Why procrastination persists.
The root cause of many human problems is a failure to manage discomfort. Procrastination and addictive habits perpetuate because people never learn to manage sudden, often unconscious flashes of discomfort. The diagram below outlines a basic model of procrastination.
For me, this looked like:
Open inbox and read email ⇒ flash of dread, feeling overwhelmed and lethargic ⇒ Think: “this message is going to take 30 minutes to respond to” ⇒ Create rationalisation: “I need to be more alert to write a good response, I’ll only waste time trying to respond now” ⇒ move onto another task ⇒ instant relief, feeling of overwhelm goes away ⇒ The belief that I need high energy to work is strengthened ⇒ procrastination habit reinforced.
This is an extremely common and harmful pattern. Around 20% of people suffer from chronic procrastination (source). The tasks people procrastinate and the underlying causes for their initial discomfort vary from person to person. However, this basic reinforcement mechanism remains the same.
In its extremes, procrastination destroys lives. Great works of art, cures for diseases and entire companies don’t exist because people never learned to overcome this reinforcement loop.
Ubiquitous internet access has made this problem worse. The option to escape discomfort is ever present. Discomfort avoidance is reinforced literally 100s of times a day. Just look at your average number of ‘phone unlocks’ per day for further evidence.
Our best mechanism for combatting this problem is fairly intensive cognitive-behaviour therapy (source). Therapists train their clients to recognise a flash of distress and teach them alternative responses. This creates a new reinforcement loop to combat the maladaptive one.
The problem is that Tik Tok and PornHub are always in your pocket. For every therapy session, there are hundreds of phone pickups. The ratio of reinforcement loops is massively skewed towards unhelpful mechanisms for coping with distress. It just isn’t a fair fight.
While CBT interventions are effective, they are prohibitively expensive and difficult to scale. Additionally, the effect size for these interventions has not improved since the 1980s (source). We want to break this 40-year stagnation in treatment outcomes.
We're aiming to build dramatically more effective treatment for procrastination with zero marginal cost! This could have a massive societal impact. Not only would it reduce unnecessary emotional suffering, it would unblock potential. On the margin, more projects would get completed – be it term papers, works of art or cures for diseases.
