Entropy Reducers Amalgamated

So an interesting article on procrastination as linked to from (of all places!) Slashdot talks about some research at MIT about how we tend to impose artificial deadlines on ourselves to combat our own known propensity to procrastinate. It discusses the idea of “hyperboilc time discounting”, where people over-weight the value of their own time now versus time later. (If you think about it, this can also be the source of the well-known self-destructiveness of teenagers: “who cares about tomorrow, I’m not going to be getting old”, or “I’ll be old for a lot less time than I’m going to be young”, etc.)

The interesting point the study made is that self-imposing deadlines is not an “optimal” method of assigning deadlines: students in the self-imposed deadlines section did not perform as well as those who had deadlines imposed for them.

I know that, for me, real deadlines always give me a burst of adrenaline and productivity; I’m seldom more productive than Friday afternoon about one hour before sundown...there the deadline is a religious one, and not really “self-imposed” in any meaningful sense.