The pipeline illusion

There's a neat trick that turns up in a lot of places where there is a large delay between an action and its result. Let's say I want to send my friend a postcard but it will take a week to arrive. It's kind of annoying that it takes so long, but we could make it better by pipelining. If I send my friend a postcard once it will take a week, but if I send my friend a postcard every day they will receive a postcard every day. Magic!

Pipelining is used successfully in areas as diverse as video games, CPU design and space travel – and one place where I don't think it's recognised: motivation. If you've never run before and you go for a run today, it's probably going to be pretty hard work. You get back from your run, tired and sweaty, and are you the fit bronzed god you hoped? Nope. In fact, there's been no appreciable difference in your fitness. Only after weeks of rewardless toil do you start to see results. But from that point on, your previous exercise works its way through the pipeline. Every time you exercise you get fitter immediately – or so it appears.

I think an underappreciated benefit of habits is that they exploit this effect. Not only do you reinforce a particular behaviour through repetition, but after a while you can feel like you have removed the gap between the behaviour and its results. Everything feels like it pays off right now which, thanks to the vagaries of our hyperbolic discounting, is much more powerful than things that pay off later.

But as much as it might seem like you've eliminated the delay, it's important to remember that it's only an illusion. If something happens today, your friend still won't get a postcard about it for a week. And if you stop exercising today, you won't suddenly get out of shape either. If you change your exercise routine, you might even be disappointed and conclude that it hasn't done anything. That's the dark side of the pipelining illusion: it messes up your ability to make good decisions.

The worst is when you're comparing a pipelined task to a non-pipelined one. If you've been working on an existing project for so long that your old gains are still catching up with you, and thinking about starting a new one, you get lots of weird and paradoxical effects. Working on the new project seems like an unquestionable loss; why start something new for a reward later when you could do the existing thing for a reward now? And by induction, it may never seem worth starting anything.

I'm not sure if you can think yourself out of the pipeline illusion by just recognising it. It would be nice to think so, but I suspect it's one of those things that creeps into your decisions without you noticing. For habits that you want to keep or change, I think it would just come back to an exercise in discipline to keep things going until the pipeline catches up. As for their effect on risk, perhaps the best answer is to set another habit: to seek out and embrace discomfort.

And if you did that for long enough, I imagine the benefits of seeking out discomfort would start to feel immediate too.