Think about it like this: present you has wants to eat the cheeseburger and fries for lunch, but has a lofty opinion of future you, and assumes that they will just eat a salad for dinner to make up for it. By the time dinner rolls around, you’ve become future you, but you find your ideas about what that person wants were not accurate. The present bias is that you assume your current ideas about what future you wants to do are going to be accurate in the future.
The 2nd vs. 3rd person really made that confusing to write.
The more I think about this the more bogus it seems. The idea of setting up a situation where you will have to do something in the future just doesn’t work. First of all, why is your future self going to respect the decisions on your present self when your present self is apparently an asshole who is perfectly willing to put things off but expects your future self to do differently? Second, people do this all the time and it doesn’t work - they said, “If I buy a gym membership then I’ll have to go because I won’t want to waste the money,” or “If I sign up for that class I’ll have to go because otherwise everyone will know I’m slacking,” and then they just don’t do things anyway.
The person who wrote this is someone who thinks about a lot of things. People who don’t procrastinate are people who do a lot of things, not people who think about a lot of things. This is essentially an argument for the thinker that doing might be better than thinking. But ultimately in order to stop procrastinating what you need to do is stop having arguments with yourself entirely and just do crap. Every argument is fallible, and your future self knows pretty well everything you know. You can’t hope to outsmart them with fancy thinking.
Procrastination is knowing it’s important, knowing that you’ll have to do it eventually, but also avoiding it specifically because doing it is more stressful than not doing it. Eventually a deadline will get close enough that it’s more painful NOT to do it, and the job is completed.
A lazy person wouldn’t have cared about the deadline, and the job would go undone.
