chiang’s LOOP

Wikipedia’s entry for Physical law states that “a law notes that something happens, a theory attempts to deal with why or how it happens.” With that definition in mind, I present the Law of Opposing Procrastinations.

How many people do you know that, when presented with a task such as studying for an exam, writing a paper, or completing a quantum physics problem set, will get out the pencil, books, and paper, fire up the word processor, sit down in the chair, and then promptly get up and start cleaning their room? This is one of the purest forms of procrastination (not to mention one of the more productive ones; wasting hours playing spider solitaire being the canonical example of the class of anti-productive procrastinations).

Probably lots, right? In fact, Room Cleaning is such a well-known natural phenomenon that the 1st weeks of December and May are probably the only time of year you could stop in any random university student’s abode, accidentally drop a glob of peanut butter on the floor, and safely put it back in your mouth without fear of imminent death by asphyxiation resulting from choking on giant Andean-sized dust bunnies. In other words, Wal-Mart probably sees some pretty good sales of Windex and paper towels during finals week.

The Copernican revolution I present is to use the following framework for understanding procrastination. Rather than thinking of procrastination as a required task X and an infinite set of more enjoyable activities Y, instead realize that each element N in Y is actually X_N and that N_N is also an element of Y_N. And finally, X₀ is an element of Y_N.

The Law of Opposing Procrastinations (LOOP) simply says that while attempting to accomplish required task X₀, you will instead first accomplish other tasks X_N through X_M, which are also defined as X₀ in other contexts.

The italicized portions are the keys to understanding the nuances of this natural law. The idea is that when you’re procrastinating on your paper by cleaning your room, you should realize that the only reason that you’re doing the tasks in the wrong order (clean room first, then paper) is because you’ve defined writing your paper as your primary task (X₀). If the situation were reversed, and you were being forced to clean your room by some vague authority-figure with some far-off deadline and the penalty of eviction for non-compliance, you might be tempted to do other things first, like escape to the office to work on that side-project you’ve been thinking about but haven’t yet found the time for.

(side note: much like Newtonian physics which breaks down at the quantum scale, LOOP may suffer the same shortcomings when dealing with very small values of X₀, such as cleaning your room. On a larger scale, such as “remodel your kitchen”, LOOP certainly does apply. I leave this issue for future procrastination researchers to explore.)

So now that we recognize the existence of LOOP, how can we judo this natural law and get it to work in our favor, rather than against us, as is typically the case? Simple — the easiest trick is to always keep a “trump” X₀ in wait, so that the required task at hand is actually X_N. A few examples may help.

Let’s say that you have to write a paper for school. The typical college student would define this task as X₀ and waste hours playing spider solitaire or perhaps Snood (or I suppose text messaging your buddies if you’re a young hipster in this day and age). However, if the student kept another task in reserve as a trump X₀, such as “declaring a major”, “finding a summer internship/job”, or “paying off student loans”, all of a sudden, writing that paper doesn’t seem so bad.

Example two: let’s say that you are a productive member of our society and have a typical office job. Your boss asks you to produce a TPS report. Instead of defining the TPS report as your X₀, try something else to trump it, such as “asking for a raise” or “finding a new job”. See? Easy!

For sufficiently large values of X₀ it may seem difficult at first to find a trump X₀. As an example, suppose that you must sell your house and move. For most people, that is a relatively large value of X₀ such that finding a trump in the same category would be near impossible, as there are few things more disruptive to your life compared to selling your house. Experienced LOOP judo practitioners would transcend categories, and perhaps instead define X₀ as planning their own funeral arrangements, or something similar. The point is that finding an alternate X₀ is always possible, and should be accomplished as soon as possible, so that you may relegate the immediate task at hand to mere X_N status.

So there you have it. Chiang’s LOOP (and how to judo it) explained. This post sponsored by X_N and written while avoiding thinking about work. ;)