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I feel like my best thinking last year was on the topic of grit. Where does grit (seem to) matter? Procrastination.
In the past couple months, I've been working a lot on grad school applications. This is painful and difficult for me. Self-promotion doesn't come very naturally to me--there was a time in my adolescence when it did, but I did too good a job of convincing myself to take the critical view of myself. So now I have to show off, and I want desperately to avoid it.
The popular culture understands counter-productive spirals of self-loathing and avoidance. And indeed these are likely a big part of why many people procrastinate. You feel bad about not doing something, so you try to avoid thinking about it, so you feel worse, so you try harder, and so on.
I have a hypothesis about a different dynamic, and I think it can be framed in a way that helps shed light on other procrastination forces, like the destructive spiral. At the heart of my framing is the Standard. The Standard is the level of quality that you expect of yourself. But it's not what you believe yourself to be capable of--let's call this the Belief, instead--it's what you believe you should be capable of. The Standard is tied to moral judgments about yourself.
I attribute procrastination to having a higher Standard than a Belief. I have a very specific feeling/experience in mind: sitting down to write but rejecting every thought and every sentence on the basis that it's not good enough. It's really a debilitating experience! However good your intentions, however gritty you feel you are being, nothing is ending up on the page. You quickly become convinced your intentions are not good and you are weak in the ways of grit. And whether you try to work or not, you are not working.
Let's assume a deadline. With any deadline, absolute or negotiable, one of two things happens. Either you make the deadline or you miss it. I've experienced both. What determines which it will be? Let's start with this question for the exposition of the model.
Notwithstanding the common assertion among the undergraduate class of the decadent West that they do their best work under pressure, in many areas of life quality of output is well understood to be an increasing fuction of time spent. We understand that the closer you get to the deadline, the less you will accomplish. And this knowledge can operate on either the Standard or the Belief, or, most usually, both.
An utterly rational person effectively doesn't have a "Standard;" if you're really rational, you don't carry around an idea of a moral obligation that impedes you from doing what you want. They only have an estimate of what they can accomplish--you need this in order to be able to plan. A rational person understands that as their time remain declines, the quality of work they can produce will decline, at least after a certain point.
That's not interesting; this post is not about rational people. It's about me. I'm not completely insane: I have an idea that the quality of my work declines if I don't have enough time. But I also have this separate sense of a Standard which I expect of myself. For a number of reasons, my Standard might be a different function of time.
To begin with it, it probably starts out either higher or lower than my Belief. There are few tasks I go into thinking, "Man, this is exactly the level of difficulty for which I am prepared". Much more common are: "Oh, of course I've got this, I know how Excel formulas work" or "Oh crap oh crap how on earth can I possibly present this research when I don't really know anything about the field?". So let's graphically represent confidence and doubt as different y-intercepts for the Standard and the Belief.
On top of that starting place, these functions can often have different shapes. Nothwithstanding what I wrote above, I actually don't think it's so unusual for the Belief to be constant. In fact this makes sense: far enough to the left, time remaining isn't an important variable and we should expect the Standard and the Belief both to be constant.
They might have different shapes because either the Standard or the Belief might begin to drop off earlier than the other. I may be overconfident about my writing and believe I only really need a couple days to write something as good as anything I can produce. But I still might start getting quite nervous and even desperate as the month I budgeted to write this stupid essay becomes a week. And if that desperation manifests itself as willingness to accept a less-good essay, than my Standard is dropping.
Something like that is what I think of as the typical scenario. That's what I noticed happening as I tried to work on my first grad school essays. At a certain point, without worrying that I would really be able to write them well enough, I did get worried about the time remaining and persuaded myself to accept something less polished. Indeed, I said to myself, you can submit total garbage, you just have to write something. And from that point I was able to get to work.
With writing, setting your Standard low is a very good strategy, because once something is written you can still do a lot of work on it. As an aside, these have been the first pieces I've written where I saw a very distinct first phase (or perhaps second after outlining) of "generating raw material" before actually producing a draft. I wrote twice as much as I needed to--freely and without hesitating about quality or relevance--for each one and later cut things away. Carving marble statues probably requires different procrastination management techniques.
There are probably other dynamics. I also do miss deadlines. I think this can happen when your Standard doesn't drop. If I'm faced with doing something very public, like preparing a poster presentation, I'm pretty likely to end up bowing out. However desperate I get, exit seems like a better option than perceived shoddy work. And a lot of the time, my self-doubt makes it feel like anything I do will be shoddy work.
The model may even be a useful framework when extended beyond deadlines. In that case, the interesting bit is probably the relationship between the Standard and the Belief, or their respective relationships with a third variable. Are there projects you never undertake because, in certain domains, you will never be able to accept outcomes at the level you think you can produce them? For instance things that only really seem worth doing if you have mastery? Or are there projects that you will only undertake within a certain time window of conceiving them--or else, for some reason, your aspirations have grown too far beyond your confidence?
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