Reddit reviews Scarcity

First - what you're doing is completely damn normal. People don't tend to be put their full attention to something until the resources required are scarce (see: Scarcity. Highly recommended book.)

To combat this, you can set mini-deadlines within your project. To hard commit to this, you can do something like telling the customer/your boss that you'll have a first draft to them in 2 days so they can give feedback. Or you can come up with some rewards / punishments to incentivize you to meet them.

Check out the book "scarcity" by
Sendhil Mullainathan, it is all about the measurable impact on cognition that being poor has. Not only does doing dumb things keep you poor, but being poor makes you dumber . there are physical processes in the brain that get rewired by poverty and reduce your capacity for long term planning and good judgement. And this poor judgement, as you said, perpetuates their state of poverty because they blew their check on Indianapolis Colts memorabilia.

https://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/dp/125005611X#byline_secondary_view_div_1492693997370

What people aren't considering in all this chatter about giving poor people money is the concept of Scarcity vs Abundance, which is really what you are talking about. The problem is not that poor people can't handle money, it's that they can't handle levels of money they have never dealt with. The problem isn't poverty, it's scarcity. The problem is not having access to whatever it is you need (scarcity), and people try to solve it giving them way, way more than they need (abundance) There's this great book called Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir and it discusses what you really need to solve the problem, which is some access to resources without exhausting everything, with enough "slack" to get you through the really hard times. You can't have so little that you are going to run out, but not so much that you mismanage, that's slack.

Take a farmer, if a farmer harvests once a year and sells his crop, he's rich immediately after he sells his crop. The whole rest of the year, he has to live off the money that he makes on his one harvest. So, naturally what happens is that they spend more money than they can afford to leaving them poorest right before their harvest. This is a compounded problem because the time you buy fertilizer is before the harvest, so they miss their opportunity to increase their yields to a new level, which would theoretically give them access to even more money and other capital. The solution is to never get the "lump sum" amount of money at one time, thus breaking the scarcity/abundance cycle.

If the farmers get paid the same amount of money every week instead of once a year, they aren't subject to huge spending/starving swings. I bet things would have been different for the guy if he was given $2,000 a month for 50 months. If it took 4 years for him to spend the money instead of spending it at any rate he chose, he could make substantial lifestyle changes and really get back on his feet.

Book:
Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives by Sendhil Mullainathan et al.
Link: http://amzn.com/125005611X

Perhaps reading this book would give you a little more insight into how this happens. I found it made to be fairly interesting reading.

Scarcity

I mis identified the author, it was Mund

https://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/dp/125005611X

Isn't this the whole Scarcity and mental bandwidth argument?

https://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/dp/125005611X

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7uNHbpwKwI

https://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/dp/125005611X

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldar_Shafir

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendhil_Mullainathan

https://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/dp/125005611X Here's the book.

I'll add, I highly recommend reading https://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/dp/125005611X as it delves into the psychology of scarcity and why and how people end up in situations like this.

Hey, I don’t have any genius answers, but the book Scarcity by Mulliathan and Shafir really helped me understand this phenomenon.

Ted Talk: https://youtu.be/gV1ESN8NGh8
Hidden Brain podcast: https://www.npr.org/2017/03/20/520587241/the-scarcity-trap-why-we-keep-digging-when-were-stuck-in-a-hole
Article by the same authors: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/scientificamericanmind0114-58.pdf
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/dp/125005611X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=scarcity&qid=1563889402&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Attempt at tl;dr:
There is a high cognitive tax from constantly resisting temptation. The best way to reduce this tax is to have slack in your budget.

You should read Scarcity by Sendil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. It provides a very convincing schema for understanding why people don't follow through on this stuff.

Not really:
https://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/dp/125005611X