No Studying After 5pm: Using Parkinson’s Law to Kick Procrastination’s Ass

http://blog.seangransee.com/post/35254966580/no-studying-after-5pm-using-parkinsons-law-to-kick

by seangransee • 14 years ago

163 53 14 years ago

blog.seangransee.com

holograham• 14 years ago

To summarize:

Get adequate sleep and exercise Maximize flow time

rgbrgb2• 14 years ago

This is a terrible summary. The post was about limiting the amount of time you allow yourself to work in order to maximize productivity during work time.

jessepollak• 14 years ago

Are you actually able to get all of your work done by 5pm on a consistent basis? I really like the idea you're promoting (and I may well try it myself), but that seems like a stretch for me. Between 2.5-3.5 hours of class a day, lunch, and the time it takes to go from class to another etc, that would really only leave me 2-3 hours for work every day...I honestly don't think that would be enough even if I could focus 100% for the whole time. Is your experience different?

seangransee5• 14 years ago

Yeah, I actually have been. It seems like a stretch, but being really disciplined has made it possible. Sometimes if I start zoning out in class, I'll start doing some homework instead. Usually that leaves me with around 3-4 hours a day to get stuff done. Then there's the Sunday catch-up day. If I'm really behind on stuff, I'll take most of my Sunday to catch up before the week starts.

(Mostly) following this schedule has made me get everything done at least twice as fast, and given me more time to work on jobs and side-projects.

trentmb• 14 years ago

I'm guessing OP is a lot smarter than me, because I need a lot more time than that to barely understand any of my coursework.

mediocregopher• 14 years ago

YMMV. I'm also working part-time along with full-time school, and my average school day doesn't end till around 3. This ends up with me not home till 8 usually. I would never be able to hold to any kind of schedule like this, since my days vary so wildly, both in amount of school work and work work.

Personally, what keeps me from procrastinating is that at this point of my school career the work I have to do at home is mostly project based, so I actually find most of it somewhat interesting, unlike the busy-work laden gen-ed courses I was in the first two years (when I did have a big problem with procrastination).

rizzom5000• 14 years ago

It's the same story every time someone posts one of these. 1. Be Motivated 2. (optional) Use (1.) to be healthy, and therefore increase your ability to be (1.).

Yep, that's been the story for as long as people have been thinking about success and communicating to others on how success works.

DrorY• 14 years ago

I'm sorry but I can't see how this is applicable for my situation. What kind of studies are you talking about? University (First degree)? Second degree ? High School? I've just started my first year of computer science and mathematics. I study all day long and still don't find time for anything else. Also, try adding a girlfriend or a spouse to the equation. With all the positive sides of it, it adds a lot of distractions during the day that you can't control.

Einherji• 14 years ago

As a first year CompSci student I find this method works remarkably well for me. Workloads are most likely different where you are but I find I'm able to complete most (often not all) of my schoolwork within this time constraint. It's all about productivity. I never even realized how much time I spend on HN or reddit or whatnot when I still have work to do. I have been following this sort of method for a month now although I find I have to break my rules almost every week, I mostly manage to get everything done between 8 and 5. The author makes a good point on sleep too, I can't stress enough how important it is to get a good nights sleep for productivity!

ballstothewalls3• 14 years ago

I doubt you are being productive. You have to isolate yourself from distractions (on a college campus this is most likely people).

If you really are studying with perfect productivity, then you need to ask yourself if you are triaging your time properly. For instance, say you have three tests: one easy, one medium, and one hard. Do you study equal amounts for all of them? Probably not. If you have already spent seven hours studying for the hard test, how much will one more hour help you? Maybe an 85 to and 87? But then if you spent that hour on the medium subject maybe your grade would jump up from an 80 to a 90. Thus your time would better be allocated to the medium test.

There is an economic concept about this though I cannot remember its name. Marginal Returns and the Law of Diminishing Returns, I think.

paulsutter• 14 years ago

Clocks vs alarms is a new insight. During hour-scale procrastination, I do check the clock often. An alarm near the deadline, instead of clock-checking, could force me to start the task immediately because of uncertainty. I'll try it right now.

EDIT: I just tried it. Unable to check a clock, I felt a real urgency to get things done. Very interesting idea.

seangransee5• 14 years ago

Even though that wasn't the main point of this post, that's probably the best part because it's super easy to follow and the benefits come immediately if it works for you.

tudorizer2• 14 years ago

I've tested exactly this last week, for an entire week. Result: I procrastinated like hell. Both in my private life and at my job.

aik• 14 years ago

Interesting. What did you learn from the experience?

boothead• 14 years ago

I'm halfway through the book "The power of habit" at the moment and here's two little titbits I've picked up so far:

1. Habits have a trigger and a reward and you'll get nowhere unless you work within this fact.

Yesterday I had some success, I was trying to fix a dumb programming mistake and getting frustrated. Normally that would trigger my usual behaviour of running off to /r/funny or HN to get my little reward of amusement/knowledge. This time however I was mindful of the loop and said to myself that my reward would be the feeling of fixing it and having the tests pass. It worked. I got my head down, fixed the bug, and felt good about myself.

2. People who successfully adhere to a habit change routine, visualize and practice how to deal with "inflection points" upfront. Inflection points here are those tough spots where you are more vulnerable to regressing to your previous behaviour.

I've been having a bit of trouble lately sticking to my habit of getting up at 5am to work on my own stuff (open source and writing a book). Last night I thought about my alarm going off, feeling the cold outside the duvet and having an overwhelming desire to roll over and go back to sleep and visualized myself just getting straight out of bed. Sure enough, this morning my alarm went off and I was out of bed before I was even fully awake.

I think it's going well, however here I am procrastinating by writing a big post on HN, so YMMV :-)

alexkus• 14 years ago

Having enforced immovable schedules can be very useful for productivity. I doubt I'd have the willpower to ever enforce one upon myself but, luckily, I don't have to.

My wakeup time is determined by a wriggly 2 year old alarm clock that comes in to the bedroom at roughly the same time every morning (~7am) shouting "WAKE UP MUMMY AND DADDY! WHERE'S MY MILK?" (we're working on the pleasantries). Last night my sleep time was determined by same said wriggly 2 year old alarm clock who has a horrible cough/cold combo disrupting her sleep (and ours) throughout most of the night.

I have to leave the office at a certain time in order to pick her up from nursery, no chance of running late or getting someone else to do it. That hard cut-off to the end of my working day is very motivating as I know I don't have any buffer to stay a bit later to finish off something I'd said I'd do by the end of the day.

I got in to the office this morning and within 2 minutes I was programming away where I'd left off the night before. The commute in (cycling[1] usually, train sometimes) is where I do the majority of thinking and planning for the day ahead.

There's very little email where I work and I keep my distractions in check with willpower and Leechblock (not got long left to post this).

I definitely believe that I'm more productive in these 8 hours a day (9 if you include commuting) than I was in the days where I'd be 'working' for 12-14 hours.

1. There's my hour a day exercise too.

loceng2• 14 years ago

I find when I have something I want to go to that has a specific start time, that the anxiety created from it can be a double-edged sword - especially when I start feeling even more productive and feel I could keep working - though then I'll miss the time-sensitive event..

rgbrgb2• 14 years ago

What classes are you in? The labs for my OS class seem to usually take on the order of 20 solid hours per week and my school requires at least 5 classes per semester.

seangransee5• 14 years ago

Machine Learning and Databases (both graduate level courses), plus Physics (electrostatics and magnetism) and Differential Equations.

My school has three trimesters instead of two semesters, so we have 3 terms of 4 classes each.

mindstab• 14 years ago

That must be nice if all you are doing is being a student. I on the other hand don't even get off work till 6. Home by 7, then dinner. If I'm lucky I sit down to study at 8. Lets face it, you really don't realize how good you have it as a student, but your advice isn't terribly useful to the rest of us now in the work force also trying to continue to learn/enhabce/keep up.

tldr: student life has a lot of freedom and perks over working a job, nanananana.

seangransee5• 14 years ago

I'm currently working for two startups and a research lab. My day is just the reverse of yours. Most of my evening/nights are spent doing work for my jobs.

codewright• 14 years ago

It's 11:14 pm my time, and I just got done with work. Legitimate, not-procrastinating, i-work-in-the-startup-salt-mines, since I began this morning...work.

I'm now faced with either getting a little more sleep, getting to read a book series I started recently, trying to get some of my russian studies done, or maybe actually learning something about programming today.

I think I developed more as a person when I was working a 9-5. I never even got to experience the freedom of academics, because I couldn't afford to go to college.

Fuck it, I'll read another article about monad transformers and then pass out.

ilovecomputers• 14 years ago

I'm a student, with afternoon and evening classes. I don't have these freedom and perks. If anything, I look forward to getting a job so I can stop worrying about studying for a test.

jamesaguilar• 14 years ago

I don't see what about this would fail to be useful to someone who had more work to do . . . That is, the focus should be on the technique to use the available time, not the specific time this person chooses to stop.

tylerneylon• 14 years ago

Student life is not always easier than work life. The level of 'freedom and perks' you feel depends more on the culture of your cohort/workplace and your commitment than on being a student vs having a job.

I went from grad school to Google in nyc, where the working culture supported going home by around 6pm. That felt like the opposite of grad school, where I regularly slept in my office.

boatski• 14 years ago

It's crazy, I know, but some students also work.

eLobato• 14 years ago

What was your schedule like during hackNY?

seangransee5• 14 years ago

Go to work approximately 10-6 on weekdays. Some days I would stay a bit longer. I didn't really follow any sort of schedule when I wasn't at the office.

tsahyt• 14 years ago

For me, productivity changes on a day by day basis. There are days when I'm able to stay focused and work from 8am to midnight, taking a half-hour lunch break and a 5 minute break every 3 hours and I actually get a lot done in that time. On other days I work for hours on end on the same thing and won't get it done because I keep procrastinating, checking HN, reddit, whatever.

I think it's a lot about being motivated and excited about what you do. If it feels really interesting, the work is basically doing itself. If I've got other things on my mind (which I have lately), everything feels like a chore. Still have to do it though. The same even applies to my personal projects to a lesser degree.

taubo• 14 years ago

You have some great student life there. I'm 2nd year, full time CS student + working part time(30h/week) as a developer. My day starts at 6.30am and usualy ends at about 1am working/studying all day.

I could only dream about your schedule.

thisone• 14 years ago

quite

I was thinking, wow, at university I had classes from 8am to about 4pm 4 days a week (Wednesday afternoons were "free")

Evenings were spent cracking the books and in the computer lab when I needed access to resources I couldn't get over the network.

Still managed to work part time.

Tasks can expand to fill the allotted time, that's true. But, conversely, if you don't have enough time to contemplate and to fail, you often don't chose the best route. You do what's familiar rather than what's correct.

kanamekun• 14 years ago

Racing to get everything done by 5 pm, telling yourself that you can't work on weekends... hmm, sounds almost exactly like being a parent!

kayoone• 14 years ago

My problem with this is this: "I tell myself that everything has to be done by 5pm"

Thing is, i cant tell myself anything if its simply not true. I cant force myself to get everything done by 5pm because i simply dont have to, i can do it later and i know it even if that means stress and doing it in the last hours.

flebron• 14 years ago

That is true, but if you need a way to rationalize it, it's a Schelling fence[1] you're using on yourself. It doesn't need to be false, you can agree to make it true by pragmatism.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/ase/schelling_fences_on_slippery_slo...

SatvikBeri• 14 years ago

You can force it to be true by signing up for other commitments, e.g. a Martial Arts class or something.

dmarti21• 14 years ago

"I’ve noticed a trend. The ones who are most successful seem to be the ones who value their physical and mental health."

This could be skewed. I'd imagine entrepreneurs who are already successful have the mental peace to order their life and make time for these things. Those without success will be overly concerned with making something work and figure they can deal with physical and mental health when they have achieved success. So the statistics or things you are reading may look like there is a causal relationship between exercise, sleep --> success, but it is really success --> exercise, sleep.

jcfrei• 14 years ago

thanks for the insights. it's always amazing to see in what convulted ways our brains works. if we'd all be completely rational minds we wouldn't need to limit our daily work/study time. yet here you go - and now that the article mentioned it, I actually remember quite a few (academically successful) friends who limit their daily study time as well.

hakanito• 14 years ago

I think it essentially is a question of personal character. I consider myself very lazy and procrastinate all the time, so it would not help to just cover the clocks for me to get things done. I would still procrastine, probably even more.

The change needs to happen on a completely different level to get out of the old routines of laziness and inability to focus. I'm talking about some kind of life-changing experience. For example, people being diagnosed with cancer often makes them appreciate life and spend their time more carefully -- or something else that has an impact on our core values and instincts.

thirdtruck• 14 years ago

From what I can tell from a broad study of self improvement, the idea of personal character reduces to an abstraction of the training and habits that actually define us.

You can think of it as the difference between "that square way over there is green" and "that square is covered in tiny blue and yellow dots, with some a few reds ones for good measure".

Our brain performs that compression of "myriad behaviors to broad categorization" automatically, by the way, so we have to drum that mental compression with conscious effort.

rnernento• 14 years ago

This is cool and all but a lot easier said than done. The author is in college where free time is in abundance. I'm not disparaging the principles but working a full time job, getting 8 hours of sleep, and exercising an hour every day isn't always possible...

freyr2• 14 years ago

Why not?

If you work 9 hours a day, exercise for an hour, commute for an hour, and sleep 8 hours, you're left with 5 hours every day.

Real-world tasks that fill those remaining 5 hours - Showering and getting dressed - Working overtime - Eating meals - Random errands and appointments - Shopping for food and preparing meals (could be off-loaded to the weekend)

It seems like you should be able to cram that stuff into 5 hours a day.

I think another factor the OP doesn't factor is time spent with a significant other. This varies from relationship to relationship, or family to family, but the expectations to spend time together can be quite high, and that can cut into personal productivity.

icebraining• 14 years ago

So, no parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends and others that may regularly need your help or just your company?

chatmasta• 14 years ago

This is great, and honestly I've found the same. I'm actually taking this term off from school to work on my business while remaining on campus. I also need to follow a pretty rigorous exercise schedule as I'm on the varsity track team.

I've found that achieving a consistent sleep and exercise schedule has been extremely difficult without any real commitments in the morning. I think one of the best things you can do to stick to a schedule is to commit yourself to something at 9am every morning.

That said -- the evenings are hard not to indulge. Weed and alcohol are pretty hard to resist... got any tips for that? :)

freyr2• 14 years ago

> Weed and alcohol are pretty hard to resist... got any tips for that?

Get some self control.

willismichael• 14 years ago

That's easier said than done. There needs to be a mechanism to reinforce said "self control". It's not good enough to just repeatedly tell yourself "I'm going to do better" (Although that is a good first step). I don't have any magic answers here, but willpower alone is not enough to change habits.

ballstothewalls3• 14 years ago

Hang out with people who don't like weed and alcohol.

stephengillie• 14 years ago

"Hang out with boring people" isn't good advice, because it's very difficult to follow.

Try finding something you'd rather be doing than drinking with people in the evenings. But that's also not very good advice. I'm not sure if there is good advice for this, but I was in a frat...

engtech• 14 years ago

One trick I've always tried to maintain is daily releases, namely that I'll always check in code at the end of the day so that it can run in the smoke tests overnight.

Running stats on our version control, I do about 4000 checkins a year, the next highest is 1000, and most team members average about 300.

That being said, my focus is horrible. Using the pomodoro technique has helped me in the past, there's something about not being allowed to multitask that means you can avoid context switching off of a difficult task to something easier (eg: the coding equivalent to cleaning off your desk).

My other problem is a willingness to work overtime. It's one thing to do it for deadlines, but because I internalize monthly deadlines I always have something that I think is so important that it Has To Be Done Now.

taylonr• 14 years ago

I essentially did this throughout my college career. I don't think it was 5pm, though, more often 7pm. What set me off was getting so frustrated one night doing Calculus at 10pm. I tend to need 8+ hours of sleep per night, so by 10 I wasn't in the best mood for studying.

It got easier once I moved out of the dorms. I'd have most (if not all) of my work done by supper and finish up a little bit after. I studied Saturdays but not Sundays. That left my nights open for things like irc or setting Red Hat up on my machine.

I found I was a lot less stressed than my friends that played N64 all day and STARTED studying at 8pm.

No Studying After 5pm: Using Parkinson’s Law to Kick Procrastination’s Ass

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