material here on HN often cites some good sources about that) that people value a cost of an objective value X around 2 or 3 times higher then a reward of the same objective value (so losing $100 might feel as bad, as winning $200 might feel good). So most humans prefer instinctively to avoid or minimize costs before they maximize the (stochastic) expected value of an action. Doesn't avoiding cost (stress, "work") seem much more reasonable then missevaluating the reward for procastination? Well, what the truth is can nobody know, because the science also doesn't know yet. But for me it sounds way more reasonable, especially because I know how much I like to not work and to have no stress compared to getting anything done.

So, now why do I think that temporal discounting even is a good thing? Time can change the reward we gain from an object. An object might increase or decrease in value over time. With money we can even be sure that it decreases over time. Also our preferences might change according to our changing situation. Whatever we do now, we can be sure that our situation will be very different one year in the future. And last but not least, the risk increases drastically, that we don't get any reward at all. Dying in a car accident is a very unlikely thing if you sit at home in front of your comuter now. But if you think about that risk again for this point in time + one year it is not that unlikely anymore. All risks increase with a bigger time frame. All this leads to a situation in which gaining something now makes it much more rewarding then gaining it somewhere far in the future.

I think the big problem about that article is that it mixes truth with false assumptions. For example saying humans act irrational is true. It is also true that humans discount rewards over time. But both doesn't mean time discounting is something irrational. This article shows clearly that having some right arguments doesn't make your assumption correct. (this might also be correct to say about my arguments)

sheeps• 15 years ago

Exactly. Distance in time means greater uncertainty of reward, and greater uncertainty means lower motivation to go after it in the first place.

wycats2• 15 years ago

Except that this factor isn't consistent with the known uncertainty discount, even if we and the person in question understand the discount rationally.

In fact, it is often wildly different from the known rational answer. In other words, we have some hardcoded responses to scenarios that are probably built on evolutionarily rational behavior, but which don't apply well to specific scenarios in which the "correct" rational behavior is easily determined.

GHFigs• 15 years ago

I think the issue here is the language used. The research usually describes things in such a way that "rational = maximizing" and and the phenomena cataloged are "errors" or "biases" that make human behavior fall short of maximizing. So, you could easily come away with the impression that "irrational = always wrong" or "irrational = bad", but what is really meant is that "irrational = not maximizing".

Temporal discounting is just something we do. It's a heuristic[1] sometimes gives good results, sometimes doesn't. When it doesn't, the redditor suggests, that's what we call procrastination. When it works well, we generally don't even notice, because it seems so natural.

Procrastination often has no reward at all. If it has a reward, why call it procrastionation? You actually do something useful, if it has a reward.

That's setting a higher bar for "reward" than what is meant. Pleasurable activities like watching television or playing video games are "rewarding". That's why people do them. That's why people continue doing them even when they "have more important things to do". Yes, in the end, you might not get anything material out of them, but if it truly had "no reward at all", nobody would do them.

losing $100 might feel as bad, as winning $200 might feel good

That's known as "loss aversion", another cut from Kahneman & Tversky's Greatest Hits.

But if you think about that risk again for this point in time + one year it is not that unlikely anymore.

Notice that you say if you think about.... When people procrastinate, are they really thinking of those sorts of things. Suppose you're a student that has a paper due soon and opt to play video games instead. You'd probably be thinking something like "I'll play games now and do the paper later." rather than something like "I might die before the end of term, so why bother with the paper?"

That's not to say you're wrong: only to bring it back to the original context.

[1]: A heuristic, in other words, being a way of "avoiding cost" of doing the rational (maximizing) computation. So it's not really different from what you're saying.

greatreorx• 15 years ago

"But both doesn't mean time discounting is something irrational."

It's over-discounting that's irrational.

If I have a school paper due in a month, the probability that I won't have to do the paper is certainly non-zero (I could die, my professor could get sick, etc)... but it's likely something less than a .01% chance that an event like that will happen. It's not rational to put off a paper until the last couple days if there's still a 99.99% chance you will have to turn it in. I over value my current reward of being able to watch more TV now, while under discounting the future cost of having to do the paper in the future. I treat it more like there's a 10%+ chance that I won't actually have to do the paper.

_gd3l2• 15 years ago

"Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment." - Nassim Taleb

People procrastinate because they're doing something they don't like.

I procrastinate when I'm doing homework. But wouldn't you know, I always get motivated when hacking on an open source project or when working on a freelance project.

prawn4• 15 years ago

Reminds me of this Twitter comment: "Suddenly realized the problem with all to-do lists: they are filled with things we don't want to do. Everything else is already done."

Mz2• 15 years ago

Personal anecdote: I once came across some months-old to-do list. It included some furniture rehabbing project. The piece of furniture in question had since been gotten rid of, so I rolled my eyes and removed the project from my to-do list. My sons teased me about being a failure for not accomplishing it.

_gd3l2• 15 years ago

This.

Fliko3• 15 years ago

I really like Taleb, but I think his quote is a bit wrong. I love to just pick up my guitar and try to learn songs by ear but I usually find myself procrastinating against doing such things. I try to take procrastination as a sign that I've been doing too much of one thing and need to start doing other things (The thing I've been doing too much =/= what I am procrastinating against).

stdbrouw• 15 years ago

What that comment doesn't get is the anguish that sometimes accompanies procrastination. I don't want to start real work, often for a reason I can't quite fathom, so I go play Skyrim, and while I'm playing it I feel really really bad for not working even though I can't quite force myself to quit playing either. There's no joy in this particular kind of procrastination, and so it can't be explained by the lure of immediate gratification.

It is or should be any hacker's goal in life to do something that you love, not to accept drudgery for some supposed long-term benefit. Which means that any procrastination that remains is likely to be of the kind that I describe here, which must have different origins. I like the "procrastination as a function of faith in a decision" theory.

brandall10• 15 years ago

You bring up a good point... I think what you describe is attributable to fear of failure, or perhaps even just failed expectations. That is, the more effort you put into something there is some expectation of success to follow. When that doesn't match up to expectations... if you already have a fragile self-esteem or had self-doubt going into whatever venture, you just feel it all the more.

Of course the issue is success isn't a linear thing, it has peaks and valleys, but its sometimes hard to rationalize this as you're actually going thru it - you really just have to push going through those feeling like a loser phases.

Fliko3• 15 years ago

I've experienced this form of procrastination a lot and I've found out that the best way to overcome it is to clean my desk, remove everything that isn't relevant to the work I want to get done and then dive into it. I'll usually be put in the zone within a few minutes after doing this.

jconnop• 15 years ago

"Why do humans procrastinate?"... with a link to reddit.com

How fitting :)

mih2• 15 years ago

An interesting video on procrastination from a chapter of the book 'You are not so smart'

http://youtu.be/DJ2T4-rUUcs

dangero2• 15 years ago

That was an amazing hook and I feel like the book was talking exactly about me. It was actually very reassuring to know how normal I am.

Not sure if you're associated with this book, but I think I'm sold.

mih2• 15 years ago

Just to make it clear, I am not associated with the book in any way, but impulsively bought it on Amazon after seeing this video.

As I pore through subsequent chapters, it strikes a chord with me and is based on well researched psychological experiments conducted at various universities. It's worth a buy imho.

dusing• 15 years ago

Sometimes (not often) procrastination saves me from making a bad decision because my during my delay something plays out that would have negated or been worsened by my planned action.

ma2rten• 15 years ago

For those who, didn't see it three month back. There was a great threat about procrastination:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886187

funkah• 15 years ago

Simple, scorn of the abstract. The hour spent watching tv is valued more highly, right now, than the consequences that come some point in the future. The tv-watching hour presses the brain's reward buttons harder than the abstract notion of having your work done ahead of time.

Taleb's "The Black Swan" has a nice discussion of scorn of the abstract, though not in the context of procrastination.

ruang• 15 years ago

One manifestation of this is to break down a semi-abstract concept such as "finish coding shopping cart" to concrete tasks such as "install rails gem".

ramanujan2• 15 years ago

There was a recent highly cited paper describing the concept of willpower as a measurable, physiological, depletable quantity, strongly affected by glucose levels:

http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Bra...

And there was a very interesting Metafilter thread from a few years ago that found that a small amount of alcohol overcame procrastination:

http://ask.metafilter.com/22924/Why-does-alcohol-overcome-my...

It's probably time to start studying these kinds of things as genuinely biological phenomena.

mmaunder2• 15 years ago

You've just covered my four tools to overcome a slump. I've coded when buzzed. The trick is to not commit and diff the next morning. [Looks like you edited and removed caffeine and "loud thumping music". I recommend streaming ah.fm for the latter]

splicer• 15 years ago

Or, use Git and make a ton of commits locally, then diff in the morning ;)

ramanujan2• 15 years ago

Yes, for me personally caffeine and loud music also work. Didn't have a cite, which is why I removed it.

But: next time I feel like procrastinating, might self-prescribe a Red Bull with vodka plus some music at 120bpm. Let's see what happens.

light3• 15 years ago

Hey this is interesting, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_sugar: "Intake of alcohol causes an initial surge in blood sugar, and later tends to cause levels to fall. Also, certain drugs can increase or decrease glucose levels."

freemarketteddy7• 15 years ago

In addition to all the four in this thread(glucose,alcohol,music and caffeine)...another tool and perhaps the most effective immediately....Adderall.

(Warning:I am not a doctor,and you must fully understand the side effects before using even a mild amphetamine)

prawn4• 15 years ago

I use No Doz and find that it just makes me procrastinate at incredible speed.

code_duck3• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, on the of the most prominent side effects of amphetamines is tolerance and habituation, then a massive crash in the other direction that can last weeks or months when you stop taking it. I generally find stimulants take more out of me than they give.

philwelch• 15 years ago

On Paul Erdos:

"After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[12] Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use."

aaronbrethorst• 15 years ago

I write my best code at the bar around the corner from my apartment, where I can get free wifi. Well, for the first hour, at least.

freemarketteddy7• 15 years ago

You just convinced me to try working from the local dive bar!

code_duck3• 15 years ago

I feel like there's something bio-psychological about this too, based on how I feel all the time.

freemarketteddy7• 15 years ago

yes...and thats why regular exercise helps a lot!...the body and mind are more inter-dependent than we think!

AndrewDucker• 15 years ago

Now there's something that's going to strongly affect dieting...

radu_floricica• 15 years ago

That research eventually turned into a great book: http://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Human...

Probably the most useful bit or research (also described much less technically in that book) is this:http://books.google.com/books?id=7CeE67IrVDUC&pg=PA130&#...

WickyNilliams5• 15 years ago

One drug that definitely doesn't help is cannabis. As a habitual smoker for over ten years I know this all too well. As of late I've started wondering whether the real damage of cannabis is not in it's health consequences but in it's ability to completely demotivate. As a complete coincidence I actually started writing a poem about this last night:

Procrastination was higher on my to-do list, Than achieving all the things that I otherwise wished. Aspiration blew motivation a farewell kiss, And said a sad goodbye, "you will be missed"

FrojoS• 15 years ago

Isn't this knowledge very common? I think every second weed joke is about how you're not motivated to accomplish anything.

mannicken3• 15 years ago

I think you were using cannabis as an excuse and perhaps mis-dosing yourself. Yeah, if you smoke a gram or two per day, it will probably make you a couch potato. Just like if you take enough opiates you'll lay unconscious and die.

But I think in timely administered, individual-dependent dosages the sativa enhances concentration and imagination/visualization skills, not to mention relieves depression and pain. And it's not habit-forming!

I can't underestimate how paralyzing depression can be, fucking with your self-esteem and making you stay at home for weeks. Depression is extremely anti-motivational. Severe depression leads to suicide and that definitely does not make a person reach his true potential.

Now, depression is linked to HIGH DOSES of cannabis in here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071023183937.ht... ("Cannabis: Potent Anti-Depressant In Low Doses, Worsens Depression At High Doses").

Now I'm wondering if they got the demotivational syndrom from high-volume smokers, basically diagnosing them with cannabis-induced depression.

captainaj• 15 years ago

Lack of motivation to do what's important? or lack of priority list.

TGJ• 15 years ago

I could die any minute. I should enjoy myself now.

vanni• 15 years ago

> (...) human motivation is heavily influenced by expectations of how imminent the reward is perceived to be.

Think to startup solopreneurs: their reward is far in time and uncertain. So they often and periodically have motivation drops.

This is why I'm working on a productivity-focused community for startup founders and would-be ones, full of mechanisms that will try to leverage human cognition weaknesses:

http://asaclock.com

corroded• 15 years ago

I could provide a one sentence answer to this that will enlighten you all, but I'll do it later after I finish reading all the articles in the front page.

lightcatcher• 15 years ago

Before reading the content behind this link, I thought for a few minutes about why people procrastinate. I came up with a few reasons:

1. Fewer context switches. A true procrastinator only works on the single next thing they have to get done, so they don't have to switch between tasks as often. Imagine the simplicity of popping tasks off of a priority queue compared to some sort of coroutine setup.

2. Saves work. Occasionally, the things that people have to do get cancelled. The procrastinator never has to do these things that got cancelled at the last minute, while the person who works ahead does.

3. Some kinds of work are easier later. Particularly in collaborative environments, getting things done is much easier when other people have already done some/most of the hard works. Examples of this include my problem sets for school. However, there is less reward for doing things after others. For instance, there is less intrinsic reward for being aided by others than for just doing everything myself on my problem sets, and it is much easier (and much less valuable) to do something like building a light bulb now than it was 100 years ago.

shawndrost• 15 years ago

Another thing that gives you "high level executive functionality": meditation.

fauigerzigerk2• 15 years ago

This theory makes very little sense to me. First of all, I don't believe that it is rational to ignore time or impact on your life.

Would you take 1 dollar today or 10 in a year? I think what matters more than the actual answer is that the choice has zero impact on your life either way. Would you take 1 billion today or 10 billion in a year? Is that even the same question? In terms of supposedly "rational" financial accounting it is, but I think it would be totally irrational for an average person not to think about these choices in completely different terms.

At some point a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference and it would not be rational to act as if this leap didn't exist just because the original quantitative model is unsuitable to account for it. I believe nonlinearity in things like these is the core of what we call intelligence and calling it irrational is nonsense. (Not sure if that theory does that, but it sounds like it might)

The other example they give, studying for an exam earlier or keep playing a game is a different matter altogether. It's a multi factor optimization and there is no way to transform it to a single factor problem (unlike the financial example). Is the pleasure gained from playing the game worth more or less than reducing stress and risk ahead of the exam? On what scale should that be determined?

andylei2• 15 years ago

> I don't believe that it is rational to ignore time

It's not. The question is how you factor time into your discounting. Take the $1 vs $10 example. There are several risk factors at play here, and we can discount for each of them.

First is the time value of money. Let's be generous and give you a 5% risk free rate of return. That $10 is now worth about $9.50.

Next is just the default risk. What if the guy asking you the question doesn't pay in a year? This risk, however, is artificial. We can modify the experiment to compensate for it: the guy can put it in an escrow account guaranteed to pay you in a year. No discount.

Catastrophe risk: what if the bank underwriting the escrow account goes under / what if the entire banking system is destroyed / what if dollars are no longer valuable / what if I'm too dead to enjoy the dollars? Let's be generous and say the combined possibility that some catastrophe will render the $9.50 worthless to you is 20%. Now the money is worth about $7.6.

Now the question is, what is this money actual worth to you in terms of utility. Suppose your total wealth was $100,000. $1 is 0.0001% of your wealth. The $7.6 is 7.6 times that value. That means that in order for the $7.6 to have a smaller impact on your life than the $1, your wealth would have to increase by over 7.6 times in the next year. If you're in a situation where the probability that your overall wealth will increase by over 7.6 times in the next year, then your decision to take the dollar now is likely rational. If not, your decision is not utility maximizing (and thus irrational).

fauigerzigerk2• 15 years ago

The problem with your concept of utility maximization is that utility is subjective and non linear. Non linear is not the same as irrational. For me, 10 billion isn't nearly 10 times as useful as 1 billion. And if I had 10 billion and you offered me another 100 billion for debugging your 1990s style Word Basic macro I wouldn't do it. But all of that would change in an instant if I was in love with a woman who adored men with a net worth of more than 100 billion. Is that irrational? I believe not.

hvass• 15 years ago

I'm surprised nobody has given this link from LessWrong: How to Beat Procrastination: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/

I highly recommend it!

verroq• 15 years ago

Isn't impulsiveness the temptation from the presence of another task with a high value and expectancy?

junto• 15 years ago

Because I'm reading HN!

jakeonthemove• 15 years ago

I find that generalizing in anything related to human intelligence is a mistake - there's just too many variables.

If I had to choose between 1 dollar now and 10 a year later, I'd choose $1 now. If the choice stood between $1 now and $10 a week later, I'd take the $10, since I wouldn't be waiting long and getting $1.40 for each day of waiting. I'm also one of those people who think days and weeks go by too damn fast (I know people who think time is flowing too slow and weeks are like ages to them).

Also, there are a lot of people who'll take Skyrim AND the ice cream NOW, simply because they can or because getting an A is not a priority (and any passing grade would do). I can't decide if that's a choice or just an impulsive action...

bjoernbu• 15 years ago

Is the very first example really true? Would most people really take a dollar now over 10 dollars in a year? I wouldn't (except I need the money right now because otherwise I'd have to turn around, look for an ATM and come back later - which I don't thinks is implied here).

Apart form that I really like the post and the conclusion of the research. Still, I dislike the example and can't imagine this is true for a majority of people.

Why do humans procrastinate?

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