Procrastination Explained

I have pretty extreme water finding gravity behavior. That is, I hate inefficiency. Alternatively, you could call it laziness. But I hate walking so much that it makes me pained to do it and would much rather bike or scooter. This is the root of all my procrastination solving solutions.

The Current Scene

Much of the dialogue around procrastination reminds me of the health and fitness scene before it was discovered that healthy food (saturated fats, beef, and eggs) actually tasted good and you could eat an unlimited amount of it because it isn’t calories in/out, it’s about how vegetable oils depress metabolism.

They were saying that one should eat a bunch of lean chicken and rice for every meal. People who force themselves to blog X number of words every day are similar. And as a point of reference to any aspiring bloggers out there: I never tracked, scheduled, or planned any of my writing. Thomas Sowell might’ve said something similar.

Ideas just come up naturally like money growing on a tree for me. You can grow your own idea-tree if you spend time deep reading and observing because you’ll see things in different ways and have deeper connections, but comes at the cost of feeling very different from those around you.

Most of the fitness scene revolved around doing what people thought you should do to achieve certain things rather than what felt right. For example, starving yourself and eating salads with no calories to lose weight. People exercise because they think it’s good, without considering whether they’re eating enough so that it’s not catabolic. Some even think that without physical pain, the exercise wasn’t done well.

(note: pretty sure carb loading is outdated, but I forgot what the latest science is around it)

Yet without this impetus our world would be one of mediocrity. If not for the drive to see places that are perceived betters, one might never know excellence.

The most well known articles on procrastination and productivity say that “It seems the Rational Decision-Maker in the procrastinator’s brain is coexisting with a pet—the Instant Gratification Monkey.” or that “To sum it up, procrastination is an escape from stress caused by something we need to do.”

• https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html
• https://www.deprocrastination.co/blog/why-and-how-we-procrastinate

But they are all through the lens of doing more of what you “should do,” rather than more of what you want to do. What would it look like if people just did what they wanted to do?

Why does procrastination happen?

Let’s take a few examples. I don’t play video games when I only have my laptop because downloading a 20GB game is painful. That’s a form of procrastination.

However, just like you can’t trick water, you also can’t easily trick procrastination by being at home and uninstalling the game on the desktop computer, but you might be able to if you move the computer into another person’s room.

Likewise, you might not be able to quit social media by installing a bunch of blocker apps because you’ll get around them, but you might if you move to the PRC where certain sites are censored.

I have a software bug that involves learning a bunch of concurrency features, so I’ve been procrastinating on that (not doing it).

LLMs make me much better at learning. I didn’t really start programming until I was 21 or 22 (though I had made a few scripts before in the past) because going into documentation sites, understanding all the different tools, and trying to figure out my problem took too long.

We see this water finding gravity behavior, or energy minimization, is of key importance. If the activation energy is too high (like installing a 20GB game, using a computer in another person’s room, or bypassing the Great Firewall), then it gets procrastinated.

We can lower activation energy by using LLMs or having a friend work through the problem with us. We can increase our own metabolism through good nutrition choices so that we have more energy to do things. Activation energy to do a task naturally gets lower as you become more skilled at something.

Updating internal state is painful, that is, learning new thoughts or habits. To be honest, I think starting new at something is always difficult, so you’ll always have the pain of doing that. Therefore, try to bear and love pain to the extent that you can.

Personality

For a 15 year old reading an advanced maths textbook, any payoff is far off in the future. The child cannot read. It is not around any people who do advanced maths. It has no direct relevance to more daily pressing needs. Of course the child would go “procrastinate” and kick a soccer ball somewhere. To force the child to recite the advanced maths textbook devoid of all context is basically torture.

Does Stephen Wolfram write his blog and think about the computational complexity of the universe because he’s forcing himself to do it, or because he thinks it’s actually fun and that is what he is naturally drawn to? The answer, of course, is obvious. He’s just having fun but everyone thinks he’s a genius because they are not the types of people that would do that. Einstein, Keynes, and all other sorts of writers were not geniuses. Just people who did what they enjoyed and thought deeply about what is.

I think a lot of misery can be found in some high academic groups because children who are not actually of the “Stephen Wolfram type” are put into a social or parental environment where they are made to be something they are not. They are forced to think about the world, get good grades, and start a company when all they actually want to do is watch TikToks, gossip, and socialize.

Ideally our society has some sort of arrangement for these people to do a simple job in perpetuity and have their basic needs taken care of, where they are a “repeater” rather than “innovator.” But there is still this upward pressure because while they may not have the industrious temperament they nevertheless would like to improve their living situation, fear poverty, and admire wealth.

And then there is the upward pressure of the environment not matching one’s self. Saw this in talented people many times in college: small town to Atlanta, find out Atlanta is bad, then off to coastal cities.

The more developed the local or rural areas are compared to the major areas, the less these power-law dynamics of cramming into cities comes into play. In a rural area you know little, consume little, and are not using your talents fully. It’s probably why mega-cities are the least common in Europe.

For me, I could never get addicted to smoking or alcohol because I found them boring. Some people find them interesting, which is why they get addicted. As a kid, I played games like Farmville, but as I got older I found them low-dimensional and pointless.

That’s also a key feature: you can age out of many addictions or bad habits if you do them enough and get bored of them.

Know yourself, do things, and what is right will reveal itself over time.

Local and global inefficiency

I’m convinced there’s a structural problem where things that look good from a high vantage point such as road planning or architecture leads to great inefficiency on a local level.

Centrally planned new government cities look great from an aerial render, as do stadiums or highway systems. Yet the local feeling is always endless and boring stretches of road as things are too far apart. Compare that to your average Western European city.

I frequently feel inefficiency in houses that I live in: it takes more effort than is necessary to move dishes to the cabinets and it takes effort to constantly go up and down stairs.

However, we can’t say that everyone has to build their own city and manufactures: specialization is what gives all of us high quality goods. If the house I lived in didn’t have a simple and repeatable template for the builders, we would all live in much poorer situations.

We have these inefficiencies of centralization in low quality factory farmed meat and eggs, centrally planned cities, and centrally planned economies.

Yet other centralizations such as computing, airplanes, eletricity, and running water create huge improvements. There are things that are marginally annoying: improperly fitting clothing, for example, but it’s not a big issue.

It appears the main issue is that certain centralizations threaten the most basic of needs: centralized food with its factory-farmed chicken and soy threaten people’s health, centralized planned automotive cities threaten people’s means of resource acquisition and commiunity, centralized information leads to centralized action in food, water, education, which can be bad for the entire country, such as mandating certain water treatments, fortifications, and so on.

Other centralizations are essential, such as the unification of various cities, principalities, or states for common defense. I think these centralizations also need to be distinguished from wars of territorial aggression. There is a case without these wars of territorial aggression and centralization, other societies with peripheral thinking and action would have posed a threat to the core centralization. For the most part, these wars have been completed and any remaining differences are now termed regional rather than unsurmountable differences.

Centralization of transportation now threatens the existence of the United States. Daily commerece is dependent upon roadways and gasoline rather than walking, bicycling, or even mopeds.. Centralized food is unhealthy and unable to reproduce the next generation. Centralized information and a refusal to consider information from the periphery leads to wrong action applied over the entire State.

Now why do these inefficiencies matter? I procrastinate writing if my tools are bad: my Obsidian vault became too bloated or I had to run build scripts for my blog manually. Thus I changed to markdown files in folders in VS Code instead and automated the scripts. I’d procrastinate doing anything in a city if I’d have to drive an hour to the other end of it. You’d procrastinate cutting something if your blade is dull. Life itself is procrastinated when people can’t meet their basic needs.

Thus efficiency is an important life and societal goal in that efficient production of basic needs (that is, some surplus) leads to innovation.

Variable payoff

Social media and news can be addicting because they have variable payoff. Now that reddit is so terrible on the front pages, I almost never look at it, but when it was new (and also when I was younger and knew less things) it had a higher payoff.

Once this came to my awareness, I strove to find ways to get maximum payoff without the waste of time spent. That’s why I created RSS feeds to scrape the top stories from the news rather than reading the paper itself each day and getting sucked in.

It’s not just variable payoff but the fact that it is novel. Novel environments lead to search behaviors in individuals. When there is a natural disaster the first thing people do afterwards is to explore.

How do I know that? Hurricane experience.

Neuroscience

There is something called the Default Mode Network which is when the brain is daydreaming and thinking about social situations. I think this is not a good mode to be in for productivity.

I think as people are young they live in a society and a school around them. As they get older they are more comfortable with being alone and know what they need to do.

Clocks

I also turn off the digital clock on my MacOS menu bar. Clocks make me stressed because I’m constantly thinking about whether I’ve been productive, or if I’ve wasted time, or something else.

If I turn it off it puts me into a mode I was in when I was younger: I just did things for extended periods of time without much attention to my surroundings.

Thoughts on productivity techniques

Now that I think of it the pomodoro technique and co-working is basically a way to force people to eat poop. If it wasn’t boring then people wouldn’t need to devise these tricks.

The solutions I think are:

• Become actually dedicated to your craft so economically productive activity is the same as fun activity
• Leave the artificial forced learning environment caused by universities with hundreds of people in a class and nobody that cares
• Be so good at doing something that it’s just a breeze and you have a surplus of time to have fun

I never got that much out of learning with peers. I feel it’s more like somebody gets ahead in one direction and then tells the map to everyone else (so that they learn, not that they copy), but the progression was always made alone. So many of the attempts of “learning together” means taking a bunch of small steps which can be slower and more inefficient.

If you go to a top high school (read: private and paid) you’ll probably already have these skills. Since I had to start from the bottom (intellectually, socially, financially - basically I had nobody around me doing such things, the only brands I knew to buy things from were Amazon and Walmart and I had never traveled out of my immediate town in the area preceding college despite my family having plenty of opportunity to let me do so) just that I did not realize it until I spent time around people in college at a much more advanced level, I got stuck in Pomodoro Hell for a while where I was bad at everything and had to build skills and nobody had a cohesive enough picture where they could tutor me to a higher level of understanding and everything was painful.

But now once again I feel like I am reaching a point where I am reasonably advanced for the demands asked of me in society and I feel my skills beginning to surpass those I had went to college with despite not having fully begun my career yet and if I keep up this pattern of learning I may surpass those who got a steady job after college and started coasting on their skills.

How to avoid procrastination?

• Know yourself and what you enjoy. Don’t force yourself to be something you’re not. There are many ways of making a living.
• Decrease activation energy from starting tasks with LLMs, learning with others, or accepting the pain of it.
• Experience more things, grow, learn, and develop so that things you once found fun due to youth become boring.
• Understand that search behaviors come from novelty. Understand that is why the news or social media is addictive. Maybe set up RSS feeds for popular sites so you can still stay a bit in the loop.
  • Policy recommendation: governments should censor social media at certain hours for increased productivity and mandate RSS feeds that summarize the day’s news. (If people believe there is something out there to EXPLORE, they will never sit down and BUILD, so a goal of education should be to make sure people experience everything so that they can settle down)
• Turn off the clock. Turn off the timers. Turn off the expectations.