SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Get it over with, or procrastinate? New research explores our decision-making process:
New research from the UBC Sauder School of Business may have figured out why. The study, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, reveals key insights into how excitement, anticipation and dread factor into people's decision-making.
"This stems from the phenomenon known as 'the sign effect'," says the study's author and UBC Sauder assistant professor, David Hardisty. "A person's desire to get positive things right away is stronger than their desire to put off negative ones. However, the timing of when a person wants to handle negative things is less obvious."
Hardisty and his team found that when people look toward positive events in the future, such as an upcoming vacation, they experience pleasure, but also impatience, which makes for a mixed emotional experience.
When it comes to upcoming losses, however, the emotion tends to be all bad -- even if that root canal is far away and life at this moment is good. So rather than postpone those negative events, many prefer to get them out of the way as soon as possible.
"When you're booking a vacation, you're vicariously enjoying the vacation, which is great, but you're also contrasting it with your current situation, which is bad. So you have that mix," says Hardisty. "And for losses, it's more of a unidimensional bad feeling. When you have a dentist's appointment coming up, you don't like thinking about the pain in the dental chair."
Journal Reference
David J. Hardisty, Elke U. Weber. Impatience and Savoring vs. Dread: Asymmetries in Anticipation Explain Consumer Time Preferences for Positive vs. Negative Events, Journal of Consumer Psychology (DOI: 10.1002/jcpy.1169)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @03:00PM (6 children)
Ah my old friend procrastination. "procrastination is the thief of time" is as true today as when it was written to paper. Once you realize you are out of time it is too late.
"get it over with" is the wrong attitude. The attitude you want is 'just a little to start a lot'. Eventually you have built something like the marble machine X.
In life you always strive to improve. Every little bit builds upon the previous little bits to create a sonata of creation. Take for example this https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/05/14/1731231 [soylentnews.org] That took time, effort, and domain knowledge. Procrastination steals from you the ability to create or do anything. Do one small thing and usually other small things can be done as well. For me cleaning the counters in my kitchen seem to motivate me to do other things. I have found a way to move myself towards doing instead of not doing.
If you try to build a 300000 point list of things to do you will never do any of them. You will probably fail. But what if you start with a list of 1 item. Hey I can do that! Oh wait that one item is actually 3 things. Well I can do at least one of those. Yep done. You are 1/3rd the way there to your 1 item goal! Ignore they 'last 90%' saying. You will never start if you pay attention to it at first.
Depression though can get in the way. It makes you feel like nothing will ever get done. Just the simple act of getting up is tedium.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by laserfusion on Saturday June 06 2020, @06:00PM
I agree, and have also noticed that when developing software, the number of features can be doubled just by going from 100% to 110% of the work. Also progress can often be invisible until the work is 98% complete.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Saturday June 06 2020, @08:13PM
The start small with something ridiculously easy sounds a lot like Kaizen.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by darkfeline on Saturday June 06 2020, @10:03PM (1 child)
This isn't new science, but the evolutionary benefit of procrastination is the possibility that a new opportunity comes up or you obtain new information that allows you to take a superior path.
Simple example, you want to buy a foo, but you don't need it right this moment. It is usually better to delay buying the foo until either you need it or there's a sale. It is also possible that you stop wanting to buy a foo or a better version of foo becomes available.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @10:27PM
That can work against you as well.
You may *need* foo. But are so willing to wait for deal you miss opportunities. Trust me procrastination is my friend I know his lies well.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2020, @10:56PM
Procrastination is about control. The only absolute certain action you can always take is none. There can be horrific consequences, but nobody can force you to do anything of you won't cooperate.
The better you are at managing stress, the less procrastination.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday June 07 2020, @12:24AM
If a task is challenging and doesn't have a clear deadline, you can often feel like it's not the best time to tackle it--the brain's great at coming up with reasons why like you're feeling too tired or distracted or haven't done enough planning--so you can start to worry about things that you think will go wrong with it if you do it now (depression, as you mentioned, magnifies these issues). For this, the adage "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good." can be a real savior.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?