So, if ideation and action are the two players, then it seems that the nature of their relationship can be either a positive or negative feedback loop. The artistry of psychotherapy then becomes to assist the client in getting on a positive feedback loop. The strengths-based approach of positive psychology would probably be best at this.

I think you're right in that there need not be choice involved, but one had to be a robot not to see immediately the option jumping right at you to stay in bed and exercise another day. So I would certainly have to make the choice. In this case it's not so hard to actually make it because running gives also immediate gratification. I always feel better afterwards although I'm not yet fit enough to reach a runner's high.

As a grad student in philosophy, one thing that's always bugged me (which might be relevant to the dispute here) is telling the difference between intention failure and intention change.

It sounds to me as though the "it's about choice" people are seeing intention revision where you see intention failure. Obviously both phenomena are real and will need to be allowed for in any attempt at describing agency: changing your mind is clearly rational in some cases, and not all cases of going against earlier intentions can honestly be described as rational revision. Both weakness of will and intention-updating exist, the question is how to tell the difference between them and that’s what a philosophical theory of agency tries to do. I’m thinking primarily of the work of Harry Frankfurt and others on what it is to have beliefs and desires of our own – i.e. how to tell when we’re being ‘authentic’.

Perhaps it's a better response to the critic to argue (as Frankfurt might) that the run-don't run case can’t be a rational case of intention-update because nothing is updated except the intention itself: no new information is gained overnight, we should've known for example that we'd likely not want to go for the run, etc etc. Nothing happened that was in anyway novel, we just wantonly decided to go against the earlier intention on the basis of shifting occurant desires. But if we take *that* as being a rational the basis for decision-making, then we shouldn’t have been forming intentions in the first place. Rational updating requires new information or a new awareness of earlier error. That’s not present in the case you describe so as described we’re being irrationally inconsistent, plain and simple.

Even so there's a puzzle: the decision/intention-shift/gap being irrational doesn't itself determine which of the decisions/intentions was the right/best/most rational one to have. I can say I was being irrational to go against the intention, or I can say I was irrational to form *that* intention in the first place (when I should've known how little it reflects what I will want when it's time to carry it out). Either description seems possible: because we often form intentions out of externally derived guilt, wishful thinking or idealism borrowed from others which (if we thought about it) we don’t actually share. We'd need to know more about which intention coheres best with our long-term plans and goals... and therefore have a way to figure out what those are.
Some ‘procrastination’ might be due to simply not having any (I suspect this sometimes about myself).

This comment is a bit of a ramble, but the main point (at least in intention) was this: I suspect disputes like this are irresolvable without a larger story about agency to wrap them up in.

I am a 2006 graduate of Pomona College, where I was a double-major in psychology and economics. I wrote my psychology senior thesis on procrastination, so I thought I'd share a little bit of my thoughts.

Carl argues that no new information was obtained during sleep, so the decision couldn't be rational updating. I would argue that there was new information: the subjective feeling the person felt when he woke up. Although grogginess might be predictable, rationally, the groggy feeling is never as salient at night as it is at 5 in the morning. That doesn't make the decision rational, but the person is deciding based on his preferences at each point in time.

What makes procrastination interesting is that those preferences change over time, and are time-inconsistent. If your preferences were the same across time, that would be rational. Alternatively, if your preferences were different over time, but were subject to a consistent discount rate, that too would be rational. But our preferences across time do not follow a consistent discount rate. Preferences across time are generally consistent, except for a very special time: the present. For research and theory on this, you could check out the behavioral economics literature, notably Kahneman and Tversky.

Essentially, if you include your own mood as a good piece of information that helps you decide what to do, then you could be considered rational. If your moods are off-limits, then you are irrational. I think a strong argument could be made that if you feel terrible when you wake up, you might reasonably predict that your run will be less pleasant than if you wake up and don't feel terrible (although you probably still wouldn't feel great at 5 am). One cognitive bias that probably would play a role here is that we let our current mood play a fairly significant role in our emotional forecasting. It might be that when we get outside in the fresh air, our bad mood will go away, but we don't foresee that because we're in a bad mood.

My opinion is that at night, we make a decision for ourselves in the future. When we wake up, we realize it was a bad decision, from our morning self's perspective. The problem is, one of our selves must suffer, either from lack of sleep, or lack of workout. We are clearly not good at sacrificing our present happiness for future happiness, or at least not in this case. Perhaps we suffer more from lack of foresight and discipline than a lack of reason.

quite a hot topic , waiting for your other posts

Just a few nitpicking comments:

Eastern philosophy and psychology could really show western psychology a thing or two in terms of suffering, happiness, and yes, choice. However, Zen (and other forms of Buddhism) is solely about being simple and mindlessly doing your chores and living a pious life. Those ideas are more cartoonish stereotypes. I would be careful not to utilize zen koans or stories just to make a point. Not because they are holy or anything, just that small conceptual conclusions drawn from the koans are completely irrelevant to the purpose/function of the stories.

In fact, choice and morality are quite important to Buddhism. What might be gained from buddhism is the practice of not getting "perpetually swept up by thought", or an aware detachment from your own thoughts. In this way, compulsive and procrastinative (is that a word? it should be) can just be let go of (not indulged in), then more reasonable action can be taken, which then depends on the choice of the person.

Just a buddhist nerd weighing in here ;)

fun fact: I am procrastinating right now.