It’s all too easy to tell yourself that you’ll engage in some unproductive but highly stimulating activity in a prudent, time-bounded manner, only for the exact opposite to happen. “I’m only going to watch youtube for 15 mins!“. 15 mins turn into 20, then 25, and so on. Once you reach 27 mins, you might as well make it 30 mins…for reasons..like it’s a nice round number?! Surely one can’t start being productive at the 27 minute mark, that’s an abomination, that’s unheard of! I’m not joking, my brain will actually flail around and throw out such excuses, which take hold, even if intellectually i know it’s bullshit. Or maybe the video might end in 6 more minutes, after you’re already at the 15 min mark, so you “might as well finish it”. Or maybe you just lost track of time.
I’m not alone!
There are other cases where similar pitfalls occur, albeit for different reasons (i.e., “changing and unpredictable circumstances”). You may have 4 mins before the train comes, so you start consoooooming media. But the 4 minutes actually turns into 15 cause the train is late. Many such cases abound! Similarly, though in this case the focus is on explicitly NOT starting a productive activity, “There’s only 2 mins till the train arrives, so i’m not going to pick back up the book i was reading on my phone cause it’ll take me that long to pick up the context again, so i’m just gonna scroll!“.
What unites these cases is that your time gets parasitized beyond your original, reasonable intentions due to factors like weakness of will, losing track of time, inertia, unpredictable and changing circumstances, and weird psychological quirks like having to “finish a task” or not wanting to change at a “weird” time. By inertia i simply mean that we often have a lower psychological resistance to continuing some activity than starting it, or, an equally salient framing, we have more resistance to changing what we are doing than continuing it. There is, of course, overlap and dependence between such factors; this isn’t an airtight taxonomy.
But each of these cases has a productive counterpart that weaponizes the very factors causing unproductive time creep! For example, you can often tell yourself that you’ll only do X difficult productive activity for 5 minutes, which lessens the barrier to start, only to do it for far longer because of exactly those factors listed above: inertia, losing track of time, coming close to finishing it/a subtask (the counterpart to “lemme finish this youtube video that ends in 6 mins), or noticing that you’re close to a round number, all of which makes you want to “extend” the time even further. Or, take the case of unpredictable circumstances: you can start reading the book even if the train is coming in 1 minute, or even if you only have to go to the bathroom to pee, because oftentimes circumstances will change and inertia will carry you through the resulting period, productively.
It’s surprising just how often these small tweaks work and result in meaningful changes. Our brain, subconscious, whatever you want to call it, is simultaneously incredibly powerful and oddly like a child that can be easily “tricked”, all while being conveniently aware of the trickery.
