What we have is a circuit, not an arc or broken segment of a circle. This circuit is more truly termed organix than reflex, because the motor response determines the stimulus, just as truly as sensory stimulus determines the movement.

Ihnatowicz in 1977: (The Relevance of Manipulation to the Process of Perception)

It appears that not only is the physical motion of animals, when it is not random, controlled by some form of perception, but perception is equally dependent on some form of motion.

Invention is not usually their principal business. They must invent in their spare time. They must invent before breakfast, invent in the Strand between Lyons’s and the office, invent after dinner, invent on Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night! See how they seize a half-holiday, like hungry dogs a bone! They don’t want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, anturic salts, nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings never drag—are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve o’clock at night on the flat of their backs; but not in bed! No, in a shed, under a machine, holding a candle (whose paths drop fatness) up to the connecting-rod that is strained, or the wheel that is out of centre. They are continually interested, nay, enthralled. They have a machine, and they are perfecting it.

Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullet #24: The “Borden Formula” (2008)

“A tired-out rail-splitter crouched over his tattered books by candlelight or by fire-glow, at the day’s end; preparing for his future, instead of snoring or skylarking like his co-laborers. Abraham Lincoln cut out his path to later immortality—in his spare time.

“An underpaid and overworked telegraph clerk stole hours from sleep or from play, at night, trying to crystallize into realities certain fantastic dreams in which he had faith. Today the whole world is benefiting by what Edison did—in his spare time.

“A down-at-heel instructor in an obscure college varied the drudgery he hated by spending his evenings and holidays in tinkering with a queer device of his, at which his fellow teachers laughed. But he invented the telephone —in his spare time.

SAM, The Senster and the Bandit: Early Cybernetic Sculptures by Edward Ihnatowicz

Observing the Senster, and knowing just how simple the controlling program was, he “felt like a fraud and resolved that any future monster of mine would be more genuinely intelligent.” (private papers). He found it disconcerting that “people kept referring to it as an intelligent thing, but there wasn’t an iota of intelligence in it: it was completely pre-programmed responding system”

Bill Powers in Living Control Systems III, p 154:

…one can make overly complex hypotheses about how an organism accomplishes what it is doing, when the actual mechanism is much simpler. In the case of the Crowd demo, the impression of intelligence is quite misleading, for the person is doing none of the things one might read into the behavior. I know that is true because I wrote the program. The person is seeking a destination position and avoiding collisions, and that is all. No decision are made, there is no analysis of possible paths through the field of obstacles, no planning of trajectories, no remembering of past experiences, no search for a way out of a trap. The behavior we see is determined completely by the actions and interactions of two simple control processes in an environment containing randomly placed obstacles.

Various versions of the Crowd demo can be downloaded from livingcontrolsystem.com, with Crowd32.zip being the most recent version. (I actually prefer to play around with the quirky DOS version: it comes with a few more ready-made simulations and there’s just something about the speedy full screen DOS interface that works for me.)

During the tournaments, a number of us noted a curious change that would quite regularly occur in the play of a contestant when he began to recognize that he was clearly outmatched. He would first concentrate very hard, then begin to alternate between wild shots and cautious play. It occurred to me that these periods of variability, if we could graph them, would look like the patterns of RT variation preceding a new plateau in the Powers Game experiment. The participants themselves acknowledged this aspect of play as part of their experiments to obtain eventual increases in skill. In this view, what would have seemed a lapse into sloppiness on the part of a losing player took on an opposite significance.

Compare with what a commenter wrote over at Cal Newport’s blog:

It’s too hard to simultaneously do and diagnose, at first, and the only way to actually succeed at things at the boundary of one’s ability is by accident. So make sure to get many, many attempts at them, to have more chances to do them right by accident. Once that happens, you can get a sense of “what did I do differently then, that made that finally work?”

The key phrase here being “do them right by accident”.

Robertson again:

Powers made the implication that the organism does not know exactly what change must occur. Random excitation caused by the reorganizing system results in various alterations of action. Then the action that begins to bring the desired objective under control becomes the basis of a new control system.

A question was once, somehow or other, started between Collins and me, of the propriety of educating the female sex in learning, and their abilities for study. He was of opinion that it was improper, and that they were naturally unequal to it. I took the contrary side, perhaps a little for dispute’s sake. He was naturally more eloquent, had a ready plenty of words; and sometimes, as I thought, bore me down more by his fluency than by the strength of his reasons. As we parted without settling the point, and were not to see one another again for some time, I sat down to put my arguments in writing, which I copied fair and sent to him. He answered, and I replied.

Three or four letters of a side had passed, when my father happened to find my papers and read them. Without entering into the discussion, he took occasion to talk to me about the manner of my writing; observed that, though I had the advantage of my antagonist in correct spelling and pointing (which I ow’d to the printing-house), I fell far short in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several instances. I saw the justice of his remark, and thence grew more attentive to the manner in writing, and determined to endeavor at improvement.

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.

But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.

I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.

My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship which my father used to exact on me when I was under his care, and which indeed I still thought a duty, though I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it.

from The Sound of Young America

Also, Merlin Mann was recently on The marketplace of ideas with Colin Marshall. If you’re a fan of Mann, you’ll love that conversation.

After saying that, however, he writes about how something he calls creative procrastination can be a massive asset for writers. Block used to very quickly transform ideas into written text when he was in his youth. He would get one idea on an afternoon and have a written story ready for his agent the following morning (!). As he became older, he let go of the habit of immediately starting typing out this ideas.

As an example of how creative procrastination helped him he describes his experience of writing a mystery story. It began by him getting the idea to the story, he got what he calls a Noteworthy Idea. In his youth he would have gone straight to his typewriter to type out the story. In this case he wouldn’t have gotten far because he didn’t have anything other than an undeveloped idea, a fragment of a thought. He had no plot, no theme, no characters and no conflict — he lacked all the details necessary for good (or at least passable) fiction.

Instead of starting working on the story immediately, he scribbled down the idea on his todo list. He saw the idea every now and then — every time he looked at his memo pad. Block goes on describing how when he read the the note about the idea, his subconscious would develop it slightly, make it a bit fuller and more detailed.

By letting the idea rest, and by not starting to work on it immediately, Block allowed the idea to develop in his mind, while he was busy writing other stories and reading inspiring books and poetry. Then, one day, he felt that he was ready to write the story. So he sat down at his typewriter and started typing.

Block calls this process creative procrastination. I think that creative incubation is a more apt name for what he did. While it’s procrastination in the sense that there’s postponement involved, I don’t consider it procrastination if you let an idea rest before you have some kind of plan of action. I’m not a fiction writer and don’t plan on becoming one, but it makes sense to let ideas develop in your subconscious a while before you start typing them out.

That’s not procrastination, that’s just a smart thing to do.

A key part of this process is to keep the Noteworthy Idea visible.

“It’s important, I think, to keep the idea visible — in a notebook, on a wallchart, whatever. That way you’ll jog your memory from time to time, and when an idea or a piece of information comes along that you can use, you’ll reach out and incorporate it in the story as it evolves.”

And as for the difference between regular procrastination and creative procrastination, Block writes:

“When it [procrastination] consists of avoiding work rather than postponing it, and when my alternative to working on Project A is not working at all. Since I’m inherently lazy, I force myself to work on Project B instead.”

I don’t know how useful it’s to label yourself as “inherently lazy” and I think there are better ways of getting started than “forcing” yourself, but those are subjects for another post. If you get a good idea, write it down, look at it at regular intervals, and notice how your subconscious develops it automatically until you one day pretty much just know what you want to write, or create.

academic procrastination

For many students procrastination is an essential part of the college lifestyle. We’ve all heard the anecdotes about the all-nighters, the late term papers and the creative excuses people come up with. According to Ellis & Knaus [1977]  around 70% of all college students procrastinate. That’s a huge percentage of the student population.

pre-internet procrastination

It’s worth noting that these figures are from the late 70s. I wasn’t around back then, but I’m pretty sure that ubiquitous internet connections, cell phones and computers weren’t  available for the students of that time. Despite that , those who were students then, procrastinated — a lot.

That tells us something about the problem of procrastination — it’s not  about the distractions around us. Yes, you might be spending a lot of time on Facebook, on Youtube or on reading blogs, but that doesn’t mean that those things are the cause of your procrastination. They are merely the symptoms, the displacement activities you use. [displacement activity = the thing you do instead of doing what you should be doing]

More recent studies confirm that procrastination is common. One study from 1984 (still pre-ubiquitous-internet) reports that half of all students say that procrastination is a moderately or highly problematic problem for them [Solomon et al]. Day gives a similar picture, reporting that about 50% of college students procrastinate chronically [Day et al. 2000].

procrastination is normally distributed

Schouwenburg — editor of the the book Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings
–  writes about procrastination in a conference paper from 2005. He discusses the results of a procrastination survey that was given to two thousand students. When the data from the survey is plotted on a diagram, you see that procrastination is normally distributed among students. The base rate of procrasination is high, that is, most students procrastinate to at least some degree.

problematic procrastination?

Schouwenburg notes that there’s no clear definition of when procrastination should be classified as problematic or chronic. Many arbitrary conventions are used. For example, if you define people who  according to the survey procrastinate one  standard deviation more than the mean as problematic procrastinators, you end up with a figure of about 10%. In other words, for about 200 of the two thousand students who participated in the survey, procrastination is a major problem.

the rest of the population

That students procrastinate a lot is hardly surprising. But what about the rest of the population? Are adults, working in ‘real’ jobs with ‘real’ deadlines, and where postponements result in ‘real’ consequences doing any better? Perhaps, but not by a large degree.

Depending a bit on which data you look at, it looks like about one in five have major problems with procrastination. That’s what McCown and Johnson reported in a paper from 1989. It’s worth noting that for forty percent of the people, procrastination had caused significant financial loss. Schouwenburg writes that one fifth of all students say that they procrastinate when it comes to doing routine tasks such as paying the bills or the taxes, or visiting the doctor’s office (Schouwenburg, 2004).

summary

It’s clear that procrastination is prevalent, especially among college students. This can be comforting to know while you’re struggling with getting started. It also means that if you manage to reduce or eliminate your procrastination behavior, you’ll be far ahead of a large part of the population.

References

Ellis, A., & Knaus, W. J. (1977). Overcoming procrastination. New York: Signet Books.

Day, V., Mensink, D., & O’Sullivan, M. (2000). Patterns of academic procrastination. Journal of College Reading and Learning, 30, 120–134.

McCown, W., & Johnson, J. (1989). Validation of an adult inventory of procrastination. Paper presented at the Society for Personality Assessment, New York.

Solomon, L. J., & Rothblum, E. D. (1984). Academic procrastination: Frequency and
cognitive-behavioral correlates. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 31, 503-509.

Schouwenburg, H. C. (2004). Trait procrastination in academic settings: An overview of students who engage in task delays. In H.C. Schouwenburg, C. Lay, T. Pylchyl, & J. Ferrari, (Eds.), Counselling the procrastinator in academic settings  (pp. 3-18). Washington: American Psychological Association.

Schouwenburg. On Counselling the Procrastinator in Academic settings. Fedora Psyche Conference. June, 2005.

I try hard to identify my most dangerous patterns of thought, but since the most dangerous ones are by definition those difficult to detect or apt to masquerade as beneficial, progress is slow. By “dangerous”, I generally mean the ones that excuse mediocrity. Procrastination’s thousand guises provide ready, accessible examples: “I’ll work on the project first thing in the morning.” “I’ll start the diet next week.” “I’ll get to that novel someday.” But the literature on procrastination forms mountains; I’ll refrain from adding my own crag today.

The dangerous thought I recently caught in one of its unguarded moments gets much less press than the p-word, but it’s similar in form and quite possibly even more poisonous. I call it the “Things will be fine when x” mindset, where x is any future condition or set of conditions.

Read the rest of Colin Marshall’s post “If only”

My  cross-country  trip had  been  based  on an assumption and a gamble. The  assumption was that  the borrower was going to stop payment  on  the  $15,000 check;  the  gamble was  that  he would make the mistake  of procrastinating and  not take care  of the matter until  the  bank opened  the next morning.

I grabbed  a couple  hours of restless  sleep  at the motel,  then dragged  myself out of bed  at the crack  of dawn.  I was  taking no chances on  not  being at  the  front  door of  the  bank  when  it opened.  I felt as  though  I hadn’t slept  in a week,  but a  cold shower and  the thought of $15,000  was stimulating enough  to keep me moving.

Winning Through Intimidation (nowadays sold as To Be or Not to Be Intimidated? That is the Question) by Robert Ringer. Pg 82.