![]() For example, if I scroll through Facebook and find funny and interesting articles regularly, I would want to keep doing it because my behavior is reinforced by entertainment value. The same applies to us – not just physically, but mentally too. This way, the rats were physically conditioned to react to positive or negative stimulus. If the lever was touched, the box would either dispense food or cut off an electric current which was being generated. ![]() Back then, he conducted experiments on animals that he kept in a “Skinner Box,” as shown here: Not surprisingly, Skinner found that we are more likely to do an action if whatever follows it is good – and vice versa. Skinner in the 1950s.Īs the term suggests, operant conditioning is the process by which we are conditioned to do an action more or less often, depending on whether the action is followed by something good or bad. ![]() This happens due to operant conditioning, a term coined by psychologist B.F. The idea to put work off first enters our minds when we are faced with tasks that we know to be unpleasant by experience. If we want to wrestle back control from the monkey, we’ll have to do a lot more–starting with understanding why we procrastinate. Melville’s monkey was in another room–he had to physically get up and move if he wanted to be distracted, so chaining himself to his desk worked. To learn how to wrestle back control from the monkey, we first have to understand why we procrastinate. Stanford sociologist Clifford Nass says that we are “suckers for irrelevancy.”Įach time we get distracted, we mess up our flow – defined as an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.” Not being in the flow is naturally very, very bad for doing actual productive work.Īre we, chronic procrastinators (my hand is raised), doomed to suffer a lifetime of unproductivity? As I’ve found out through lots of distracted reading and experimentation, there’s hope yet. And unlike Melville, we live in an age of perpetual distractions which are easily accessible at the swipe of a finger. Sitting at our desks mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, though, it’s hard to imagine that we could ever overcome the Instant Gratification Monkey, and get to work on the ever-increasing mounds of assignments and projects ahead of us.Įven if we did chain ourselves to our desks and get started, distractions continually attempt to try and lure us away. Moby Dick went on to become one of the greatest literary works of all time. That particular story turned out pretty well. Like many famous creative people who would come after him, he struggled against mankind’s greatest nemesis – procrastination – and even had to resort to chaining himself to his desk to be productive. Check out his latest articles over at the Piktochart blog.īack in the 1800s, American author Herman Melville was facing a problem while writing his to-be masterpiece, Moby Dick. His motto in life: Always be improving, always be loving. Daniel is a Content Strategist at Piktochart, where he writes regularly about creativity, design, and storytelling.
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