Managing Procrastination, Part One

Archived Original Version

Published: January 10th, 2017
Newer Version Two Published: January 21st, 2017
Author: Christopher Matthew Cavanaugh

Contents

Understanding Complex Situations

Before any progress can be made with procrastination, one must have a thorough understanding of the problem situation. What are the key aspects of an example of procrastination, and how do these relate to some present inactivity? How can we understand our situation well enough, that we can determine what tools or skills are required? Inability to find a useful tool, or failure to perceive all contributing factors will decrease our chances of breaking free from delaying behavior.

The goal of our first strategy is to build situational awareness, and create tools that are organized in a way we can easily recall. A trick for becoming more aware about a situation is simply to brainstorm, and the method we will use is plain keyword generation. We just want to identify all the important parts we are dealing with, which is more difficult than one would expect. These keywords can be thought of as factors, dimensions, variables, or summary aspects of the situation. Secondly, for any keyword we have, we can list related tools, which are tips, recommendations, principles, and sub-strategies. Organized factors and tools alone provide a simple but powerful method that can be put into immediate action, and can be extended for new circumstances. The problems of situational breadth and depth are addressed strategically, by expanding upon keywords and inserting new tools. We will have a prototype to guide us, and a means to deal with the uniquenesses of new but related issues.

Let us consider the first aspect of the strategy concerning situational awareness. It must be recognized that what we comfortably call a "situation" is poorly understood. A situation is something incredibly abstract; we use the word routinely without seeing all that must come together for the idea to be useful, or even exist linguistically. When we are asked to describe a situation precisely, we find that we cannot do it—ever. This may appear an exaggeration, but it is not, at least not regarding human behavior. The case of a procrastination situation is no different, and we continually fail to capture all its elements when we try to describe it.

Here I would like to make a detour. Casual readers may want to skip this, and proceed directly to the tips and tools at the end. More interested readers should proceed, since it includes preparatory material, and isn't too long. To progress through later parts of this series we will need to have a working understanding of what a situation is. I will introduce a few distinctions and supporting terms. What follows may appear to be a philosophical or metaphysical discussion, but do not be confused—it deals with current practical problems that are unsolved within the sciences. There is no consensus about the best methods of representing interrelated pieces of information in the real world, in data storage or running software (the ultimate destinations for managing information). No model exists in any science that can represent something so abstract as a prototypical situation. That would require a model to represent situational models of any kind— chemical, geographical, psychological, astronomical, or social. It is simply not possible to create such a prototype, and map it to computer systems, at least not yet.

Situations can vary in size, from the smallest and shortest event, to the largest and longest-lasting totality we can think of. We will consider situations as subsets of the whole, which we will call the "universe" or "world," without concern for disagreements among physicists about what these denote. We understand situations in relation to their larger contexts. The largest context can be understood as the collection of all potential data that we have available, from physical raw material. The universe contains all situations, past, present, and future; in this series it is synonymous with "nature". It is just the container that contains everything else, or a master superset, if you approach it logically or mathematically.

It is certain that even a basic instance of procrastination is connected with larger part of the universe than we are prepared to deal with, so we will focus our attention, as we do naturally, on a proximal chunk, that is useful to us. Using our normal conception, we can arrive at the basic methods we use to reduce the physical universe unreflectively. What interests us when we naturally think about situations are:

  1. Relevance
  2. Utility

A situation must include only relevant information: nothing false, and nothing perceived as disconnected. Relevance is partly understood in terms of the second item: usefulness. If something is not useful to understanding a situation, we believe it does not form a part, and we lose interest. A person who has high capacity for understanding situations will lose interest when criteria of relevance and utility fail. We focus our attention to that which feels connected and can be used to our advantage. We expand our situations as we attempt to find additional points of control, for explanation or some other purpose.

There is a difference between the utterly complete "real situation", which is out-there in the physical world, and what we imagine. We will no longer say the word "situation", without prepending clarifiers. We will say "real-situation" or "true-situation" to distinguish from the purely psychological "mental-situation" that relates to it. A "digital-situation" will be that version represented in a computer system, corresponding to both of the above.

Reflecting on a situation for the first time, we can draw from any resources we have accessible in our mind, but not from the world. Most real-situations are not present directly before us as we reflect—they are either in the past, or they continue with us into the future. We are only initially working with what is stored in our brains. Thus we have a mental-world that we use to construct a mental-situation.

Humans are great at forming associations naturally, on the basis of experience in the world, and quickly combine thoughts to form cohesive images of events. We create associative maps of a sort. We generate mental-situations almost immediately after we experience events. We don't have any choice in the process, and when we create these, before we have thought carefully about them, they are of relatively low quality; they are of much higher quality after sustained reflection and processing (or after unconscious processing during restorative sleep). When we retrace events, we make more well-considered associations. So there is a range involved—mental-situations differ in completeness and level of processing, from low to high. When it is highly processed, a mental-situation comes to resemble a more complete model of the real situation. We assume that we can improve our understanding of situations by continuing to reflect on them. Without an ability to do this, we would be ineffective at learning anything complex.

We are constantly stimulated with new experiences, so mental-worlds and mental-situations grow and are refined in parallel. They both develop simultaneously in response to worldly exposure. The mental world is the human brain's analogue of the real-world (after all, our brain includes everything we have learned about the real-world, and we are contained by our mental universe). The mental-situation is the simple analogue to a real-situation.

The completeness of a mental-situation depends on the capabilities of an animal's mind. We know that people range in natural abilities, so some can achieve a better mental-situation than others. For example, in the presence of others who have shared experiences, some are preferred to tell stories over others, and not merely because their versions are more entertaining. When I reminisce with friends, for example, I am known as the storyteller, because it is trusted that I will be accurate and complete (and will not inadvertently fabricate). Conversely, I know others who are unable to tell stories because they will alter them, and usually these people look to me or others for guidance to get it right. Everyone has an interest in cooperatively preserving distortion-free mental-situations.

A computer may soon achieve a higher level of representation, than what can be contained in any animal's mind. In the future it is likely that brains and machines will be combined to construct even higher-fidelity representations of true situations. While this is speculation, it does make sense to think of what near-perfect representation, within its defined limits, would be like. I suspect that representation will always be limited, due to having different media from which to construct representations (versus using worlds to simulate worlds). It is assumed that a complete mental-situation would be in one-to-one correspondence with a real-situation and is basically unchanging once space-time bound. This is important, because we believe we can get closer and closer to the truth, if only we were more capable and had more meticulous information. We accept that in a courtroom, one person may provide a story that is more true than another, and that as a case progresses, things can get more clear and precise. Scientists and historians assume the same. We will not question this assumption because we will see first hand later, that we can understand our own situations better, when we have a better data-model to use as a guide. So we will move on without any controversy over epistemology.

Now that we have our concept of a mental-situation, let's briefly discuss some details about what mental-situations and computer-situations include. To be useful they would include models that correspond to nature, as we have seen, but in what ways? When we look at the world, at real-situations, we naturally separate them into objects, properties, and relationships. We have gotten progressively better at this since we were mostly unable to do it, as infants. A real-situation is exactly the set objects, properties, and relationships we want to capture in mental-storage. The brain models information in unknown ways, but we are certain these ways are extremely useful! This skill is what makes modeling possible to begin with; and we can use strategies for getting better at it, with the proper learning, aids, and world-view. With traditional concepts and science we form taxonomies of knowledge (forming a true conceptual system, organized in a way that matches the world), along with mental images, sounds, and so on.... Experts have not arrived at consensus on how the world should be depicted, and this should be obvious upon reflection concerning refinements and transformations in scientific taxonomies that we've witnessed in just the last 100 years (think of the tree of life before versus now, with the rise of genomics). They are not always presented in hierarchical tree models, but webs, and other visual or logical models. They are also included in database models within functional software systems. This makes computer simulations and games possible, which model reality well enough for us to find them appealing and incredible.

The data-model and running software that is focused on a specific phenomena is a digital-situation, represented by a design and architecture implemented physically in the computer, that represents objects, properties, and relationships. Models created to represent phenomena are diverse. There are many ways of doing it in software, but common methods involve creation of entity reference diagrams, object oriented diagrams, or multi-perspective models using unified modeling language (or other methods). Implementations in software systems typically use relational-databases that are basically familiar data-tables that are tied together with key relationships. These databases (along with the state of running software) provide a snapshot of a state of a digital-situation, which then represents a true-situation. So a situation ends up being represented in a computer by entities/objects that have variables, measured values, and relationships to other objects, just as we would expect. Again, since we find it mentally satisfying, we know there is some correspondence with mental situations, and the world that we can immediately compare it with. Virtual reality can feel just like the world, and since we are fooled, we are certain that it is representing some phenomena correctly.

This concludes our meandering into the complexities of situations. We will return to this topic in later sections and continue to make use of the basic distinctions. We will find this analysis to be excellent for generating other useful ideas. With this we are prepared to discuss the first strategy for handling procrastination.

Using Keywords for Situational Awareness

We can see from the above, the first step is get a fairly well-processed mental-situation, that we could use to generate a detailed written case study. We won't actually be creating a case here, but we need the mental-situation before we can do anything else effectively. To process a situation for the correct data, we ask questions about the various dimensions situations have, and various factors, just like a scientist would when analyzing any phenomenon of interest. Some of these factors and dimensions are common to all situations, and some are specially relevant to procrastination. Ultimately we are talking about objects, properties, and relationships, but for now we are proceeding informally, so we will identify factors without jargon. If we can identify most of these, we will have made key first steps in strategic processing of our real-situation using plain language, which will assist with communication later.

The natural approach to this process is to simply brainstorm using keywords and simple associations. With popularization in social media everyone can recognize the effectiveness of tagging for loose categorization, and its importance for combining information and for searchability on the internet. After we have relevant keywords we can organize and reorganize them to more closely match the structure of the situation we perceive. We may create diagrams to represent our experience from several different perspectives. This extends our natural process of forming associations and using them to organize our understanding of phenomena.

Since we can create keywords without reference to any specific situation, we can get an idea of a prototypical procrastination. We can use this prototype as a schematic to use for understanding future instances. This is little more than learning patterns and applying them in the future. Analyzing a real-situation is much faster and more complete if we start with a list of all dimensions they typically contain, than trying to reconstruct a situation from memory unaided. So we will start with a kind of evolving paradigmatic skeleton of procrastination. We will need to address limitations of generality, since this will create a lense that can distort unique instances, and give the appearance of similarity when perhaps there are critical differences to consider. So we will methodically prune it and extend it as we apply it to new situations (more methodology will be discussed later). We will see that relying on a list is an efficient way to quickly understand a situation in all its parts, and is a starting point for understanding its complexity. It is a great way to prime oneself on associations that one can use to quickly see many aspects of a situation, and to form new associations and find new revelations.

With this we can present our first strategy. Success with procrastination is largely a matter of maximizing our abilities that relate to all factors defining the problem situation. It is little more than finding all the points of control, finding tools and tips for each point, and then becoming experienced controlling and manipulating them. First one works to gain situational awareness by thinking carefully about the topic. After awareness, one can learn to maximize power by quickly accessing the correct tools, and increasing abilities in each domain. The tips and tools below are a starting point for slowly building up strength in each area. By using this strategy, we can better understand our situations and tools that apply. A bulk of the task is just identifying the tools we need to work with, and the skills we need to develop.

Power over procrastination could be measured, in part, by the degree of our awareness of factors and our skill and speed at manipulating anything that can be controlled, without thinking hard about it. With this we can see that the approach is not restricted to procrastination, but to any situation, particularly those that require complex consciousness and diverse controls. The goal, then, in situations like these, is to create a preponderance of resources, support structures, positive environments, habits, thoughts, and anything else that contributes to cases of success, while decreasing level of effort needed.

Factors, in this context, are kept to a personal level, and do not exactly match objects and variables we would choose for scientific investigation, although we could and would use associations like these to generate them. It is worthwhile to be rigorous in model development, but right now we are trying to be useful on a day to day basis, where no measurements are going to be taken. We will not be doing any factor analysis. Basic language simply works best for our goals here. Factors should be easy to recall and make use of, in addition to providing an increasingly powerful mental image of the realities involved. Some aspects can be thought of as true dimensions, while others are keywords that relate to important factors or aspects of the situation. All of these are encompassed within the use of keywords. The desire to categorize and recategorize excessively should be avoided as a waste of time, and here we will prefer usefulness over a well-formed scientific taxonomy, or data-model (we postpone a starting data model for a future part).

Later we will also see how important lists like this are for research. Not only for identifying fields for gathering more information, but for having search terms to use in search engines.

Below is the initial list of factors. It is composed of keywords that I found highly useful in my own struggles. Feedback has taught me that others find them useful as well. It is meant to be tailored and extended for individual experience.

Starter Keywords:

Variants of the keywords are included in parenthesis. Notice that these are little more than especially applicable words and synonyms or equivalent phrases.

There are more, but it would be boring to be too exhaustive here, or in the tool list below. An appendix will be provided with a cheat sheet, containing more examples, at a later time. The main point here is to recognize the many contributing aspects that can be controlled, and to have a finite list that is easy to understand and recall. If a word in the bulleted list doesn't work for you, perhaps you can substitute your own word or a word in parenthesis. Or, use the entire list if that is helpful. The reader should notice, that every bullet point here is clearly related to the experience of procrastination in several ways. This will be obvious as the tools are examined. If some point is not considered, a huge chunk of the strategy would be missing! Since I am not omniscient, I believe other large chunks are missing as well, which means I am probably still being influenced by factors that I have not considered! This is to be expected, since we are so limited, and there is no apparent end to the self-mastery we can obtain, by careful observation and learning. There is more to learn and more to add, and it can be quite exciting to discover and apply something new. Procrastination need not be boring. It is an opportunity for self-discovery.

Tips and Tools for Procrastinating Students

Below are tips that I provided a student who came to me in need (in expanded and edited form). These are informal and conversational. If you are not a student, try to receive this information as a student would. Of course, these apply to more than just the school experience.

These factors and suggestions can be used to gradually evolve into a position where goals tend towards completion naturally. The environment itself can come to invoke the correct feeling and mood, and repeated use of that environment leads to habituation and therefore transformation. If I had to choose a factor that yields the greatest reward, it would be a change of environment and position in that environment. Sticking to the same old places creates the same distractions, cravings, compulsions, and preserves general tendencies. New situations may not be better—one has to select carefully. It is wise to choose the right places and companions for your goals, and commit. If you would like to become like people who are productive, you should seriously consider going to places they would go, and being around people they would choose to be around. Where does your future self spend time? Not the same places! Who will your friends be? The environment played a key role in making you who you are today, and it will make you almost the same person tomorrow if you're not careful. If you are resistant about changing your environment, this will likely slow your progress or stop it entirely. A change of surroundings decreases the chances of reverting to old ways. You should be prepared to change environments routinely to support improvements in motivation that you require.