The brain likes routines. But what about when you want to study or do a new hobby? Would it then prefer spending that energy? Or would it rather manipulate you like a puppet master, to sit in a comfy sofa or chair and scroll YouTube, for a period until the procrastination equation tells you to do otherwise?

Let’s talk about the procrastination equation. It’s made by Piers Steel, a scientist who has been studying procrastination his whole career. It goes like this:

$$\frac{Expectancy \times Value}{Impulsiveness \times Delay} = Motivation$$

Lets have chatpgt give a quick explanation:

Yeah, so I have a few examples:

1. (Expectancy) If you believe you won’t finish the assignment today, you procrastinate.

2. (Value) If you don’t find the subject interesting, you procrastinate.

3. (Impulsivity) If you are easily distracted by impulses, like app notifications, thoughts, dopamine, you procrastinate.

4. (Delay) If the deadline is 1 month away, you procrastinate.

So going back to the main point. Our brain likes to preserve energy to stay efficient. What can we do to bypass this natural behavior, because we want to work towards our goals?

I honestly don’t know yet. But what I do know is:

1. We can increase the expectancy of success and value of reward variables.

2. We can decrease our distractability from impulses and deadline variables.

We should ask ourselves how to do this. In my previous blogpost about being "Like a lion” falls into the impulsiveness category.

This should be investigated further. If you have any, please comment them below! Till next time.

I am not saying I want to spend ALL my free time on it, I still want to do the healthy stuff, like investing my time in socializing, eating healthy, and exercising. I just want to spend this time I am wasting, on something meaningful, like my career.

But it’s not fun to grind in your free time. Learning complicated programming frameworks, languages, concepts – it requires so much effort.

I thought the way to become better is to treat your craftsmanship as a hobby. Like for example in gaming I find it enjoyable to grind to become better at the game. But the truth is, games are easy, or I mean... most people play games the easy way, while the pro’s do it the hard way. When I was into League of Legends, I watched a documentary on the pros, and their day consisted of doing boring and intensive drills, and watching a lot of replays... So, if I look at my “grinding”, it actually wasn’t grinding, it is just part of the game... If I wanted to become a top 1% player, I had to be grinding the grinding... If you know what I mean.

Anyways, so, maybe working on becoming better at your craftsmanship isn’t possible by making it a hobby?

I just find it so hard, that on the days with a deadline I can work 10 hours straight, and on free days I work 0 hours. But am I really working 10 hours straight on those days?

Something I learned from the book Deep Work, is that people can only work intensely for between 2 to 4 hours maximum per day. So, there must be something wrong with the working 10 hours straight.

I think, that in those 10 hours 80% is spend on consuming information related to the problems we are solving. Like by reading documentation, googling, discussing, meetings, watching a tutorial. And 20% is using your powerful brain energy on solving the problem.

So, maybe I should alter my perspective to spending most of my time setting up for the grinding by consuming information on the problem I want to solve. And then using the little super brain power that can do the complex puzzling when I have everything set up. Like 80% setting up and 20% actually grinding.

I have no idea if this will result in a burnout, but I am willing to try.

Thank you for reading. And thank you Storm for giving me the motivation to continue blogging!

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.