The Problem Of Pre-Crastination

It's better to go slow in the the right direction than to go fast in the wrong direction. -- Simon Sinek

Pre-Crastination: The Opposite of Procrastination

Why we do some tasks before their time—and why pigeons do, too

By David A. Rosenbaum and Edward A. Wasserman | June 30, 2015

Procrastination is a well-known and serious behavioral problem involving both practical and psychological implications. Taxpayers commonly put off submitting their annual returns until the last minute, risking mathematical errors in their frenzy to file. Lawmakers notoriously dawdle and filibuster before enacting sometimes rash and ill-advised legislation at the eleventh hour. And, students burn the midnight oil to get their term papers submitted before the impending deadline, precluding proper polishing and proofreading. For these reasons, we are cautioned not to procrastinate: Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. He who hesitates is lost. Procrastination is the thief of time.

However, the opposite of procrastination can also be a serious problem — a tendency we call “pre-crastination.” Pre-crastination is the inclination to complete tasks quickly just for the sake of getting things done sooner rather than later. People answer emails immediately rather than carefully contemplating their replies. People pay bills as soon as they arrive, thus failing to collect interest income. And, people grab items when they first enter the grocery store, carry them to the back of the store, pick up more groceries at the back, and then return to the front of the store to pay and exit, thus toting the items farther than necessary. Familiar adages also warn of the hazards of pre-crastinating: Measure twice, cut once. Marry in haste, repent at leisure.Look before you leap.

We first found striking evidence of pre-crastination in a laboratory study exploring the economics of effort. College students were asked to carry one of a pair of buckets: one on the left side of a walkway and one on the right side of the same walkway. The students were instructed to carry whichever bucket seemed easier to take to the end of the walkway. We expected students to choose the bucket closer to the end because it would have to be carried a shorter distance. Surprisingly, they preferred the bucket closer to the starting point, actually carrying it farther. When asked why they did so, most students said something like, “I wanted to get the task done as soon as possible,” even though this choice did not in fact complete the task sooner.

Nine experiments involving more than 250 students failed to reveal what might have been so compelling about picking up the nearer bucket. Although some hidden benefit may await discovery, a simple hypothesis is that getting something done, or coming closer to getting it done, is inherently rewarding. No matter how trivial the achievement, even something as inconsequential as picking up a bucket may serve as its own reward.

Is pre-crastination — exhibited by college students, bill payers, e-mailers, and shoppers — a symptom of our harried lives? The other study from our laboratories suggests it is not: that experiment was done with pigeons. The birds could earn food by pecking a touchscreen three times: first, into a square in the center of the screen; second, into the same square or into a square that randomly appeared to the left or right of it; and third, into a side square after a star appeared within it. Critically, food was given after the final peck regardless of whether the second peck struck the center square or the side square where the star would be presented. The pigeons directed their second peck to the side square, hence moving to the goal position as soon as they could even though there was no obvious or extra reward for doing so. Thus, the pigeons pre-crastinated.

Finding pre-crastination in the pigeon is particularly important because the evolutionary ancestors of pigeons and people went their separate ways 300 million years ago. Following a popular line of thinking in comparative psychology, the fact that both pigeons and people pre-crastinate suggests that this behavioral tendency may have emerged even earlier in phylogeny.

Why would our evolutionary kin have pre-crastinated, and why do we humans and our pigeon contemporaries do so now? It is possible, as suggested above, that pre-crastination amounts to grabbing low-hanging fruit. If grain is nearby or if a bucket is close at hand, then it may be best to get it while it’s available. Another explanation is that completing tasks immediately may relieve working memory. By doing a task right away, you don’t have to remember to do it later; it can be taxing to keep future tasks in mind. Requiring people to delay performance of a task often worsens their performance of it. Yet, we doubt this is the whole story. Lifting a bucket doesn’t tax working memory very much, and it’s not obvious why directing the second peck to the future goal location would reduce the load on the pigeons’ working memory. A simpler account is that task completion is rewarding in and of itself. Tasks that can be completed quickly woo us more than tasks that must delayed. All potential tasks, or their underlying neural circuits, compete for completion. Neural circuits for tasks that get completed may endure longer than neural circuits for tasks that don’t.

Another benefit of completing tasks as soon as possible is to provide us with as much information as possible about the costs and benefits of task-related behaviors. Trial-and-error learning is the most reliable way we discover what does and doesn’t succeed in everyday life. Such learning can even prompt practical behavioral innovations. Given these benefits, it may be better to gain experience from several trials than only a few.

Pre-crastination clearly adds to the challenge of coping with procrastination. Not only must procrastinators start sooner to begin tasks they’d rather defer, but they must also inhibit the urge to complete small, trivial tasks that bring immediate rewards just for being completed. The discovery of pre-crastination may suggest a way to counter the ills of procrastination. Break larger tasks into smaller ones. Such smaller tasks, when completed, will promote a sense of accomplishment, will bring one closer to the final goal, and, via trial-and-error learning, may support the discovery of even more adaptive or innovative ways of behaving.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

David A. Rosenbaum, a professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University, is the author of “It’s a jungle in there: How competition and cooperation in the brain shape the mind” (Oxford University Press, 2014) and co-author of “MATLAB For Behavioral Scientists” (Routledge, 2015). Edward A. Wasserman, a professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, is the co-author of “How Animals See the World” and “Oxford Handbook of Comparative Cognition” (both published by Oxford University Press, 2012).

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Gareth, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, is the series editor of Best American Infographics and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

Be The Change: Take an important task you have to complete and break it into smaller pieces so you can spend enough time making sure you put your best into the work.

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

Some picture quotes ... 0141

Surrender Your Data

Surrender Your Data - Michael Quattrone

Surrender your data, and I will give you wisdom. Empty your bank accounts, and let me show you value. Shut your eyes to entertainment, and open them to beauty. Unplug your high-speed connection and I will connect you to the eternal moment.

Come outside. There is a community waiting to stand in a circle with you and raise its voice. Come outside, and we will walk together to a place we have never been, but can remember. In such a place, the oldest things will be made new by the ripeness of your attention, and all the ancient stories we no longer know will be spoken in tongues of fire and emblazoned on your senses.

Have you tried to think your way into life, or out of it? How has that worked so far? But your merciful heart can forgive you, no matter how long it has been packed away. No matter how many times you denied it, didn’t hear, or pretended not to. That is the heart that brought you here. That is the same generous heart that has opened your life to this moment of choice, this palace of surrender, this precipice of love: your heart that was wild enough to be born into your animal form; your heart that will savage all your false domesticity, and sink its teeth into the flesh of human purpose; the heart that feeds on the blood of life; the heart that gives it back—twofold, tenfold, Godfold—renewed, re-vowed, in the rhythm of the drumbeat that invented time.

This is the choice that is both “now or never” and “now and always.” And all that’s asked of you is to say yes. You must say yes in a way you have not spoken any word before. In a way that breaks both language and silence. Say yes, the oldest prayer to the oldest God; the yes that created everything and holds us still; the yes that only you can say, and only you can hear; the yes that ripples through your body with hunger and pleasure and fear; the yes that will echo, and give you no rest, and will restore you beyond measure; the yes your soul has already spoken; the song that has already moved you; the yes of the name you are given at the gates of heaven, for that is where I am meeting you now.

That is the threshold you are crossing.

About the Author: Michael Quattrone is a singer, songwriter and seeker whose greatest curiosity and most profound learnings are sparked at the threshold between inner life and outward expression. You can learn more at Hearthfire. 

How To Find Your Bliss

Wherever you are --if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. --Joseph Campbell

How to Find Your Bliss: Joseph Campbell on What It Takes to Have a Fulfilling Life

--by Maria Popova, syndicated from brainpickings.org, Jun 05, 2015

“You have to learn to recognize your own depth.”

In 1985, mythologist and writer Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904–October 30, 1987) sat down with legendary interviewer and idea-monger Bill Moyers for a lengthy conversation at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in California, which continued the following year at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The resulting 24 hours of raw footage were edited down to six one-hour episodes and broadcast on PBS in 1988, shortly after Campbell’s death, in what became one of the most popular series in the history of public television.

But Moyers and the team at PBS felt that the unedited conversation, three quarters of which didn’t make it into the television production, was so rich in substance that it merited preservation and public attention. Shortly after the broadcast, the full transcript was published as The Power of Myth (public library) — a dimensional discussion of Campbell’s views on spirituality, psychological archetypes, cultural myths, and the mythology of self. The book is nothing short of secular scripture — a trove of wisdom on the human experience in the canon of such rare masterworks as Thoreau’s journals, Simone Weil’s notebooks, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

As Moyers notes in the introduction, Campbell saw as the greatest human transgression “the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake.” This, perhaps, is why the most rewarding part of the conversation deals with the dictum that has come to encapsulate Campbell’s philosophy on life: “Follow your bliss.” Decades before the screaming tyranny of work/life balance reached its modern crescendo, Campbell put a sympathetic ear to the soul’s cry and identified with enormous elegance and precision the root of our existential dissatisfaction. He tells Moyers:

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

Discerning one’s bliss, Campbell argues, requires what he calls “sacred space” — a space for uninterrupted reflection and unrushed creative work. Far from a mystical idea, this is something that many artists and writers have put into practice by way of their peculiar workspace rituals, as well as something cognitive science has illuminated in exploring the psychology of the perfect daily routine. But Campbell sees past the practical rituals of creativity and into the deeper psychic and spiritual drivers — that profound need for a “bliss station” into which to root ourselves:

[Sacred space] is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.

Two centuries after Kierkegaard admonished against the cowardice of the crowd, Campbell argues that we often lose our way on the path to our bliss station as society’s limiting notions of success peer-pressure us into unimaginative, fail-safe pursuits:

It’s characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.

The majority’s function in relation to the spirit is to try to listen and to open up to someone who’s had an experience beyond that of food, shelter, progeny, and wealth.

Opening up to those more meaningful dimensions of bliss, Campbell insists, is simply a matter of letting your life speak:

We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Mark Strand’s beautiful meditation on the poet’s task of bearing witness to the universe, Campbell points to poets as the most attentive of listeners to the language of bliss:

Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most people are concerned with other things. They get themselves involved in economic and political activities, or get drafted into a war that isn’t the one they’re interested in, and it may be difficult to hold to this umbilical under those circumstances. That is a technique each one has to work out for himself somehow.

But most people living in that realm of what might be called occasional concerns have the capacity that is waiting to be awakened to move to this other field. I know it, I have seen it happen in students.

Looking back on how he arrived at this notion of finding one’s bliss, Campbell touches on the crucial difference between religious faith and secular spirituality:

I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked.

The religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive.

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

The most uncomfortable but essential part of finding your bliss, Campbell argues, is the element of uncertainty — the willingness to, in the timeless words of Rilke, “live the questions” rather than reaching for the ready-made answers:

The adventure is its own reward — but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way… Life can dry up because you’re not off on your own adventure.

There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.

---

This article originally appeared in Brain Pickings and is republished with permission. The author, Maria Popova, is a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, and is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings.

Be The Change: Do something in the spirit of following your bliss today.

Sourced From www.dailygood.org