Good and Bad Procrastination
December 2005
The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators.
So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?
Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure
it.  But this is, strictly speaking, impossible.  There are an
infinite number of things you could be doing.  No matter what you
work on, you're not working on everything else.  So the question
is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.
There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you
do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing,
(b) something less important, or (c) something more important.  That
last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.
That's the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat,
or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking about
some interesting question.   His mind is absent from the everyday
world because it's hard at work in another.
That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all
procrastinators.  They're type-C procrastinators:  they put off
working on small stuff to work on big stuff.
What's "small stuff?"  Roughly, work that has zero chance of being
mentioned in your obituary.  It's hard to say at the time what will
turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on
Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote
under a pseudonym?), but there's a whole class of tasks you can
safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house,
writing thank-you notes—anything that might be called an errand.
Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.
Good in a sense, at least.  The people who want you to do the errands
won't think it's good.  But you probably have to annoy them if you
want to get anything done.  The mildest seeming people, if they
want to do real work, all have a certain degree of ruthlessness
when it comes to avoiding errands.
Some errands, like replying to letters, go away if you
ignore them (perhaps taking friends with them).  Others, like mowing
the lawn, or filing tax returns, only get worse if you put them
off.  In principle it shouldn't work to put off the second kind of
errand.  You're going to have to do whatever it is eventually.  Why
not (as past-due notices are always saying) do it now?
The reason it pays to put off even those errands is that real work
needs two things errands don't: big chunks of time, and the
right mood.  If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net
win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few
days to work on it.  Yes, those errands may cost you more time when
you finally get around to them.  But if you get a lot done during
those few days, you will be net more productive.
In fact, it may not be a difference in degree, but a difference in
kind.  There may be types of work that can only be done in long,
uninterrupted stretches, when inspiration hits, rather than dutifully
in scheduled little slices.  Empirically it seems to be so.  When
I think of the people I know who've done great things, I don't
imagine them dutifully crossing items off to-do lists.  I imagine
them sneaking off to work on some new idea.
Conversely, forcing someone to perform errands synchronously is
bound to limit their productivity.  The cost of an interruption is
not just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on either
side in half.  You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple
times a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all.
I've wondered a lot about why
startups
are most productive at the
very beginning, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment.
The main reason may be that there's no one to interrupt them yet.
In theory it's good when the founders finally get enough money to
hire people to do some of the work for them.  But it may be better
to be overworked than interrupted.  Once you dilute a startup with
ordinary office workers—with type-B procrastinators—the whole
company starts to resonate at their frequency.  They're interrupt-driven,
and soon you are too.
Errands are so effective at killing great projects that a lot of
people use them for that purpose.  Someone who has decided to write
a novel, for example, will suddenly find that the house needs
cleaning. People who fail to write novels don't do it by sitting
in front of a blank page for days without writing anything.  They
do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for
their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email.  "I
don't have time to work," they say.  And they don't; they've made
sure of that.
(There's also a variant where one has no place to work.  The cure
is to visit the places where famous people worked, and see how
unsuitable they were.)
I've used both these excuses at one time or another.  I've learned
a lot of tricks for making myself work over the last 20 years, but
even now I don't win consistently.  Some days I get real work done.
Other days are eaten up by errands.  And I know it's usually my
fault: I
let
errands eat up the day, to avoid
facing some hard problem.
The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B
procrastination, because it doesn't feel like procrastination.
You're "getting things done."  Just the wrong things.
Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossing
things off your to-do list is not only incomplete, but positively
misleading, if it doesn't consider the possibility that the to-do
list is itself a form of type-B procrastination.  In fact, possibility
is too weak a word.  Nearly everyone's is.  Unless you're working
on the biggest things you could be working on, you're type-B
procrastinating, no matter how much you're getting done.
In his famous essay
You and Your Research
(which I recommend to
anyone ambitious, no matter what they're working on), Richard Hamming
suggests that you ask yourself three questions:
What are the most important problems in your field?
Are you working on one of them?
Why not?
Hamming was at Bell Labs when he started asking such questions.  In
principle anyone there ought to have been able to work on the most
important problems in their field.  Perhaps not everyone can make
an equally dramatic mark on the world; I don't know; but whatever
your capacities, there are projects that stretch them.  So Hamming's
exercise can be generalized to:
What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't
  you?
Most people will shy away from this question.  I shy away from it
myself; I see it there on the page and quickly move on to the next
sentence.  Hamming used to go around actually asking people this,
and it didn't make him popular.  But it's a question anyone ambitious
should face.
The trouble is, you may end up hooking a very big fish with this
bait.  To do good work, you need to do more than find good projects.
Once you've found them, you have to get yourself to work on them,
and that can be hard.  The bigger the problem, the harder it is to
get yourself to work on it.
Of course, the main reason people find it difficult to work on a
particular problem is that they don't
enjoy
it.  When you're young,
especially, you often find yourself working on stuff you don't
really like-- because it seems impressive, for example, or because
you've been assigned to work on it.  Most grad students are stuck
working on big problems they don't really like, and grad school is
thus synonymous with procrastination.
But even when you like what you're working on, it's easier to get
yourself to work on small problems than big ones.  Why?  Why is it
so hard to work on big problems?  One reason is that you may not
get any reward in the forseeable future.  If you work on something
you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling
of accomplishment fairly soon.  If the reward is indefinitely far
in the future, it seems less real.
Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically,
fear of wasting time.  What if they fail?  Then all the time they
spent on it will be wasted.  (In fact it probably won't be, because
work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)
But the trouble with big problems can't be just that they promise
no immediate reward and might cause you to waste a lot of time.  If
that were all, they'd be no worse than going to visit your in-laws.
There's more to it than that.  Big problems are
terrifying
.
There's an almost physical pain in facing them.  It's like having
a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination.   All your initial
ideas get sucked out immediately, and you don't have any more, and
yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking.
You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to
approach it somewhat obliquely.  But you have to adjust the angle
just right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enough
that you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but not
so much that it paralyzes you.  You can tighten the angle once you
get going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once it
gets underway.
If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself
into doing it.  You have to work on small things that could grow
into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split
the moral load with collaborators.  It's not a sign of weakness to
depend on such tricks.  The very best work has been done this way.
When I talk to people who've managed to make themselves work on big
things, I find that all blow off errands, and all feel guilty about
it.  I don't think they should feel guilty.  There's more to do
than anyone could.  So someone doing the best work they can is
inevitably going to leave a lot of errands undone.  It seems a
mistake to feel bad about that.
I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let
delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.  Work on
an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the
wind as you can, and you'll leave the right things undone.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert
Morris for reading drafts of this.
Romanian Translation
Russian Translation
Hebrew Translation
German Translation
Portuguese Translation
Italian Translation
Japanese Translation
Spanish Translation


@tonyaajjackson 95% how. It's easy to get from how to what, but hard to get from what to how.

@cnnrjcbsn @NateSilver538 I would guess it's roughly the average of those two things.

@NateSilver538 Social clout and quality of education aren't the only two factors in the value of a university. There's another that's even more important: the quality of the other people there. And like it or not, that will be higher at an elite university.

@Noahpinion You never knew that? Religious books have massive sales numbers compared to the sort of books they list.

@Nairebis I didn't say I automatically reject such people, just that it's a red flag.

@shreyjos @garrytan Depends on the investor, but YC will accept you with nothing more than an idea.

@waitbutwhy Or just not do it at all.

@Benoit_Gaillat Here are two essays addressed specifically to high school students:

What You'll Wish You'd Known: https://t.co/6Eii8AiurW

How to Start Google: https://t.co/rN1OHWBwm5

@CryptpalSingh A university.

@Indian_Bronson @waitbutwhy If he's acting, then both Tim and I are doing exactly what he wants. But how can we tell whether he is or not?


This is the 98th page of search results for that query, just for things published in 2022.

https://t.co/NIddwCa05n

People mocking the PhD thesis on smells have no idea how infinitely much of this stuff there is out there already. There are seas of it, written to get jobs, read by no one.

https://t.co/aM0HaWgHyv

@candestra That was his point.

"I don't want to have to pay for Brain Premium to avoid getting Coca-Cola ads in my sleep."

— 12 yo on why he won't get a Neuralink implant

@MacaesBruno I grew up in America and didn't notice how loud Americans were till I started travelling abroad, but it's true.

I would not be surprised if there's something in our DNA about sticks — that humans are the stick-wielding species.

This evening the CEO of a public company told me that all startups should reincorporate in Nevada. That's apparently the best alternative, and for startups that are still private it's trivially easy.

It used to be automatic for startups to incorporate in Delaware. That will stop being the case if activist judges start overruling shareholders.

@michael_nielsen "How to Do Great Work" is 12,500 words. So I think I'd just boil that down. It would require brutal editing, though, because it's already very boiled down. I'd have to toss whole ideas.

@Scientific_Bird Did this law have any other observable consequences?


Mean People Fail
November 2014
It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know
are mean.  There are exceptions, but remarkably few.
Meanness isn't rare.  In fact, one of the things the internet has
shown us is how mean people can be.  A few decades ago, only famous
people and professional writers got to publish their opinions.  Now
everyone can, and we can all see the
long tail of
meanness
that had previously been hidden.
And yet while there are clearly a lot of mean people out there,
there are next to none among the most successful people I know.
What's going on here?  Are meanness and success inversely correlated?
Part of what's going on, of course, is selection bias.  I only know
people who work in certain fields: startup founders, programmers,
professors. I'm willing to believe that successful people in other
fields are mean.  Maybe successful hedge fund managers are mean; I
don't know enough to say.  It seems quite likely that most successful
drug lords are mean.  But there are at least big chunks of the world
that mean people don't rule, and that territory seems to be growing.
My wife and Y Combinator cofounder Jessica is one of those rare
people who have x-ray vision for character. Being married to her
is like standing next to an airport baggage scanner. She came to
the startup world from investment banking, and she has always been
struck both by how consistently successful startup founders turn
out to be good people, and how consistently bad people fail as
startup founders.
Why?  I think there are several reasons.  One is that being mean
makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best
work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general.
Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved.
You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of
tricks that work in one particular case.  And yet fighting is just
as much work as thinking about real problems. Which is particularly
painful to someone who cares how their brain is used: your brain
goes fast but you get nowhere, like a car spinning its wheels.
Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There
are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race
ahead, not to stop and fight.
Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best
people to work for them. They can hire people who will put up with
them because they need a job. But the best people have other options.
A mean person can't convince the best people to work for him unless
he is super convincing. And while having the best people helps any
organization, it's critical for startups.
There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to build
great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of
benevolence
. The startup founders who end up
richest are not the ones driven by money.  The ones driven by money
take the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup
gets en route.
[
1
]
The ones who keep going are driven by something
else. They may not say so explicitly, but they're usually trying
to improve the world.  Which means people with a desire to improve
the world have a natural advantage.
[
2
]
The exciting thing is that startups are not just one random type
of work in which meanness and success are inversely correlated.
This kind of work is the future.
For most of history success meant control of scarce resources.  One
got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral
nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically
in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another
to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant
success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a
handicap but probably an advantage.
That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum.
Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce
resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.
[
3
]
There have long been games where you won by having new ideas. In
the third century BC, Archimedes won by doing that. At least until
an invading Roman army killed him. Which illustrates why
this change is happening: for new ideas to matter, you need a certain
degree of civil order.  And not just not being at war.  You also
need to prevent the sort of economic violence that nineteenth century
magnates practiced against one another and communist countries
practiced against their citizens.  People need to feel that what
they create can't be stolen.
[
4
]
That has always been the case for thinkers, which is why this trend
began with them.  When you think of successful people from history
who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists.
The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading.  The
games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, and
this is reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between
meanness and success.
So I'm really glad I stopped to think about this. Jessica and I
have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean.  We
tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not meanness.  And now
I have both an additional reason to crack down on it, and an
additional argument to use when I do: that being mean makes you
fail.
Notes
[
1
]
I'm not saying all founders who take big acquisition offers
are driven only by money, but rather that those who don't aren't.
Plus one can have benevolent motives for being driven by money — for
example, to take care of one's family, or to be free to work
on projects that improve the world.
[
2
]
It's unlikely that every successful startup improves the
world.  But their founders, like parents, truly believe they do.
Successful founders are in love with their companies.  And while
this sort of love is as blind as the love people have for one
another, it is genuine.
[
3
]
Peter
Thiel
would point out that successful founders still
get rich from controlling monopolies, just monopolies they create
rather than ones they capture.  And while this is largely true, it
means a big change in the sort of person who wins.
[
4
]
To be fair, the Romans didn't mean to kill Archimedes.  The
Roman commander specifically ordered that he be spared. But he got
killed in the chaos anyway.
In sufficiently disordered times, even thinking requires
control of scarce resources, because living at all is a scarce
resource.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Ron Conway, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris,
Geoff Ralston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.
Portuguese Translation
Japanese Translation
Arabic Translation


This is the most interesting article I've read so far about the upcoming election. The striking thing to me is how difficult it has become to get accurate polls. They're practically guessing at this point.

https://t.co/rFhpZR8DVQ

For many years, 12 yo has been dictating stories that I type. He always picks up something to fidget with. Whatever he picks up, he eventually drops. So every session begins with finding him something unbreakable.

@cremieuxrecueil That's very unlikely. It peaked 4 years ago, when moderates decided they'd had enough. Neither election result would change their minds about that.

Automatically disbelieving authorities isn't independent-mindedness. It's just conformism with the sign bit flipped.

@ReaperCapital @typesfast Wokeness is dangerous, but Trump is more dangerous.

@halabi @qualadder The word "country" doesn't inherently mean a legal entity in the modern sense.

@qualadder In 1500 Italy was the richest country in Europe.

@derekworldover How's the weather in St. Petersburg? The correct spelling of this word is "meddle", incidentally. The reason your spell-checker didn't catch it is that mettle is also a word.

Even this number implies Trump will lose. He won Iowa by 8.2% in 2020 and still lost the election. (When he won in 2016, he won Iowa by 9.4%.)

@tracewoodgrains In my case the answer is: surprisingly recently. A couple weeks ago, an essay by Bertrand Russell switched me to believing that it was probably a mistake for the allied powers to participate in WW I.


@EigenegiE They would have gotten bought.

@MattSchone You mean the lender? I don't know their name. It doesn't matter anyway. They all seem pretty similar.

@zelimir__ Don't take it unless you have no other choice.

@winterrose All that has to happen is for the company to breach some threshold in the terms and the lender to get a little nervous.

@kayyar1 In this case they would have. They had a solid acquisition offer, but the venture debt provider wouldn't give them time to close it.

@UbachukwuO @Chris_Deutsch Yes, there are rules. In effect they can call the loan at the most inconvenient moment.

@Chanpreet_0024 Sure, if they call the loan.

@Chris_Deutsch It's never the interest rate. The problem is always that the venture debt provider calls the loan.

Talked to yet another founder whose company was killed by venture debt. I asked why they took it. He said they just tacked some onto the end of one of their funding rounds. It seemed like free money.

@AndreSobolewski No I have not.


@josephjojoe @cremieuxrecueil We never remember their names. The songs are so similar that they all blend together in a kind of slurry.

@Chris_arnade How would you measure that?

@cremieuxrecueil 11 yo always wants to play recent pop music on the radio on the way home from school so that we can make fun of its repetitiveness by singing along with it.

@jeremyyamaguchi "Pre-seed" rounds are now $4.5m? Maybe it's time to retire that inherently ridiculous phrase.

@tlbtlbtlb I think usually they're just incompetent, but apparently the Republicans have a strategy of deliberately not fixing immigration this year so that they can run against Biden on it.

@eshear Photography was a disaster for painting actually. It's no coincidence that the era of "Old Masters" (as defined by auction houses) ends at just the point when photography became widespread.

@mattyglesias Seems gratuitously harsh...

@abhinavkej It's a lot better than it looks from the outside.

@MRamirezCal Interesting question. That would tend to spoil it, since it's so deliberately short, so I wouldn't presume to.

@DanielJHillman Me too.


The FBI informant story seems the most damning sign so far.

Apparently people in the SF Bay Area have stopped drinking. I heard about one big social event that made half as much from drinks in 2025 as in 2024.

@michaelchikov Same. Keep learning.

You will learn things in a startup, of course. But the way to learn the fastest is to work on whatever you're most curious about, and you don't have that luxury in a startup. In a startup you have to work on whatever users want most.

The thing to do now is to learn new things and increase your skill at the things you already know. Startups are rarely the optimal way to do this. The point of a startup is to make something people want, not to learn.

If you're in high school and you want to start a startup one day, you might think the best thing to do now is to start startups. But it probably isn't.

@davieball @garrytan @OpenAI OpenAI was a research project, but it too had a very specific focus initially: playing Dota 2 well.

@SenSanders These people aren't praising him because they want tax cuts. They would be fine if there was zero change in tax policy. They're praising him because they don't want him to pull some arbitrary move that damages their companies.

@tracewoodgrains Maybe someone can teach him about economics.

@sapinker I think you're making a small but significant mistake here. The test is not the company's current profits, but what you believe its future profits will be.

Speculative investing, in your sense, is when you buy stock at a price you believe will never be justified.