Standard operating procedure for high school
And grad school.
And experienced professional 😐
Can confirm, am professional and am procrastinating. I know I can bang my work out in like 2-4 hours, so why should I spend all week doing it?
The trick is to spend the other hours of the workweek looking busy like the task is taking the full amount of time.
I definitely have never done this before, no sir, not even once
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I once read someone make a point (more eloquently than me) that procrastination is your brain’s internal bullshit detector. For example, if a lion were to break into your room right now, you would get the fuck up and flee no matter how lazy/neet you may be. Therefore the matters you procrastinate on are a big old bag of hooey (according to your mind).
I procrastinate on cooking and then complain that I’m hungry and there’s no time to make food. I think my brain is broken.
your brain is fully aware that you can just have two handful of nuts and be good for a couple of hours. Just because your brain also believes that you gotta have a proper meal doesn’t matter
I don’t have any nuts in the pantry because I don’t like them. My brain knows this.
A can of Pringles, whatever
Well thanks to my unhelpful brain I’m losing weight from not eating enough
I saw someone make “mashed potatoes” out of Pringles… seriously wondered why. But they did.
I guess one could but… that just sounds expensive and weird-tasting to me.
did it actually mash?
Yeah it actually did, looked slightly less disgusting than I would have expected it to.
Procrastinate long enough and you’ll still be eating them though. Why? Because you haven’t been shopping and it’s wayyy easier than cooking -my brain
I’ll see your handfuls of nuts, and raise you a couple spoonfuls of peanut butter.
It’s a) relatively cheap b) delicious c) easily edible on the fly with a spoon, time constraints be damned. It serves the purpose quite well, and even throws a bit of sugar in there too.
Not exactly a balanced diet, but it does accomplish the goal reasonably effectively and frequently is already in the house.
Also good when not medically quite at 100% - when not at my best, I do everything I can to follow dr. orders, ofc, but sometimes it’s more efficient to throw a tiny bit of sugar at one’s brain in a (relatively) healthier way, than to keep fighting it during recovery.
I try to alternate:
- peanut butter
- banana
- nuts
- cheese
I’m basically a gatherer.
Not missing a meal (or a few even) won’t kill you, try getting to a starving state and then see if your brain lets you park your ass on the couch.
The executive functions are a tiebreak system, in many ways. It balances the various possible options, both benefits and costs, short term and long.
Procrastination is when this system can’t overcome various situational inertias. I tend to think of it akin to a teacher in a classroom. The kids are perfectly capable of raiding a kitchen, when sufficiently hungry. It’s also impossible to keep them focused on maths, when a dozen labrador puppies are released into the classroom. Within its limits however, it’s supposed to turn disparate drives into coherent action.
I have adhd. The teacher is exhausted from a 3 day bender, and someone swiched their coffee to decaf. Avoiding situations that cause a procrastination lockup are a fact of life.
adrenaline is nature’s Adderall.
There’s a Ted talk on this called panic monkey.
I watched it instead of doing an assignment in high school. Made a lot of sense and little difference.
Just looked it up. It’s a talk based on the Wait But Why? blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU
FYI, the name for the thing he’s describing is ADHD. The “rational decision maker” is called executive function.
Glorious, never knew about the post. Thanks
If you leave it till the last minute, it only takes a minute!
executives call a variation this “optimization”. oh it took you four weeks instead of five? do it in four next time. give me a 300,000 dollar bonus please
As a software engineer, the trick is to never tell them it takes four weeks, you promise 5 weeks, procrastinate for 4, and do it in 2, blaming the extra on software being hard. Most execs understand that, and only being a week late is pretty good (my boss adds 2 weeks to all my estimates for his own reporting).
It’s a subtle art that most contractors have perfected. Some even deliver on-time, but that’s dangerous because the exec might catch on (software is never on-time).
Anon used ChatGPT to do the assignment, didn’t they
It’s no way to live.
