Living on the edge

We have a natural instinct to value the present far more heavily than the future. The powerful urge to irrationally favor hedonic choices at the expense of future well-being is well-documented.

I’m aware of it, but like most people, I still live it every day. For example, readers of my blog may know that I’ve recently begun to focus on my health. I completed my physical checkup yesterday morning. I’ve committed to designing a dietary schedule by the end of the month, and I’ve written down four dietary principles in the Health section of this website.

And yet, I still helped myself to my friend’s sugar-encrusted churros when we had Mexican food yesterday. Last night, I had two helpings of white rice to go with Thai curry. When someone proposed Shake Shack for lunch today, I didn’t object. Tonight, I ordered a plate of deep-fried spring rolls to go with my pho at a Vietnamese restaurant.

I’m still eating whatever I want, perhaps because in my mind, I’m living out my last few days of freedom before the promised dietary schedule comes into effect.

Eat the delicious cake now, worry about the consequences later. Watch the movie now, do work later. Buy the new iPhone now, don’t pay until 2022. Buy the car now, pay for it in instalments (ie. later). Western countries’ economies are based around this human shortcoming, fuelling consumerism to its absolute limits. This is disturbingly evidenced by the 56% of American households who are living paycheck to paycheck during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

As for me, the most pressing problem (aside from the diet issue) is my tendency to complete tasks at the last minute. A good example is this blog. Every day, I begin writing in earnest after dinner at approximately 8pm, and generally finish writing and editing my post within three hours. However, there has been a couple of close calls, when I squeaked by and published something 10-15 minutes prior to midnight.

It’s stressful. What if I can’t think of anything to write about? What if inspiration strikes, but I need more than 3-4 hours to research, think, and formulate the post? I’d be stuck, and unable to make good on my commitment to publish one post per day.

Today, I must report, is one of those days. I got home at 9pm, and immediately sat down to write. I had a few ideas for posts noted down, but nothing has quite gelled together into a coherent post. What to do?

Fortunately, I knew this day would come, and saved up an exact post topic (this one) to share with you. As with most challenges originating from the peculiarities of our base tendencies, solutions can be found if we commit to using our rational minds to design them and ensure that they're implemented. The general principles we can use are nothing new - I’ve discussed them before. That said, I'll still share in the section below my exact solution for procrastinating with this blog.

Involve others

In my daily work, I never miss deadlines - even though they tend to be clustered together over a few days in October for Round 1 and January for Round 2 - because I never let myself become overwhelmed by too much work near the end. My trick for doing this is to schedule face-to-face meetings (or video calls) about once a week with each of my students during the application season. This regular cadence ensures that we’re continually producing deliverables and only making minor (rather than major) adjustments to the overall timeline each week.

In the context of this blog, readers such as you keep me honest. If I say publicly on my blog that I’ll do something, it’s much more difficult for me to rationalize away any voluntary failures when I know others are paying attention. Hence, this post. You’re reading it now, but this time it may be mostly for my benefit.

Set very specific rules

With the dietary schedule, I made the mistake of setting a completion date that’s too far away (the end of this month). Aside from pushing back the improvement of my overall health, the distant goal actually gives rise to a competing motivation for eating unhealthily prior to the deadline. A more appropriate deadline and more specific instructions (eg. what will the dietary schedule contain?) would help. (By the way, notice how I'm talking about fixing this problem, but not actually fixing it. Human nature at its best!)

As for this blog, I will fix it. I'll address the procrastination issue in the following way: on Sundays and Mondays (when I don't go to the office), I’ll write two blog posts. I’ll still publish one post per day, and save the other one in a “rainy day repository” to be published later.

To combat procrastination, I’ll commit to finishing the first blog post prior to 6pm, while the second post will be finished prior to midnight as per usual. To avoid simply using up my extra weekend posts as buffers for the following week, I’ll commit to a net gain of at least one unpublished post each week.

In other words, starting from this Sunday, I'll write at least eight blog posts per week, but only publish seven. Onward!