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Very easy and very hard

Here is something weird.

This semester has been super brutal so far, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into, mostly because it would bore me to write and bore you to read. I sort of am at a point where I can take a breath now, mostly thanks to deciding that it would be okay to colossally fuck up this assignment. Goodbye 15% of my grade. Oh well.

But tonight, and yesterday, I did this thing, where I worked on everything a little bit. Homework in Dan’s class, worked on it for fourty-five minutes. Reading for Wilma’s lab, same. Etc. Making a little bit of progress each day. And suddenly I feel twice as good. Literally. Maybe more. Which means I still feel bad (see the earlier part about not going into the reasons) but I mean, it’s a > 100% improvement; takes less time; produces less worry, and superior results.

So the weird thing is: why don’t I always do this?

For ease of discussion, let’s re-phrase the question: “I know that doing X is good for reasons A, B, C. In fact, it is superior in every significant way to doing Y. And yet I habitually do Y. Even after saying this now, I will, with 90% probability, go back to doing Y again.”

Why is this true? I could write pages and pages about why this is true. I could site economics papers on discount rate. I could cite other papers on the utility of procrastination. I could give you my own personal history in ten volumes, all of which illustrate the same idea. And yet, none of this explanation satisfies me at all.

If anyone has anything wise to say now would be a good time.

This was written by shanusmagnus. Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009, at 6:38 pm. Filed under cat-blog. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.
  • Ah DH, I wish you were here in the flesh, too.
  • Byron's Friend
    We all face this problem bro, you are not alone. (Hence, I am here right now.)

    A fews things that have helped me stay more on track:
    - a passion/joy exists in the things you should be doing
    - reminding yourself daily on where your focus should be (written out)
    - work in short chucks of time (90-120 minutes) and focus (no distractions) on one task. Then take a short (deep breathing, exercise, eat, talk with someone, etc) break to mentally re-energize. Then start up another time segment of focused work.
    - get enough sleep so that enough energy exists to do that which you desire. Without the energy, I don't care how much time I have. My output is poor, it takes longer, and I am more likely to participate in distraction. This is huge for me personally and probably overrides all other points above. The amount of time available is almost meaningless without the personal energy to go with it.

    peace
  • janie
    You know that I have nothing useful to say on this subject and that my solution is acceptance. Accept that you are going to do things half assed, you are never going to study as much or work as hard as you think you should, you are going to perform below your true capabilities, you are going to procrastinate on stupid things that somehow really screw you, you likely are going to waste time doing things that don't matter while you avoid doing things that do, you are never going to do things every day, even if you establish a pattern or a habit you are going to screw it up, you are going to knowingly not do things forever.
    Stop thinking about it, stop trying to make it better and it will free up so much mental space you will end up doing more overall.

    The best solution by far for me is to have something in my life that takes up so much of my time that when I do get time to work I am 800 times more productive in a short period of time than I ever was when I had tons of free time. A side benefit to super needy children. Work is my break now and it couldn't be sweeter even though I still don't get enough done now it really is because I don't have enough time.
  • deerslyr1
    You should really try it. Next time you have a bandage on your leg, or you can just decide to put one on now, try to remove it slowly taking care to preserve every hair. Focus on a little bit at once instead of ripping off the entire thing (like homework?). You'll feel 100% better than if you were to just rip it off and count the number of hairs lost.

    Just remember to post the video of you trying the bandage thing.
  • It's weird how I have no trouble believing that you remove bandages slowly.
    It seems right, somehow.
  • deerslyr1
    Homework is like removing band-aid stuck to a hairy leg. No one wants to drag out the removal process. Surprisingly, I have had good luck removing a bandage slowly from my leg. That could be what you are experiencing here. In the long run though, you are just too busy and don't want to waste time so you just rip the band-aid off.

    Does that make you feel any better, hehe.
  • Eden
    I don't have any words of wisdom, sadly, just observations. I've heard you talk about this many times before -- asking the same questions, coming to the same conclusions, comforting yourself with little "truisms" that you've concocted via equations. But despite saying this or that is "true", you're never fully satisfied that it is, in fact, true. So you ask the same questions again and inevitably come to the same conclusions, sometimes before you've even begun to act in the way that would bring about this conclusion. How does a person get into this kind of exhausting cyclical thinking, and how do they get out? Fuck if I know. I can't do it either. But I think there are clues to be found here, somewhere, in the thinking step.
  • LL Dave B
    You don't have the required leverage on yourself. Reasons A, B, and C may sound good but subconsciously they might not be. So off you go to do Y. What pleasure do you get from doing Y? What pleasure do you get from not doing X? Is the pain of not doing X painful enough?
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