As the coronavirus shit hit directly to the high-speed fan, the world turn from turmoil to the abyss. With the extended period of working from to at least the end of May, there’s no ending in sight. It feels can be a warm bed for our oldest friend - procrastination.
As I was aimlessly browsing through the internet, one article particularly caught my attention, it is a paper by Tsinghua university Goal Gradient in which introduced a concept call goal gradient.
Put into plain English, it is to say people would exert more effort if they aware of the end is in sight and visa versa. However, should the goal is unclear or too far, our brain/behavior tends to be conservative and the gradient or effort of return is far less potent compare when you are almost reaching the finish line of a marathon.
This not only explains my lowered productivity during WFH, but also gives scientific justifications to all the famous methodologies engineers have been using, e.g small tasking, intervals between tasks, kanban …
So how can I learn/apply this reach? One way I tried and kind of work pretty well was to let my procrastination money go wild. (btw the tedtalk I watched 10 times Inside the mind of a master procrastinator) But with a succinct goal in 25 mins window. I found I could not start to super focus on the first 5 ~ 10 mins, but towards the end 15 mins, my focus was very high as subconsciously I was aware the goal is near (I think) thus became more and more focus on finish the current goal.
I used a tick box app (Todolist on mac) which can help get a sense of accomplishment.
