“You’re a Genius!”
I was at my friend Andy‘s house the other day, and he kept calling me a genius whenever I noticed some solution to a problem we were facing. This kind of situation came up quite a few times while we were cabling his new 4-core, NVidia-powered, full-res-Crysis-playing, fiber-net-backed, desktop monstrosity.
After being called a genius approximately fifty times, I realized that I should complement people more. To practice, I attempted to reciprocate the compliment at opportune moments. Following my natural instincts for this turned out to be disastrous, since my sense of humor is perhaps my strongest sense of all.
I tried eliminating the humor bias by considering the full set of commendable actions, and choosing to complement each action, as it occurred, with approximately .50 probability. After a few trials, it was painfully obvious that I was just inserting the compliment randomly.
Thinking back to conversations with all the people from Google who I’ve had the honor to problem-solve with, I’m beginning to believe there is some sort of training regimen for the effective use of the phrase “You’re a Genius!”
Todo: Figure out an effective “You’re a Genius!” algorithm.
VinceP 2:15 pm on November 20, 2008 Permalink
Kevin, I just wanted to say thanks for the article. Although short, it strikes right at the heart of procrastination, and I really think it's a common sense approach to what is a VERY stressful problem. Being overwhelmed or bored into inaction is a state that, once it becomes severe, is very hard to shake. The simple solutions you offered are key for me and, along with tracking my time usage in a detailed way (including just being honest and tracking the times I procrastinated), should help me stay out of the inaction tarpit in the future.
Anyone reading this should realize that it might seem silly to have this problem (or to just admit that one has this problem), but if you ever stretch yourself (or even just think about stretching yourself – we all dream), you WILL hit this at some point.
Having just gone through an intense period of this myself, all I can recommend is just being honest about it instead of ashamed. Recognize it for what it is, and make a plan to get out of that state as soon as possible. Letting it fester can actually turn into a “job changing event”, if you know what I mean.
Kevin, a suggestion / though for the article – Your paper didn't address the 'Bored' side of the procrastination graph. One is bored because the perceived difficulty of the tasks is much lower than one's perceived abilities. My suggestion there is to make the boring work interesting by either a) reducing the boring task into chunks like you suggest then make the completion of each chunk a semi-competitive game or b) find a way to automate the boring work by using a more interesting way to work – so for example modifying 100 XML files by hand (for a webmaster for example), would be very boring but learning how to automate that with a short script would be much more fun.
FYI – I found your paper through the links on Wikipedia in the procrastination entry.