Procrastination and the "extended will."

Interesting article about procrastination in the New Yorker, one which goes into the idea of separate "selves" with different desires.  So, tangentially related to some of the stuff I've written on gluttony.

Here's an excerpt: 

The idea of the divided self, though discomfiting to some, can be liberating in practical terms, because it encourages you to stop thinking about procrastination as something you can beat by just trying harder. Instead, we should rely on what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, in their essay in “The Thief of Time,” call “the extended will”—external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work. A classic illustration of the extended will at work is Ulysses’ decision to have his men bind him to the mast of his ship. Ulysses knows that when he hears the Sirens he will be too weak to resist steering the ship onto the rocks in pursuit of them, so he has his men bind him, thereby forcing him to adhere to his long-term aims. Similarly, Thomas Schelling once said that he would be willing to pay extra in advance for a hotel room without a television in it. Today, problem gamblers write contracts with casinos banning them from the premises. And people who are trying to lose weight or finish a project will sometimes make bets with their friends so that if they don’t deliver on their promise it’ll cost them money. In 2008, a Ph.D. candidate at Chapel Hill wrote software that enables people to shut off their access to the Internet for up to eight hours; the program, called Freedom, now has an estimated seventy-five thousand users.

Not everyone in “The Thief of Time” approves of the reliance on the extended will. Mark D. White advances an idealist argument rooted in Kantian ethics: recognizing procrastination as a failure of will, we should seek to strengthen the will rather than relying on external controls that will allow it to atrophy further. This isn’t a completely fruitless task: much recent research suggests that will power is, in some ways, like a muscle and can be made stronger. The same research, though, also suggests that most of us have a limited amount of will power and that it’s easily exhausted. In one famous study, people who had been asked to restrain themselves from readily available temptation—in this case, a pile of chocolate-chip cookies that they weren’t allowed to touch—had a harder time persisting in a difficult task than people who were allowed to eat the cookies.

Given this tendency, it makes sense that we often rely intuitively on external rules to help ourselves out. A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at M.I.T., did a fascinating experiment examining one of the most basic external tools for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Students in a class were assigned three papers for the semester, and they were given a choice: they could set separate deadlines for when they had to hand in each of the papers or they could hand them all in together at the end of the semester. There was no benefit to handing the papers in early, since they were all going to be graded at semester’s end, and there was a potential cost to setting the deadlines, since if you missed a deadline your grade would be docked. So the rational thing to do was to hand in all the papers at the end of the semester; that way you’d be free to write the papers sooner but not at risk of a penalty if you didn’t get around to it. Yet most of the students chose to set separate deadlines for each paper, precisely because they knew that they were otherwise unlikely to get around to working on the papers early, which meant they ran the risk of not finishing all three by the end of the semester. This is the essence of the extended will: instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.

I like the concept of the "extended will" -- a much more positive term than, say, "crutch" to describe some of the self-control techniques I've developed to deal with gluttony...

Comments

[Beth]

It’s very strange, Erin, yours is one of the first blogs that I began to follow years ago – three, four, five years? How long have you been writing? And I’ve never commented or “outed” myself, even when you gave the opportunity because well, I didn’t know what to say really. I started reading your blog long before you began to address your eating issues and read with avid interest your posts on your eating (and home making and child-rearing). And your no-nonsense, character building approach really meant something to me, you gave particular meaning to weight loss that had been lacking in my perspective (as someone who battles food addiction) and I admire your tenacity and application. (Not to mention your child-birthing manner.)

And well, the thing is, we couldn’t be more different: I’m an atheist with one child and no more ever, birth-controlled up to the eyeballs, pro-choice, mainstream schooling, liberal, living a relatively high life in London. And yet, in spite of our many and varied differences, I have read your blog all these years and it has contributed to the quality of my life and I wanted to thank you for that contribution and for your handiwork and humour and example.

And this article in particular, today and the back-link to the previous article are well-timed missives for me. So thank you for them and for walking a worthy walk (even if I don’t read all of the religious writings that you do – some, but not all, I mean how much of St. Francis de Sales can one atheist take?) May you continue in faith and strength (and in the knowledge that you reach beyond a predictable demographic.)

[bearing]

Beth -
Wow - I'm speechless. Thank you so much, those are very kind words!

Blogging is such a strangely rewarding activity. I started it (in February 2005) without thinking much about what it would turn into -- how much time it would take, whether it would be good for my family, what other activities it might take the place of. Just something fun to do. I still struggle with describing what it has turned into for me. The most surprising pleasure has been the way it has created a (relatively tiny) community of readers here -- some of them also bloggers that I read, and that some of you read -- and I'm occasionally awed to think of all the other tiny interrelated networks of reader-communities gathered around all the other blogs -- many with unpredictable demographics.

There are just so many cool people in the world, and we could meet so many of them, and have great conversations, if we had world enough and time.

Thank you so much for your comment, it means a lot to me. Please comment more! :-)