Friday, November 02, 2007

Power of Procrastination

Theorem: Pp=te/ta
The Power of Procrastination is proportional to expected time to complete some arbitrary chore over the actual time it takes to complete that chore. The Pp of the Daily Show would then be a very small number (<1) while the Pp of one's doctoral thesis would be a very large number.

Ex. Sally normally washes the dishes once every other week. Given that she has a paper to write for tomorrow the paper's Pp is 336p. How long does it actually take Sally to wash the dishes?
A. 1 hour.

I am still working on a theory for Pp wrt time remaining. It is clear, a priori, that Pp increases as the due point approaches, but I am not exactly sure what that relationship is yet. Seemingly, te is a constant so Pp must vary with ta, but how?

3 comments:

Sarah Brodsky said...

I got that the last post was about "It's a Wonderful Life." But what is this a parody of? "A Beautiful Mind"?

Zev said...

No, it is a parody of my life.

Mark Dredze said...

I believe there was a PhD comics about this topic, whereby one of the students proved something about procrastination.