Category: procrastination

Magic Dots: User Experience (Person 2)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In 2012 I posted about using “magic dots” to get work done. You make a mark on a piece of paper every six minutes you work. The idea derives from the quasi-reinforcement effect of Neuringer and Chung. They found that giving pigeons markers of progress toward food, such as a blackout, doubled how much the pigeons pecked for food — that is, doubled how much they worked.

I found magic dots very helpful. The future will be different from the past was my reaction. (In the future I will get more work done.) So did a reader named Joan. Now a reader named David Johnston tells his experience:

I’m an engineer designing cryptographic digital circuits in microprocessors, which is intellectually challenging but also involves a lot of coding and debugging which requires concentration and attention to detail but is certainly not intellectually challenging. My specialization is random numbers, which even by computer science standards is a very narrow and deep field to specialize in. I don’t know of anyone else who does what I do. My work environment is saturated with sources of interruption which very much gets in the way of getting work done. If you think my employer is getting something wrong in creating an effective workplace for engineers, you would be correct. Procrastination is a big issue for me and I’ve tried various approaches to focus better without great success except for the Japanese music thing described below.

So after reading your article I gave it a try, I set up a timer on my computer (Orzeszek Timer) to beep every six minutes and filled out the dots on each beep.

On my first pass I lasted 2.5 hours before I had a meeting to go to and completed a detailed technical diagram of a circuit I was proposing. The next day I did 5 hours (with a lunch break in between) and was coding up the circuit. I stopped due to a meeting and could have continued. The third day I did not get a chance to focus on code or design, so I managed 0 hours. Then the weekend happened.

This is very much not normal for me. I might do 30 minutes to 1 hour before feeling the need to do something else besides concentrating, like dealing with email or getting a coffee. Getting back to it is not an efficient process since you are typically juggling multiple facts (aka the ‘working set’) pertinent to the problem and getting back in that frame of mind takes time. This is well a well documented aspect of computer programming, where there is a warm up time before the programmer becomes productive and then the productive period is fragile and easily set back to the start by interruptions.

I intend to keep trying this method and I hope it proves to be effective over longer periods because succeeding at my job is a lot less stressful than not succeeding. Obviously the vanishingly small investment required to try it is a big factor in making it easy to choose to try it.

So my initial reaction is that it works. My sense is that there is something important about mentally breaking up progress into chunks. I certainly do that on long tasks, e.g. a long drive ( I might envision it as passing the 10%, 20% etc points as we progress) or recently a game (Ingress – a game you play with a smartphone that requires you get out and walk a lot) where the space between levels doubles. To get to the final level 8 from 7 requires 600,000 points to reach 1.2 million total. Logic would suggest you should just head out and get all the points you can as fast as possible, but that is disheartening because any one day doesn’t make a big dent. By setting a goal of 10,000 per day, that gave me a mental and physical framework that was effective. I knew when to keep going (less than 10,000 points achieved) and I knew when to stop (at 10,000 points and probably 2 miles walking). Roughly 60 days later I got to the highest level.

While working on design, the beep in my ear and reaching to draw a dot or line on graph paper was not enough to knock off my concentration, but the continuing for the next six minutes felt like an achievable goal, much like 10,000 points in Ingress felt like an achievable goal each day, whereas choosing to sit and concentrate for five hours is a non starter, much as trying to battle through 600,000 points in Ingress is a non starter.

Possibly unrelated, but maybe not – I have found that I work well listening to Japanese music on headphones (e.g. Happy End or Tokyo Jihen). I haven’t a clue what the words are and so it seems to not interrupt my coding state of mind in the same way that English language music does. The cadence (3-6 minutes per song) is not that far off the quasi-reinforcement time of 6 minutes that was suggested on your website. Also it blocks out the blathering of people near me in the office. I presume it being Japanese has nothing to do with its efficacy. It is just a language that hits zero of my language processing neurons. Any language would do if the music was good.

If you find the magic dots don’t work for you, I am just as happy to hear about it.

Last Weekend’s Quantified Self Conference

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Last Saturday and Sunday there was an international Quantified Self Conference at Stanford. I attended. In Gary Wolf’s introductory talk, he said there are 70 Quantified Self chapters (New York, London, etc.) and 10,000 members. I was especially impressed because I recently counted about 50 chapters. One new chapter is Quantified Self Beijing. It has its first meeting — in the form of a day-long conference — in nine hours and I haven’t quite finished my talk (“Brain Tracking: Why and How”). Please indulge me while I procrastinate by writing about the Stanford conference.

Here are some things that impressed me:

Office hours. A new type of participation this year was “office hour”, meaning you sit at a table for an hour. My office hour, during which two people showed up, was the most pleasant and informative hour of the whole conference for me. I thank Janet Chang for suggesting I do this.

Robin Barooah used a measure of how much he meditated, which he collected via an app he made, to measure his depression. When he was depressed, he didn’t meditate. Depression is half low mood, half inaction. It is very rare that the inactive side of it is measured. It is so much easier to ask subjects to rate their mood, but this has obvious problems. Robin inadvertently found a way to measure level of activity over long periods of time. He also found that participation in an experiment that tested a PTSD drug caused long-lasting improvement, another idea about depression I’d never heard before. At dinner, Robin told me that his partner, when they’re at a restaurant, has sometimes said “God bless Seth Roberts” for allowing her to eat butter without guilt.

Steve Jonas, from QS Portland, told me that he spent a long time (many weeks) doing some sort of mental test. During one of those weeks, he consumed butter a la Dave Asprey, in coffee. Much later he analyzed the results, computing an average for every week, and noticed that during the week with butter his performance was distinctly better than performance on other weeks. I hope to learn more about this. Steve also gave a talk about learning stuff using spaced repetition. He noticed that learning new stuff increased his curiosity. After he used spaced repetition to learn stuff about Mali, for example, he became more interested in reading news stories about Mali. I think this is an important conclusion about education, the way rote learning and encouragement of curiosity are not opposites but go together, that I have never heard before.

Larry Smarr, a computer science professor at UC San Diego, gave a talk called “Frontiers of Self-Tracking” centered on his Crohn’s disease. I was struck by what was missing from his talk. He began self-tracking before the Crohn’s diagnosis and clearly the self-tracking helped establish the diagnosis. However, you don’t need to self-track to figure out you have Crohn’s disease, roughly everyone who has gotten this diagnosis did not self-track. I couldn’t figure out how much the self-tracking helped. Crohn’s is generally associated with frequent diarrhea, which is exactly the opposite of hard to notice. Larry said nothing about this. Later he talked about massive amounts of personalized genetic data that he was getting. I couldn’t see how this data could possibly help him. Isn’t self-tracking supposed to be helpful? If I had a serious disease, I would want it to be helpful. At the same time, judging from his talk, he seemed to be ignoring the many cases where people have figured out how to better live with their Crohn’s disease. I would have liked to ask Larry about these gaps at his office hour but I had an eye problem that caused me to miss it.

I asked Nick Winter, cofounder of Skritter, what he thought of the recent Ancestral Health Symposium at Harvard (August 2012), which we both attended. He didn’t like it much, he said, but it more than justified itself because Chris Kresser’s talk about iron led him to get his iron checked. It turned out be off-the-charts high. Partly because oysters, partly because of red meat. I think he said he has since donated blood and it came down. I hadn’t previously heard of this danger of eating red meat. Again I discussed with Nick why he found that butter had a bad effect on his cognitive performance, the opposite of what I found. One possibility is that the butter slowed digestion of his lunch, thus reducing glucose in his blood at the time of the cognitive tests. But this does not explain why a certain drug eliminated the effect of butter.

In his talk, Paul Abramson, a quant-friendly San Francisco doctor, said that mainstream medicine is “riddled with undisclosed conflicts of interest”. I hope to learn more about this.

Jon Cousins contributed a neat booklet about what he had learned and not learned from starting Moodscope. What he hadn’t learned was how to make a sustainable business out of it. I suggested to him that he might be able find professors who would apply for grants with him that would use Moodscope as a research tool. The grants would pay Jon a salary and might include money for software development. Mood disorders are a huge health problem — depression is sometimes considered the most costly health problem of all, worldwide — and Moodscope is a new way to do research about them. Paying Jon a salary for a few years would cost much less than assembling a similar-sized sample (Moodscope has thousands of users) from scratch. I wonder how professors who do research on mood disorders will see it.

Magic Dots: Quasi-Reinforcement Helps Get Things Done

Seth Roberts17 Comments

This photo illustrates a method I have used for many years to get work done, usually writing. Every six minutes of work, I make a dot or line. One hour = 10 marks = a box (counting method from Exploratory Data Analysis). I use a stopwatch. I make a mark when I am more than halfway to the goal. If I glance at the clock and it says 4 minutes (more than halfway to 6 minutes), I make a mark. If I glance at the clock and it says 10 minutes (more than halfway to 12 minutes from 6 minutes), I make a mark. I only zero the clock when I take a break. I use one piece of paper per day.

I devised this. It is based on an effect discovered by Allen Neuringer and Shin-Ho Chung called quasi-reinforcement. Neuringer and Chung studied pigeons. They found that if you give a pigeon food every 500 times it pecks a key, it will peck the key slowly (say, 2 pecks/minute). If you give the pigeon a brief flash of light every 20 pecks — a marker that shows it is doing the right thing to get food — it will peck much faster (say, 4 pecks/minute). The flashes of light are quasi-reinforcement, said Neuringer and Chung — they have some but not all of the properties of ordinary reinforcement, such as food. By themselves, the flashes of light don’t interest the pigeon. It won’t peck a key to get them. The amazing thing about this effect is that it doubles how hard the pigeon works without raising its salary.

I noticed improvement — it was easier to write — within about 20 minutes the first time I tried this. I chose six minutes as the unit because shorter times were more distracting and longer times less effective.

I told Gary Wolf about the dots method two years ago and he’s been using it ever since. He says it is good for getting started on something he needs to write. After he gets going, he stops doing it. He uses it as an example of the value of self-tracking. I too find that after I get going on something, I need it less. If I stop, however, I drift backwards toward doing less productive stuff or nothing.

Gary asked me about this a month ago and I started doing it again (instead of percentile feedback). I noticed something I had never noticed before, which was that the system lifted my whole energy level and gave me a “can’t wait to get started” feeling in the morning. This too made it easier to get stuff done. It reminded me of some rat research I’d done. Put a rat in a Skinner box and it will explore for a while. If it doesn’t get any food, after a while (10 minutes?) it will stop exploring and curl up in the middle of the box. However, if I give the rat a pellet of food at random times (at the rate of one pellet/minute), it will keep exploring the box indefinitely. Learning psychologists have emphasized that when you reward an action, you make it more likely. The rat experiment I just described suggests a second effect: when you give reward — at least, when reward is rare — you make all actions more likely. You increase exploration, not just the rewarded response. When I was a young professor I went to a two-week neuroscience program at Dartmouth. It was all lectures. The other attendees were graduate students. I had little in common with them. There was little to do in the town, besides eat Ben & Jerry’s. The next town was 8 miles away. I couldn’t find anything I enjoyed doing. After a week, I had trouble getting out of bed, like the rat curled up in the middle of the Skinner box. A psychiatrist might have said I had major depression. I flew home and was fine.

 

 

 

Procrastination (cont.)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A just-published review article (abstract only) on procrastination, which looks good, and an interesting talk by the author of the review, Piers Steel, a professor of business at the University of Calgary. No mention of an evolutionary explanation.

Update of my earlier post about procrastination: To keep my email In Box un-jammed and my kitchen table unembarrassing, I now realize I must play a few games of Sudoku every day.

Sudoku

Science in Action: Procrastination (results)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

It worked. This became:

My kitchen table a little later

The clearing took about 40 minutes of work and three games of Sudoku. Now to test the broken-windows theory of neatness, which says that things stay decent (say, a few items on a table) so long as the disorder stays below a certain threshold. Below that threshold, a natural tendency keeps things neat. Above that threshold, it malfunctions.

Science in Action: Procrastination

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A month ago I had lunch with Greg Niemeyer, a professor of art at UC Berkeley whose medium is games. His games have appeared in art galleries all over the world. He asked me if games had been studied by psychologists and pointed out some of their psychological properties — the power to make you concentrate for a long time, for example.

This was fascinating. He was so right — games are powerful in several ways. I wondered how that power could be (a) studied and (b) used. My first question was whether games could be a stimulant, like caffeine. I emailed Greg about this; he suggested I try Bejeweled and Sudoku. But I found them tiring — they require concentration. My next idea was that maybe I could use games as a reward. I used to enjoy Tetris and Freecell. If I do X (something I wouldn’t otherwise do), then I get to play a game. This contingency causes me to do X. There are dozens of rewards you could use this way (listening to music, eating a piece of chocolate, etc.); the advantages of games include their number and variety, the care put into them, the lack of satiation (you can play the game many times and it remains pleasant), their harmlessness (if I avoided getting addicted), their low cost, the ready supply (you can play a computer game whenever you have a computer), and the short duration of some of them. The reward for a 5-minute task should not last 4 hours.

I have wondered for a long time about procrastination — what causes it, what to do about it. I like to think I’ve figured out a few things but even so certain things I should do seem to go undone . . . well, forever.

For example, a month ago I had 40-odd emails in my inbox, some a few months old. I never got around to clearing it out. Bejeweled was no fun but Sudoku (Easy level) was okay. I never played Sudoku for fun but it was slightly enjoyable. Maybe I could play a game of Sudoku as reward for answering email. If I made the requirement — the amount of email that I needed to answer — small enough, it might work.

It worked. When I made the requirement tiny — deal with 3 email (which might take 10 minutes) — that was small enough. And I was able to do it again and again: handle 3 email, play Sudoku, handle 3 email, play Sudoku, etc. Progress was slow — I spent more time playing Sudoku than dealing with email — but slow progress was far better than no progress. I was a little stunned it was actually working. After about 10 cycles (which took 3 or 4 hours), my inbox was as empty as I could make it. It hadn’t been that empty in years. To gather some data about the whole process I wrote some R programs for recording what the task was, how long it took, etc.

Then I started spending all my time revising The Shangri-La Diet for the paperback edition. A few days ago I finished that. My inbox had gotten full again and again I used Sudoku to clear it out.

I want to learn more about this way of getting things done. Does it work with other chores besides email? Here is the kitchen table in my apartment:

My Kitchen Table 26 December 2006 8 am

It isn’t usually this messy but it hasn’t been completely clear for years. Can I use Sudoku to clear it off?