This may be true for some forms of procrastination, but there's one kind in particular that has a much cleaner and more precise story behind it. Your intuitive task planning system will simply refuse to go down paths that it knows has a reward-to-effort ratio incompatible with long-term flourishing. Instead, it will prune that task planning process in favor of either something known to be of higher value, or some strategy that it believes will help find high-value tasks. Modelling procrastination this way explains several phenomena:
1. The "honeymoon period" of organizational methods. This is simply the period of time where your intuitive task-planning system hasn't figured out that your new organizational method is generating insufficiently rewarding plans. Once you learn that it has you tilting at windmills, the honeymoon "ends" as the system itself gets pruned for something easier or novel enough that it might be more effective.
2. The unreasonable effectiveness of breaking things down into simple steps. Every piece of uncertainty and risk that your plan has to overcome adds to the amount of expected reward necessary to successfully motivate the effort. Listing out simple, well-understood steps significantly reduces the sense of venturing into the unknown, and the lower perceived risk directly affects your short-term willingness to engage in the process.
3. The loop people often get stuck in of closing a social media feed (eg, reddit), only to re-open it 30 seconds later. When you don't have a good short-term plan, finding something interesting is the "default". Competition between social media sites has generated several highly popular super-stimuli for this niche.
1. The "honeymoon period" of organizational methods. This is simply the period of time where your intuitive task-planning system hasn't figured out that your new organizational method is generating insufficiently rewarding plans. Once you learn that it has you tilting at windmills, the honeymoon "ends" as the system itself gets pruned for something easier or novel enough that it might be more effective.
2. The unreasonable effectiveness of breaking things down into simple steps. Every piece of uncertainty and risk that your plan has to overcome adds to the amount of expected reward necessary to successfully motivate the effort. Listing out simple, well-understood steps significantly reduces the sense of venturing into the unknown, and the lower perceived risk directly affects your short-term willingness to engage in the process.
3. The loop people often get stuck in of closing a social media feed (eg, reddit), only to re-open it 30 seconds later. When you don't have a good short-term plan, finding something interesting is the "default". Competition between social media sites has generated several highly popular super-stimuli for this niche.