{"id":112,"date":"2013-11-07T08:30:52","date_gmt":"2013-11-07T08:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/?p=112"},"modified":"2013-11-08T23:16:12","modified_gmt":"2013-11-08T23:16:12","slug":"problems-with-procrastination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/2013\/11\/07\/problems-with-procrastination\/","title":{"rendered":"Problems with Procrastination"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Whenever I have major deadlines encroaching, I suddenly find YouTube and Facebook utterly fascinating and irresistibly amusing. I end up spending my scarce time randomly surfing the web despite the hours of work I have yet to do. Looking back, I often wonder how I could have possibly justified watching hours of YouTube videos? I mean I\u2019m an economist for heaven\u2019s sake! I am well versed in cost-benefit analysis. I understand the inner workings of achieving market efficiency. So why, despite all my econ know-how, do I often find myself regretting the choices I have made?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>To better understand my procrastination problems I turned to my fellow economists, and this is what I found: I have time-inconsistent preferences! <a title=\"Putting a Price on Procrastination\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2008\/HEALTH\/12\/30\/procrastination.economics\/\" target=\"_blank\">David Laibson<\/a>, an economics professor at Harvard, explains that \u201cunpleasant chores feel only half as bad when we imagine doing them tomorrow, versus actually doing them today. \u2018Pushing costly, unpleasant tasks into the future is like getting a 50 percent discount on them, psychologically.\u2019&#8221;<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>This basically means that I am human, and tend to overvalue the here and now. I privilege the present me over the future me by doing what makes me happy now instead of what will make me happy in 48 hours. Fortunately, there are ways to help us deal with our time inconsistent preferences.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/StickK.com\/\">StickK.com<\/a>\u00a0is a website that helps keep you on task by having you risk your own money. If you don\u2019t meet your deadlines\/goals you lose the money you assigned to the task.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Hopefully this cleared up a few things about procrastination. Best of luck on your future endeavors and may you make time consistent choices from here on out.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever I have major deadlines encroaching, I suddenly find YouTube and Facebook utterly fascinating and irresistibly amusing. I end up spending my scarce time randomly surfing the web despite the hours of work I have yet to do. Looking back, I often wonder how I could have possibly justified watching hours of YouTube videos? I mean I\u2019m an economist for heaven\u2019s sake! I am well versed in cost-benefit analysis. I understand the inner workings of achieving market efficiency. So why, despite all my econ know-how, do I often find myself regretting the choices I have made? To better understand my <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/2013\/11\/07\/problems-with-procrastination\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Problems with Procrastination<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":371,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[26,27],"class_list":["post-112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-behavioral","tag-decision-making"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/371"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}