How can we overcome procrastination?
As university professor procrastination is one of my favorite thing of course. Because I view it everytime and every semester, I see the good intensions of my students and toward the end, I see you know dead relatives and fevers, and all kinds of a creative excuses. So—and procrastination it is not just about procrastination it is about a fundamental dilemma between what is good for us now and what is good for us in the long term.
So, right now I feel like watching television not working. So I delay work for tomorrow. And, tomorrow comes, I again feel like television and not to working I delay it again. That is the same thing about savings, about healthcare it is the same thing about drug abuse. I want to do what is fun now, not what necessarily good for the future.
So, one year—actually a couple of years, I offer the following treatment to my students. I said this semester, you owe me three papers. You can hand it to me anytime you want. But you have to commit today to when you are going to submit each of them. If you are late, you will lose a point or grade for each day you are late. So, there is a huge penalty for that. And now, please submit your dates.
Now, what would the rational students do? The rational student would say, I will submit everything at the end. I can always submit early there is not a problem. Why I should commit to this costly, potentially costly deadline?
But what if a student know that they have a self-control problem. And, if they keep all that papers to the end, this last week of the semester will just be hell, right? They will not be able to sleep, they produce bad work and so on.
If the students know that they have self-control problem, and they understand it. They might, pre-commit to earlier space deadline, and they might actually do better.
And, the experiments we have done in this show that this is the case. When you give people a mechanism to do it they actually do it better. Now, it is interesting that in the years after that, I have given students in my class the paper. Nobody is ever come to me and say, professor we are early, can you please make the deadlines earlier. And, here is my pre-commitment for this and deduct it.
People on their own behalf do not come and propose this mechanism. But the good news if you give them the mechanism, they seem to be taking it. Think about something like facts forms I am bit sure what is the politically correct way to say it, but people could eat lettuce at home basically for free. But they go to expensive places to forces them to eat lettuce. Why? Because they that in home they will be tempted to do other things.
Now, I do not think that somebody would go to somebody, look I am paying $200.00 a day to take away everything but lettuce. But if we create this mechanism people would recognize it and in some condition, and accept it. And that for me is opportunity for free launches.
And, here is how I view it and in standard economics everything is at equilibrium, everything is perfect. There is no reason to change anything. The world is fine, everybody is pursuing their ideal. In behalf of economics, the sad news is we are rational, we make mistake, we are foolish, myopic, emotional, and so on, and so forth. With this bad news come good news, and the good news is free launches. It means the people are mistaken in myopic and so on, we can also mechanism and solution that would actually get them to behave better. And weight watchers and those kind of things are examples of those 401K are another example of this.
How much money, do you think people would saved, if we left it to people own decision at the end of the month to decide how much they are going to send to the retirement plan, very little. But the fact it comes up automatically from your pay check in the beginning of the month really helps moving their own. And, that is really the easiest way to improve our well being is to understand what your opportunity for free launchers and to encourage businesses, and the government to do more of that.
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