Ahead vs behind

I've been noticing recently how big a difference it makes to my happiness whether I feel ahead or behind with something. Sometimes that's measurably ahead or behind, as with posts or prototypes or other regular things. Other times, it's the perception of being ahead or behind, like with long-term progress towards some work or preparation for an upcoming deadline. Either way, it's hard to overstate just how different it feels when you're doing something a day before you need to as opposed to doing it on the day, or worse still, a day late.

It's taken a while to acquire the tools to think about this difference and why it exists, but What changes? has turned out to be the thing I needed. The key observation is that, for something with multiple outcomes, you need to ask "what changes?" for each outcome. For a task you do ahead of time, what changes? If you do it, a positive: the task is done. If you don't, a neutral: you can just do it later. For a task you do exactly on time, it's a positive (it's done) vs a negative (it's not done). And for something that's past due, it's a neutral (do it, but it's late anyway) vs a negative (it's even later now oh god help).

Various experimental results show that we tend to value losses disproportionately compared to gains. That is to say, we would rather avoid a loss of $100 than achieve a gain of $100, even though the net change in position is the same. I think that loss-aversion comes into play here too; positive vs neutral is a more favourable bet than positive vs negative, and more favourable still than neutral vs negative, even when the net values work out the same.

That has some other interesting implications too. For example, one element of procrastination could be that the motivational power of the split between positive and neutral is less than the split between positive and negative. So, in a perverse optimisation, you wait until exactly when it's due, because that's when the difference between doing it and not doing it is highest. That would further mean that this split disappears as soon as it's past due, and your motivation would totally collapse, which is consistent with my experience.

Motivation aside, there's obviously a kind of comfort in knowing that the worst feasible outcome in your present situation is a neutral. I think this comes back to positive and negative reinforcement. It's not that a negative reinforcement doesn't work; it does, it's just unpleasant. The reason why being ahead feels good, even if it tends to not be as intrinsically motivating, is that there aren't as many unpleasant negative things to consider.

The practical consequence is that, beyond just not having to consider the unpleasant things, it's also less likely that they will happen. In this case, the unpleasantness is entirely rational because it's helping you avoid dangerous situations. What's irrational is the desire to maximise the split between positive and negative outcome which pushes you towards last-minute dramatics. That whole pattern seems eerily similar to problem gambling and other high-risk behaviour.

How can you avoid it? I think the only answer is to replace risk as a source of motivation. In some cases, that could be the defence in depth idea: pull your risks forward, treat them seriously but not disproportionately, and spend more of your time on meta-risks. But in a way doing that is just moving risk-based motivation around. It'd be interesting to look at entirely different sources, like wanting to maintain a certain character, or building habits to the point where the status quo is motivating on its own.

Regardless, one thing is clear: being behind is a huge motivation killer, and it's worth bending over backwards to recover or restructure as quickly as possible. No matter what other sources of motivation you have, being trapped between a bad outcome and a neutral one is a burden large enough that removing it should almost always be your first priority.