Procrastination as a Collective Action Problem

It looks like I'll be widening the scope of this blog very significantly pretty early, with a post on philosophy that is not quite political.

It was appropriate to post about procrastination in light of the absence of any new posts for a considerable time for a young blog.  Hence, a post on the form inherent in procrastination.

So, procrastination is a collective action problem among the many different time-slices of a person.  The you that exists in any particular moment values the quality of its own experience more than that of the you that exists at any other moment; in other words, there is a preference for immediate consumption over future consumption which is inversely proportional to the ability to delay gratification.


So, faced with a task to accomplish, maybe with or a without a deadline, or a deadline on a spectrum of firmness, each time-slice of you doesn't want to perform the work (pay the costs) now, when the benefit is shared evenly over different time-slices.  As long as it gets done, everything is good, but why does the current me have to do it when a different one could do it with no consequential difference?

Update: Of course, the idea of a collective action problem for a single person as split into multiple time-slices of a person applies to more than just procrastination from work, but also to dieting, quitting smoking, saving money, and many other things.  Each individual fatty hamburger will not by itself determine one's health and weight; each individual cigarette will not by itself determine if one gets lung cancer or emphysema; each individual small frivolous expenditure will not substantially affect the size of one's savings.  But if one makes these decisions thinking only on a case-by-case basis, they will tend to make more of these suboptimal choices than they would if they could set a general rule for themselves to hold at all times.  

Update II: I love instances like this of empirics demonstrating (confirming?) non-obvious theoretical predictions. 

Update III on 7/5/16: It just occurred to me how much this reasoning invokes Zeno's Paradox.