Laziness Does Not Exist

Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control) (Published 2019)

If procrastination isn’t about laziness, then what is it about?

Good and Bad Procrastination

Why Procrastinators Procrastinate

The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.

Procrastination: It's pretty much all in the mind

Scans show differences in the brains of those who love to put things offs compared with the "doers".

Why I Procrastinate

A look into me, my awful procrastination habit, and how I fixed it. (spoiler alert: it was ADHD)

How to Beat Procrastination

Part 2. Where does a procrastinator go wrong and how can you actually improve your procrastination habits?

Every productivity thought I've ever had, as concisely as possible - …

I combed through several years of my private notes and through everything I published on productivity before and tried to summarize all of it in this post. If you’re unproductive right now Here’s what you should do if you’ve been procrastinating for an entire day: Accept that you won’t do anything today and try not to get angry at yourself Set the alarm for the time you will be preparing to go to bed today No, really. Do it. It will take 20 seconds Procrastinate for the …

The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do and What to Do About It

Plus, 3 strategies to help you start beating procrastination now.

Getting Ahead By Being Inefficient

Inefficient does not mean ineffective, and it is certainly not the same as lazy. You get things done – just not in the most effective way possible. You’re a bit sloppy, and use more energy. But don’t feel bad about it. There is real value in not being the best.

How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model - Part 2.

In the previous post we covered the B J Fogg model of behavior: Behavior = Motivation * Ability * Prompt

Self-Control and Optimal Goals: A Theoretical Analysis

Consumers set goals to achieve a variety of objectives such as losing weight, saving for retirement, and achieving better health. A large body of literature in psychology and consumer behavior shows that goals can help consumers achieve these objectives. However, there is almost no research that examines how we should set optimal goals. The purpose of this paper is to develop a parsimonious framework that examines how goals can help performance and how we should set optimal goals. We use the literature on hyperbolic discounting to model these issues. Our results show that goals can often increase performance but can also sometimes encourage procrastination. We show that some goals are worse than having no goals, even when the goals are achieved and the consumer exerts more effort because of the goal. We also find that the presence of goals can lead to myopic consumers behaving as if they were hyperopic. Our results also show that the most difficult goals should be assigned to consumers with moderate levels of motivation and self-control problems. We also find that it is sometimes optimal to set goals that are never achieved.

How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model

B J Fogg is a Stanford professor who came up with a simple model of behavior that helps us understand why we take action or not take action at any given moment.

It’s the Effort That Counts: The Effect of Self-Control on Goal Progress Perceptions

Does the amount of self-control consumers must exert to choose a goal-consistent action influence their perceptions of goal progress? For example, if you choose to go to the gym when one of your favorite TV shows is on (vs. when nothing interesting is on TV), do you perceive that you have made a differential amount of progress toward your goal, despite completing the exact same workout? In eight studies (N = 7,515), the authors demonstrate that consumers perceive that they have made more progress on their goals when more (vs. less) self-control is required to choose to complete an identical goal-consistent task. This is because when consumers exert more (vs. less) self-control to choose a goal-consistent task over the goal-inconsistent alternatives, they infer higher commitment to the goal. The higher inferred commitment, in turn, leads consumers to perceive that future goal pursuit will be easier. The authors demonstrate this effect across a variety of tasks and means of exerting self-control, as well as with both hypothetical scenarios and real-behavior studies.

Efficiency is the Enemy

If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it.

The peril of laziness lost | The Observation Deck

In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris: If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have defined a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine. To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste. Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.

Why efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better | Psyche Ideas

The urge to do everything faster and better is risky. Far wiser to do what’s good enough for the range of possible futures