My hypothesis is that: With the increased convenience and the fast pace of the world today, we want to be gratified instantly and our ability to wait for gratification is coming down. This is what I call as the gratification cycle and the cycle seems to become shorter and shorter. Our instant access to online movies, online shopping, answers to any question online, etc. has made us feel that we need to gratified instantly and we are not ready to delay gratification.

This is also the reason why our attention spans are coming down as we need more shorter and frequent pain-pleasure cycles. This is very evident for procrastinators as they don’t want to pursue a task that doesn’t have instant gratification. And even when they pursue a task, they tend to stop it frequently to seek gratification from the little work that they did so far. These frequent stops causes more inefficiencies and longer time to complete a work.

Also, refer to my earlier post on delayed gratification.