{"id":4464,"date":"2019-04-18T08:30:42","date_gmt":"2019-04-18T15:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/?p=4464"},"modified":"2019-04-17T23:13:22","modified_gmt":"2019-04-18T06:13:22","slug":"why-would-i-do-it-now-when-i-could-do-it-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/2019\/04\/18\/why-would-i-do-it-now-when-i-could-do-it-later\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Would I Do it Now When I Could Do it Later?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Procrastination: it doesn\u2019t seem very efficient. As I procrastinated writing this blog post, along with all of my other assignments in the home stretch of my last semester, I thought about how much I would regret my past decisions of not working in the near future. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In behavioral economics, these decisions are posed as problems of \u201cintertemporal choice.\u201d There is a distinction between the decisions we make in the present and those we foresee in the future. One article delves into this issue, which the author calls <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/people.hbs.edu\/nashraf\/marketplaceofperceptions.pdf\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThe Seductive-Now Moment.\u201d<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> People would rather have instant gratification and devalue both the consequences and benefits that today\u2019s actions have on tomorrow. Everyone devalues the future; but aggressively devaluing it characterizes the irrational behavior of procrastination. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One solution to these time-inconsistent preferences, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/slate.com\/human-interest\/2008\/05\/how-economists-think-about-procrastination.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">another article<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> suggests, is \u201cto bring future benefits closer to the present or to magnify the costs of delayed action.\u201d These authors bring up the idea of visualization to make the future feel closer to the present. As you\u2019re pushing aside projects and opening up Netflix, it may help to imagine the joy of completing the assignment and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">closing <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">all the research tabs instead of the limited satisfaction of just minimizing them. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Procrastination: it doesn\u2019t seem very efficient. As I procrastinated writing this blog post, along with all of my other assignments in the home stretch of my last semester, I thought about how much I would regret my past decisions of not working in the near future. In behavioral economics, these decisions are posed as problems of \u201cintertemporal choice.\u201d There is a distinction between the decisions we make in the present and those we foresee in the future. One article delves into this issue, which the author calls \u201cThe Seductive-Now Moment.\u201d People would rather have instant gratification and devalue both the <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/2019\/04\/18\/why-would-i-do-it-now-when-i-could-do-it-later\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Why Would I Do it Now When I Could Do it Later?<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4464","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\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4464"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4466,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4464\/revisions\/4466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/econ\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}