Name: Procrastination: Crash Course Study Skills #6
Uploaded: 2018-02-04T07:34:16.000Z
Duration: 10 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Last week we covered several techniques for improving your ability to focus on your work and resist distractions.

This week we're digging into a related issue, which is in fact the most pernicious problem that perpetually plagues pupils… procrastination.

Nick, I still think that intro needs more alliteration. And cowbell.

Before we dive into specific solutions, it's useful to know why we procrastinate.

Now, we could go deep on the biological battle between your prefrontal cortex and your limbic system, or in a million other directions,

but since our focus is on solving the procrastination problem, one recent explanation that I find to be particularly useful is

Temporal Motivation Theory, which is laid out by Dr. Piers Steele in his book The Procrastination Equation.

This theory suggests that a person's motivation to complete a task or assignment can be represented by – you guessed it – an equation.

Motivation = (Expectancy * Value) / (Impulsiveness * Delay)

Now, while I don't really think all the complexities of human behavior can be boiled down into a neat little equation,

I do think that this Procrastination Equation is a useful mental model for pinpointing the specific causes of our procrastination.

Expectancy is a term that represents how strongly you believe that you're able to complete a task, and it has an inverse correlation with your procrastination.

If you feel competent at what you're doing, your expectancy will be high and that will increase your motivation to get to work.

If the task looks really difficult, though, expectancy will be low and you'll be more likely to procrastinate.

The other place where you'll find that inverse correlation is between procrastination and Value,

which includes the rewards you get for completing the task, as well as how pleasant – or unpleasant – the experience of actually doing it is.

Impulsiveness is how susceptible you are to distractions and, well, impulses to do other things, and it's directly correlated with procrastination.

The less able you are to resist that sudden desire to go check Twitter, the more you're going to put off working on that English paper.

And if you're thinking about going to check Twitter right now, remember:

if you can resist that impulse, you'll actually be strengthening your brain's ability to focus.

Finally, there's Delay, which is the amount of time between now and when you'll get the reward for completing the task.

The longer the delay is, the more you'll tend to procrastinate.

This happens because human beings naturally place far more value on the short-term rather than long-term rewards –

even if those long-term rewards are objectively greater.

For most of human history, this was a helpful bit of brain programming.

If you were a hunter-gatherer living in 10,000 BCE, you had no reason to care about the antelopes you were gonna hunt in 3 years –

all that mattered was the one in front of you right now.

But today, when your success in life depends more on studying for tests and remembering to put money in an IRA than on your antelope-hunting skills,

your brain's hard-wired preference for short-term rewards becomes a hinderance.

It's the main reason why you consistently find yourself cramming for tests the night before;

rationally, you know you should start studying a few weeks in advance, but most of your brain is like, “Eh, is that really necessary?”

And to make matters worse, Delay is the hardest factor in the equation to control, since the time at which we'll get a task's reward is often set in stone.

This is especially true when you're in school, since almost everything has a due date.

It's useful to simply be able to recognize that the delay between now and when you'll reap a task's reward matters a lot when it comes to your procrastination.

And, really, that's the value of the equation as a whole; it's a mental model that makes it easy to pinpoint why you're procrastinating.

If it's because you feel like you're not skilled enough to actually complete the task, then you need to find a way to increase Expectancy.

Or, if you notice that your attention is constantly being pulled in other directions, then it's time to figure out how to decrease your Impulsiveness.

So now let's go over some specific ideas for manipulating those three most malleable factors.

To raise Expectancy you can do several things.

One of the most helpful is to break the task down into smaller sub-tasks.

Doing this allows you to narrow your focus to something that's not nearly as daunting,

and it also lets you more clearly define the specific actions you have to take.

So if you're writing a paper, realize that “write a paper” is a project that can – and should – be broken down.

You've got the research phase, the rough draft phase – which you can break further down into sections, like the intro, arguments, and conclusion –

Once you've defined these actions and know what order to tackle them in, you'll have a much clearer vision of what should be done right now.

Plus, writing the rough draft of an intro paragraph is much easier than trying to write the entire paper all at once.

Another great way to raise Expectancy is to simply ask for help.

While being able to figure things out on your own is definitely a useful skill,

there comes a point when refusing to reach out to someone else only slows you down.

So go to your teacher's office hours, or find a friend to form a study group with.

Now when it comes to improving a task's Value, there are a few things you can do:

1. Improve the actual reward for completing the task

2. Improve the experience of doing the work itself

3. Add additional rewards, or mini-rewards for completing sub-tasks

The best way to improve the first item on the list is to choose work that's more fulfilling to you.

Now, you have some amount of control over this when you're selecting your classes,

and as you move into your career and build up more experience, that amount of control will definitely increase.

However, when you're a student, there are still a ton of required classes and things that you just have to do.

And once you've started, it's pretty difficult to improve the actual reward – it's usually set in stone.

If you finish a math assignment, you'll get the credit for it and you'll improve your math skills. Pretty simple.

But you do have a lot of control over the other two items.

To make the experience of doing the work itself more pleasant, you could choose a study location that you enjoy being in –

like a coffee shop or your favorite spot in the library.

You can also find a good study music playlist, work with a friend, or go for a quick walk beforehand to raise your energy levels before you start.

And additional rewards can further boost your motivation.

There are several ways to create these, including gamification, which is the idea of taking elements from games and applying them to your work.

One of my favorite ways to do this is with Habitica, an app that essentially turns productivity into a role-playing game.

Habitica takes all the elements that make RPGs like Pokemon and Final Fantasy so addicting

– leveling up, experience points, gear – and it applies them to real life.

I use Habitica as a tool for sticking to my morning routine and making sure I work out enough,

but there's also a to-do list function, which you can use for individual assignments and tasks.

Now, if you don't want to do that, you can keep things simpler by just setting up small rewards for finishing sub-tasks –

like letting yourself watch a movie or go out with friends after you finish taking notes on a couple of sources for that research paper you're working on.

And it's here that I want to talk about the concept of low-density fun vs. high-density fun.

See, a lot of students feel like they have too much work to ever let themselves do anything fun that takes a significant amount of time.

Maybe you've had these kinds of thoughts yourself, as well.

You think, “Man, I'd really love to play Horizon Zero Dawn right now, but I should really use that time to study.”

The irony is that these same students who are constantly denying themselves that high-density fun

are also spending a lot of time checking Facebook, or picking new outfits for their Bitmoji avatars, or browsing dank memes.

These things represent low-density fun; they're more attractive than doing work, and it's easy to convince yourself that you're only gonna do them for 5 minutes.

But inevitably you do end up spending a ton of time on them –

after all, these websites and apps are literally designed from the ground up to be as addictive as possible – and what's worse, they're not actually fun.

And if you waste all your time on them, you leave no time for actual, high-density fun that can act as a true motivator for finishing your work.

So the counterintuitive tip here is that you NEED to let yourself have this high-density fun.

Give yourself two hours tonight to play that new video game.

Or join that offroad dirtboarding club you've had your eye on.

When you allow yourself to do these things, you create anticipation that can be used as focusing energy for your work.

Now, to be honest, last week's video on Focus and Concentration provided most of the in-depth tips you're gonna need to reducing your tendency to give into distractions.

So today I'm just gonna reiterate that your environment really matters.

If you're studying in a place where you have access to distractions, your attention is more likely to be pulled away by them.