Page 84 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

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preventing procrastination:

Enlisting Your Habits (“Zombies”) as Helpers

or centuries, arsenic was a popular choice for killers. A sprinkle on your
F morning toast would cause your painful death within a day. So you can
imagine the shock at the forty-eighth meeting of the German Association of Arts
and Sciences in 1875, when two men sat in front of the audience and blithely
downed more than double a deadly dose of arsenic. The next day the men were

back at the conference, smiling and healthy. Analysis of the men’s urine showed
it was no trick. The men had indeed ingested the poison. 1
How is it possible to take something so bad for you and stay alive—and
even look healthy?
The answer has an uncanny relationship to procrastination. Understanding

something of the cognitive psychology of procrastination, just like understanding
the chemistry of poison, can help us develop healthy preventatives.
In this and the next chapter, I’m going to teach you the lazy person’s
approach to tackling procrastination. This means you’ll be learning about your
inner zombies—the routine, habitual responses your brain falls into as a result of
specific cues. These zombie responses are often focused on making the here and
now better. As you’ll see, you can trick some of these zombies into helping you

to fend off procrastination when you need to (not all procrastination is bad). 2
Then we’ll interleave a chapter where you’ll deepen your chunking skills, before
we return with a final chapter of wrap-up coverage on procrastination that
provides tips, tricks, and handy technological tools.
First things first. Unlike procrastination, which is easy to fall into, willpower
is hard to come by because it uses a lot of neural resources. This means that the

last thing you want to do in tackling procrastination is to go around spraying