Accountability

I was going to switch to trying to have sustainable, regular posts without longer “productive thinking” posts. For nights like today where I procrasinated/just came home late, trying to finish a post might be counterproductive to my productivity overall. Yet, maybe making a blog post mandatory with the potential consequence of sleeping late could be an interesting motivator. We’ll continue to juggle this I guess. EDIT: I decided to force myself to blog no matter what. It’ll make me try to start work earlier or blog earlier.

I switched productivity apps today to a new app called “Habitica.” It’s basically a multi-purpose app that comppiled productivity apps into a game–while the game itself isn’t super fun, it’ll be interesting to see because there are more tangible gains, I’ll be able to motivate myself more. I’m also trying to get my friends to join as well–if you’re interested in it, message me and I’ll add you to our in-app party. It’s a good way to keep each other accountable as well as have stuff in the game to actually play.

Anyways, if this doesn’t work, I’m going to start using Beeminder, which I used to meme really hard but I’m slowly getting desperate. It basically takes money from your bank account if you don’t fulfill your goals, which sounds like a really dumb thing to purposefully sign up for. But honestly, my unproductivity is probably costing me a lot more–I thought about it, and if someone offered me a magic pill that automatically get rid of my procrastination habit, I’d probably pay like $1,000 for that without much hesitation. Hella worth.

Today’s post will be shorter due to aforementioned reasons–it’s really late right now and I don’t want to die during work.

Productive Thinking

Today I was watching a Youtube video and in it, someone mentioned how people are only really disappointed when they have expectations. It made me pause and think–is this actually the case? After all, a bad situation is a bad situation, no matter one’s expectation, right?

The example they cite in the video, which, in my opinion, isn’t a great example, is the difference between people who immediately respond to emails versus those who delay by a day or two. As a student who doesn’t receive a ton of important emails on a regular basis, the example wasn’t super relatable to me, although I can see the general sentiment. The argument is that there are people who are upset when certain people do not reply within a day, but are not upset with others when they take the same exact time to reply. The only difference is the person’s expectation–if the former is expected to reply promptly because that is the norm for said individual, then it is upsetting when the norm is broken.

I think a more universally relatable example is shipping packages. If Amazon promises me that something will arrive within five business days, and it arrives in four, I’m elated. However, if they promise me that it’ll arrive in two days, and it takes FOUR to arrive, all of a sudeen, I’m rather tilted. It feels unprofessional, I feel cheated, and I probably spent those last two days of waiting for my package rather antsy. However, in both cases, the product was the exact same and the time it took to arrive was identical–the only difference was the expectation I had on the arrival date. Of course this is rather exaggerated, but the general sentiment still holds true–broken expectations cause a great deal more grief than logically demanded, exemplifying the human tendency to desire order and despise chaos.

Evolutionarily, this makes sense–the more control humans have over a situation, the safer it is. When expectations are set, one’s world of order is defined in a certain way–breaking those expectations introduces chaos. I don’t like chaos, you don’t like chaos, and Doublelift does not like Chaox. This aspect of human nature affects many aspects of life–we have set laws to follow, a big reason for procrastination actually is because facing a mess of many tasks is stressful, and a messy room almost inevitably looks worse than an organized one (have you ever watched one of those oddly satisfying compilations)?

So next time you’re disappointed, ask yourself: were your expectations too high? Perhaps you’ll find that the little added chaos was less of a deal than it first felt.