What Is Akrasia Effect?

Are you are a college student ? If yes, then you are definitely going to relate with this the most.

Akrasia effect is the senario where a person plans to do a set of things but, is not able to complete is till its deadline. The Akrasia effect is so commonly there in our life that we didn’t even know it existed until now. The main point here is people are very good at making plan for their future self and making themselves believe that they will successfully execute them. But, this is not exactly the case for most of them, why? Because people in the present state get motivated to do things that provide us with instant gratification.

The present brain and body of a single human being works for the result it wants in that instant while the plans of future work only when you are able to take it with utmost seniority. Procrastination is synonymous to Akrasia effect. People tend to think over the projects or topics they were going to work on too much that they tend to shift the time to actually work on them.

The term which really describes the effect is “time inconsistency”, even economists and researchers have found that the management of time is what leads to this effect. This problem is not the present human outcome of actions but was also observed in the past. It has been here with us since centuries.

In 1830, a French author Victor Hugo was facing problem with his deadline of his new book. He went out or did other things to avoid and let the deadline slip of the book completion. Then after realizing that he has been wasting time, he made anew deadline of 6 months and locked almost all his clothes in a closet and lived with 2 piece of clothing the whole winter which drove him to sit and write for 2-4 hrs a day.

This shows or teaches that when you are serious about something and don’t want the opportunity to slip by due to your laziness or procrastination over it, you need to take harsh steps to keep yourself motivated . Many a times you may have also done something to keep yourself awake during an exam or project submission.

Therefore to come out of the Akrasia effect you need to self evaluate and do things that is unconventional for you, so that you are in constant reminder of completion of the task you should complete.