I originally published a version of this post on LessWrong as “Strategically Procrastinate as an Anti-Rabbit-Hole Strategy”. It was too Beeminder-relevant not to also be on the Beeminder blog.
The original version of this post was pretty drenched in irony. I started writing it around 6pm, honestly believing it would take a couple hours and I could take the rest of the evening off. The hard deadline was midnight, due to a different commitment device than Beeminder, long story.
Of course I ended up hitting publish six hours later, minutes before midnight. Along the way I fell into a quintessential Wikipedia rabbit hole (see the sidebar below).
Basically, the writing of this post bee-yootifully illustrated its own point, which I’m about to get to. You know how Beeminder is all about using a commitment devices to not procrastinate? Well, fun ironic fact: you can use procrastination itself strategically as a commitment device to cap the amount of time you spend on something.
This is really just a corollary of Parkinson’s law, that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Here’s a cute way to put it, apparently original to Wikipedia:
If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.
Sidebar: A Case of Citogenesis
What was that about “original to Wikipedia”? Wikipedia’s whole thing is to only collect information from cited sources — no original research. Yes, but, sometimes this happens:
I believe that what Wikipedia calls the Stock-Sanford corollary of Parkinson’s law (“If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do”) is a bona fide example of citogenesis. Wikipedia cites a 2013 book which states the so-called Stock-Sanford corollary with no citation of its own. But checking the history of the Wikipedia page, the cute corollary was added a full three years before the book was published — in 2010!
In short, if you don’t want to let yourself spend more than X hours on something, don’t start working on it till X hours before the (hard) deadline. I propose the name just-in-timeboxing for this strategy.
Is this like Structured Procrastination?
No, that’s quite different. Structured Procrastination is an elaborate psychological game you can play with yourself in which you get yourself to do important work by framing it as procrastination on some other supposedly more urgent task — a decoy task. It reminds me a little of setting your clocks 10 minutes fast to trick yourself into being more punctual. I personally hate things like this. Some people think of Beeminder as being in this category — or that it’s even worse than self-trickery, namely, self-blackmail. I don’t think either are fair characterizations. I see it as merely incentive alignment. Like strategically removing your ability to go down fractal rabbit holes all day while writing a blog post because you started it at 9pm and if you don’t hit publish by midnight you’ll be kicked out of Inkhaven.
What about “Strategic Procrastination”?
Sigh, if you google that, you get a lot of platitudes about how it’s good to take breaks and let your subconscious mind process information. I’m sure that’s true, but not at all what we mean.
This is, however, a bit related to the Principle of Delayed Commitment, which we’ve previously blogged about. The short version is that there’s inherent value — as well as cost — in postponing work until it actually needs to get done. The main cost is midjudging and running out of time. The value is that the work may change, including by becoming moot, and doing it early might be wasted effort.
In conclusion, deliberately waiting until a strategically chosen amount of time before a deadline to start working can be perfectly rational, and also meta-rational, by leveraging the panic of a looming deadline in order to focus.
PS: Remember that if you’re nodding along too hard to this advice, you might need to reverse it.
