Mindful Moments: Stories and Lessons of Procrastination

Fear plays a big part in procrastinating. According to Burka and Yuen, authors of Procrastination: why you do it, what to do about it, people use procrastination as an oddball way to maintain their sense of self-worth. The thinking goes like this: by procrastinating, we avoid feeling like a failure even when we do fail. “‘Well, I could have done better if I’d started sooner and given myself more time to do it.’” And even extremely successful people can be afraid of failure.

Why such an elaborate ruse to keep oneself prideful? Because when we’re too focused on being judged or even judging our own results then it is easy to become afraid of those results. Or so perfectionist that getting started seems daunting. It can be easier to put something off than start something that could result in failure.

When we think through the consequences of our actions, us humans are what economists call “risk averse“. We’re naturally more concerned with doing badly than we are excited about doing well. Decisions about starting new projects should therefore not be considered as a strictly rational process.

So is that it? Is it inevitable to be paralyzed with fear and never get anything done? Of course not! We can value the work that we do in and of itself. Failure and success are really beside the point. It’s the effort that we put into the work that we do that gets put on the scale at the end of our lives.

And how can we get reasonable feedback about our time management without going down the rabbit hole of cognitive dissonance? Well, that’s why ProcrasDonate‘s free browser add-on uses positive icons as sorting buttons. It’s why we include an unobtrusive (but ever present) procrastination meter at the top of a user’s browser. Together these empowerment tools create a graphical sense of real-time procrastination data without being intimidating. Likewise the weekly updates with uplifting quotes!

Procrastinating to protect our sense of pride? That’s just fear wearing a monkey‘s dress.

One of the best things about working with Lucy is her enthusiasm for work process tools. We’ve tried a number of them working on bilumi, ProcrasDonate, and a couple other projects together. Pivotal Tracker is the tool that sticks. I’ll let her explain why… but let me just say that the smile on her face when she finally surpasses the tool’s expectations is wonderful (and motivating in and of itself.)

“I use Pivotal Tracker (PT) to manage software development. Pivotal Tracker is an online web service. After logging in to our private ProcrasDonate project, I see a prioritized list of stories (high level modules that may contain specific tasks).”

“I found Pivotal Tracker via a Hacker News poll of project management tools… From the get-go I was sucked in… We decided to use it for our big launch… Using the tool exceeded my expectations.”

“Clay and I can add and reorder stories. We can loosely indicate the time to complete a story using “points.” A 1-point story will take less than 4 hours, a 2-point story will take a full day, and so on. We use a fibonacci point scale for stories because PT is just that cool.”

“The list of stories is partitioned into week-long iterations. PT determines how many stories to put in each iteration based on my previous performance. Working full time I tend to complete 10 “points” worth of stories. As my work habits and skills change, the expectations of PT will correspondingly change over time.”

“Pivotal Tracker has expectations. It is my buddy. It graphs how many story points I complete each day from the start of the iteration or release deadline to the end. The burn down graph also shows my expected burn-down rate.”

“For our first release, even when I burned down at a better than linear rate, PT was still quite cautious of my abilities. It still projected a flat burn down rate for the future, expecting me to miss the deadline by weeks. Every day I tried to burn down faster and faster to show it that I could meet deadlines. Of course back then we also added more and more features each day, so I always hovered around linear burn down. I did meet the deadline, and after a few weeks PT’s expectations synchronized with my actual performance. Still, it was super exciting in those first weeks to feel pulled forward by PT’s challenge.”

“PT’s expectations and challenges change as I change, and that makes it more forgiving and less emotional than dealing with a real person. The rewards and punishments are all wrapped up in the graphs, so in the end it is only as motivating as my commitment to the website.”

“PT’s website is excellent, especially because it takes so little effort to use. The stories list and the charts are right there on the main page. Stories are re-ordered using drag-n-drop. Stories are added and edited using AJAX rather than loading a different page. The UI is snappy and flexible, yet stays out of the way. There is a separate project settings page that allows one to enable advanced features such as fibonacci points and checkbox tasks.”

“Not enough peanut butter.”

“I fail PT when I stop using the service or start questioning the track. The fault is mine, but the point of project management software is still to help users have good process. I’m not sure what PT can do in these cases. Being on a team with someone a step outside the actual work is helpful. I suppose PT could know when it’s a good time for me to be using it, and then automatically open itself into a new tab and say something friendly, such as: hey, here’s a challenge, why don’t you burn down this little graph right now!”

“It would also be neat to see a larger timescale of progress shown, possibly on a calendar view. Then we could see when future stories would land given our current work rate, as well as understand past performance.”

“[PT makes me feel] like I have a friendly mentor keeping me on track. Of course, I also had a real person, Clay, managing the stories list and keeping me on track, so I might be mixing up the human and robot influences on my feelings. At the very least, PT’s charts offered excellent feedback on my progress. That kind of feedback can be boring for a human to give, yet make a huge difference in the motivation, focus and peacefulness of a worker.”

“[I would like PT to] provide statistics on my work performance. For example, am I personally accomplishing more over time? How does my performance change in weeks with lots of bugs, or weeks with lots of small point stories? What does my average chart look like? If I was on a team of developers, it might be nice to provide a little competitive motivation, but it would have to be done in the right way so that all sorts of strengths were highlighted, and none of the stats were too important.”

Alicia Volpicelli is one of those people that seems a little bit magic. Like time and space warp to help her excel at everything (and still have time to laugh and chat up a storm at parties.) But her magic is actually the result of a set of considered choices she has made based on quantitative self reflection. She gave birth to Zephyros (Z) a few months ago. So I asked her to explain how that has changed her work habits.

In her statements to follow Alicia mentions an eating disorder that she worked through a couple of years ago. In this case, the recording of her daily eating/exercise habits was a bit too successful and pushed her body into a temporarily unhealthy state. Professional help, family support, and her own introspection brought her to a full recovery. I wanted to explain this so the reader understands that intensive self management is not without its risks. I’ll let Alicia take over from here…

“I am a research engineer at Lincoln Laboratory – specifically, my group and I are researching laser communication. I am on the PAT (pointing, acquiring and tracking) team, where we handle maintaining an optical link with a variety of different components… I get along with everybody… I’m lucky that [the] 2 guys I work with most I really like and respect. I picked the group I’m in based on one of them (he was one of my interviewers).”

“I used to bike to work every day, and play hockey on weekends, and then frisbee at work a few days a week… I don’t quite do *as* much as I used to now that we have Z – I do still play disc and hockey but haven’t been biking to work (for a while I needed to get home quickly to feed him, since he was hard to nurse unless he had just woken up) now he’s a bit easier so I am hoping maybe to get back into doing it a few days a week – but its a good 90min of exercise and time I don’t get to spend with him…”

“I work both at work and at home, so I like to keep my mind on what I’m doing, even if its in the background. I’ve realized errors I’ve made or come up with something new while biking home, or at home knitting, as much as at work.”

“For me, specifically, I work best if I am working on something in the middle of a project. I know I have trouble getting going if its at the start, if there’s a lot of setup to do, etc, so I try and set time aside to do that and not procrastinate. Once everything is in place to just code/debug/take data/etc I do much better, and work much faster and efficiently. I know I’m like this with a new program I have to write – so I’ll use an old program that I *know* won’t work, redo parts of it, compile, and then enter ‘debug’ mode even though it had no prayer of working – I just work better when fixing a broken something than spending too long in a ‘design’ phase. That being said, some design is necessary most times, I just tend to do it after an initial run at something is already done. I just work better that way.”

“I used to keep daily records of eating/exercise but that really contributed to my eating disorder. I now sometimes do [keep records of] exercise but just to see changes – I checked when pregnant to see how much not playing hockey in the winter changed things (not much, since we had a lot of snow and I was xc skiing instead) I checked a few weeks ago too to see where I was at w/ being a mom. So I can tell you pre-momhood I exercised about 10-20 hours a week… during pregnancy I was more like 8-15… Now its only about 6 hours a week, but I do a lot more walking that I don’t count.”

“Heh, I do track Z’s sleep every day though. If I am super cranky or getting sick its easy to see why! (Lots of night awakenings for him = sick momma later) when he’s teething though I know it will pass and it does and I catch up.”

“Lately I feel about a day behind. Its hard to keep up w/ my hobbies/exercise/work/etc with a baby but its not too bad. I still knit a ton, and am exercising an okay amount. I am slacking a bit lately at work and need to fix that, so am trying to do more at home which helps.”

“[My husband] Stos of course is a lot of this, our partnership really works. He has only about 20 hours of work a week – he gets most done on Thursdays when his mom is over helping – and then between 4 and 8pm when I’m home before Z’s bedtime (8) and after Z’s bedtime too. He’s been great w/ getting a lot done so that he’s free weekends so I can play hockey, and sometimes brings Z halfway through so I can breastfeed him right after and not miss a feeding. Our balance really works well, better than I would have ever guessed.”

“I ended up being a pretty hippy-crunchy parent (why am I surprised?! I guess since I thought I wasn’t that *maternal* or something)… I am fine w/ Z still waking multiple times a night and that’s why he’s still in our bed, and I’m fine with that. I don’t want to ‘sleep train’ him or feed him solids before he’s ready or wean him before he’s ready or anything like that. Many folks at work complain about their life ‘before kids’ and how nice and free and this and that it was – and I just don’t do that. Sure it was different, and sure I had more free time, but I don’t have free time now since I *want* to spend it with Z! and to compare seems so silly, life before was fun and everything, but I didn’t have Z, so how could it have been better? just different.”