Things I do to combat procrastination (Part 1 of N) - Reverse exponential backoff
In this series of posts, I’ll jot down the techniques/practices that I use to help myself overcome procrastination. I do not claim to be the originator of these techniques and this is going to be a rag-tag collection of practices that I’ve mostly picked up different places and modified for my own use. My aim here is to organize my thoughts around these techniques to work as a better resource for me and also for any others who might be reading this and can benefit from it. Fair warning, some of them will be very idiosyncratic. Anyway, here’s the first one.
Technique 1: Reverse exponential backoff
Despite the fancy name I’ve given to the method, this idea is quite simple, as it will become clear when I explain it.
We (quite obviously) often procrastinate on tasks which are mentally draining for us: basically the tasks that we dislike. The prospect of sitting at such tasks for a long time can be daunting and one error that I had found myself making while taking on such tasks is that I would set timelines based on not how much I “wanted” to do the task but based on how much time I “should” devote to a task. I would often set targets like “So I’ve been procrastinating on this for a very long time, I’m gonna focus on it for the next 2 hours and finish it!”. The error I would (and still do) often make here is that I would fail to take into account my emotions about the task: 2 hours is an unrealistic target for my emotional mind, given how much it hates the task. The result? “2 hours…..That’s a looong time, eh, not now..” my emotional brain would say and move on to the next youtube video about oddly satisfying japanese woodworking.
Thus the idea behind this technique is to combat this tendency of setting ambitious targets and to make a deal with your emotional side. Here’s how it goes:
1. I take the current time target (say it’s N minutes) that I’ve set for the task and halve it.
2. Then I ask myself, “Can I get myself to do this tasks for N/2 minutes”?
2.1 If the answer is yes,
then I get started on it right away.
2.2 If my feelings still yell out “HELL NO”
then set N = N/2 and go to step 2 (halve the duration again)
I repeat this process until I get a time where my emotional mind can’t reasonably (pun? intended) object to doing that task. For example, I often start off with a task for 30 minutes and reduce it to 15 minutes. Can I do it, mind? Nah. 7.5 minutes? Still nah. 4 minutes? Nope. 2 minutes? Umm, maybe. 1 min? Okay, I guess. So then I set a timer for 1 minute and start working.
Now you might be thinking that this is crazy: what good is 1 minute of working? Well, firstly it’s better than 0 minutes and secondly--and more importantly--I often find myself working past the time the countdown timer interrupts me with its annoying beep. At the time of the beep, I usually I find myself in the middle of a task (since almost no task takes just 1 minute) and feel a tendency to go on (unfinished tasks occupy your mind more than finished tasks), so I “snooze” the timer for the same duration and get working again. Often I end up snoozing the timer multiple times before stopping and thus accomplishing more work than intended. Oops.
Since starting is one of the hardest part when it comes to tasks like these, subsequent iterations become easier and I am able to take on more and more chunks of time until I actually finish the task, in the ideal scenario. Sometimes however, I find that I can’t get myself to “snooze” the timer and even the small duration turned out to be personal hell. In that case I honor my agreement and stop working, take a break and start off again with the same small iota of time I had decided earlier. No cheating with the emotional brain :)