Keep your brain working

How often does this scenario reoccur: you are working toward completing a project, have motivated yourself sufficiently to get started on it and make some decent headway, and then you take a step back to evaluate all of the progress you’ve made so far, realizing you’re over halfway toward your goal you decide it would be a good opportunity to reward yourself with a little break. I am (to my own chagrin) all too familiar with this pattern, often succumbing to the allure of starting a new project (or three or four) rather than completing that which I am already knee deep in. Being a writer, I am continually engaged in mindgames with myself, trying to trick myself with various reward mechanisms and systems into getting my brain to get words on a page, a simple task fraught with the greatest hindrance to progress: the resistant will. Melville’s testament to life on earth, “Moby Dick,” Ishmael makes an appeal to God to “keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience… For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the capstone to posterity.” It is my belief that procrastination is endemic to our culture, a direct outcome of our result-oriented society where we only value in terms of completed tasks, and not in terms of process. In resistance to these simplifying mechanisms, we procrastinate; we attempt to redeem the value of the work by not bringing it to completion. We’ve grown accustomed to operating according a backward logic that on the one hand esteems the procedural aspects of the work and on the other hand frustrates and devalues it to others and oneself by not allowing it to reach its culmination (an incomplete project remains a deficient project). These two conflicting dispositions make for a perplexing complex and a lot of unncecessary anxiety.

Psychologists Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishback (both of the University of Chicago) have investigated the attitudes with which people motivate themselves and located two primary perspectives: to-date thinking; or, what was has been done up until point x, and, to-go thinking; that which is still left to do after point x. Wereas to-date thinking fosters a sense of accomplishment and complacency in the incomplete, to-go thinking actually triggers a discrepancy in the brain between where we are currently and where it is that we still want to get to and shifts one’s attention and energies toward what is still required to get to that point. Although remedial rewards can serve their purpose in achieving one’s goals, particularly if they function more as markers of what still remains to be done, it is best to wait to party hard until you’ve completed the cathedral. We all know what happened to the hare who took a little break and got passed up by the tortoise who then received his due credit when he passed the finish line.