Addicted to Novelty

Pablo Sanderman

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June 6, 2024

Be it watching a youtube short, scrolling through Instagram, or reading a manga, my brain is always seeking the most exciting stuff. I think this is caused because of the novelty bias in my brain.

Here's a short story. Today I had a goal to finish my school assignment. I need to finish a small research paper for one of my subjects. The deadline is in 3 days.

So I had planned and set up 8 hours of uninterrupted work to work on this assignment. After finishing my morning routine, I, you guessed it, started procrastinating. I went to the couch, and started scrolling on youtube shorts. It was fun, I laughed a lot, I know I have enough time to get the assignment done in 3 days I thought to myself.

Well... Yeah it's true that everything is fine, there was no stress. I know I can finish the assignment in a like 3 hours. But I was missing something... I was wasting time procrastinating, instead of doing something useful, like getting better at programming.

Anyways, in the end I only put about 30 minutes into the assignment. I didn't finish it, I will have to work on it tomorrow. Today, I have basically wasted my time watching youtube shorts, listening to music, and reading manga.

Okay, so here's the issue. I just wasted 7 hours and 30 minutes on procrastinating. Instead I should've done something different than the assignment, but still relatable to programming. Something that has some novelty, is exciting, and fun.

So yeah, I decided to deploy this website in like 2 hours with vercel. Because it's novel. I always wanted to do this.

And that assignment wasn't novel, because I have already written dozens of papers for school. It's just the same, it's boring, I hate it.

Interestingly, I think this problem is amplified once you are young. We young adults aren't good at doing boring stuff. And I think adults who are in their forties, have a thicker skin, and are therefore not affected by the lack of novelty in their tasks.

So the lesson learned here is that, we young people need novelty. If you are procrastinating on some school assignment, instead do something novel, but still related to programming. If you want to become a 10x developer, you just gotta put more hours in than everybody else. But that's only possible if you aren't procrastinating.