The Procrastination Equation (10 page)

What’s more, procrastinators tend to be credit card revolvers; that is, they have hefty rotating unpaid balances on their monthly statements. When you combine all the credit cards in a household, the total often exceeds $10,000.
¹⁶
Thanks to something called “universal default,” most procrastinators are probably being charged the maximum rate for those balances, close to 29 percent per year, or 32 percent if it’s on your Sears card and up to 113 percent if you live in Mexico. Universal default means that if you are late paying one bill, such as the phone or electric bill, the credit card company can jack up their rates. Make one mistake, anywhere, and they've got you (goodbye 0 percent introductory annual rate). Here compound interest again rears its head, but this time it’s ugly. How are the credit card companies making record profits? At the dallying hands of procrastinators.
¹⁷
They affectionately call revolvers the “sweet spot” of their industry.
¹⁸

Of all the scientific studies that show how procrastination is dangerous for your financial health, here is one I found particularly revealing. It deals with MBA students, so I've nicknamed them “Leaders of Tomorrow.” The study demonstrates the self-defeating choices of procrastinators by examining University of Chicago MBAs, who often pride themselves on being cutthroat competitors.
¹⁹
After playing a series of games in which they could win up to $300, study subjects were given a choice about how they could receive their winnings. They could either get a check now or wait two weeks and get an even larger sum. Here is why procrastinators tend to be poorer: even though most of them demanded to be paid now, they didn’t cash their checks until, on average, four weeks later. In other words, it took them
twice
as long to get to the bank as they would have had to wait for the larger reward. This brutal mixture of procrastination and impatience is common: two-thirds of the students wanted their money up front.

If none of this has resonated with you yet, I will add one final example,
the
final example: your last will and testament. Way back in 1848, Lewis Judson noted that procrastinators not only borrow excessively but they put off their estate planning too: “Most men postpone making their wills until on a sick bed, and often then, until too weak to make them clearly and the lawyers take more of the estate than the heirs.”
²⁰
In the ensuing one and a half centuries, nothing much has changed; right now, I bet your will is almost certainly either out of date or completely undone.
^5a
Though you will be dead when the ramifications of this particular procrastination play out, it is probably the ugliest possible legacy to leave for your friends and family.
²¹
Dying intestate—without a legal will—is common, happening to around three quarters of the population. George Gershwin (American composer), Richie Valens (rock pioneer), Howard Hughes (reclusive billionaire), Keith Moon (drummer for the Who), and Barry White (the smooth bass soul singer) all died intestate. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., despite both rallying against procrastination themselves and receiving a stream of death threats, died intestate too.
^5b
What dying intestate entails depends on the jurisdiction where you live. Your whole estate may go to the government, to a hated sibling, or perhaps to your ex-spouse from whom you are separated but not yet divorced (and his or her new partner). Nothing may go to your soul mate, your best friend, or your favorite charity, and all your family heirlooms could be sold at bargain prices. The law favors descendants over ancestors so, if you do have children, they could get your estate all at once at the supremely responsible age of eighteen with no strings attached.

MEDICAL PROCRASTINATION

Despite being an important medical procedure, the thought of a colonoscopy makes most people squeamish. Even a description, which I'm about to provide, often provokes discomfort. The first step in a colonoscopy is to clean out your innards as much as possible. Typically, this involves drinking a gallon of a very strong laxative until what you pass resembles what you put in. You may also need an enema, which requires you to take in another few quarts, except from the other end. After this cleaning, upside and down, you are ready for the physician. You will go to the hospital, put on a gown, and then be sedated. You certainly don’t want to tense up when asked to lie on your left side and then receive a half-inch colonoscope through your rectum. A little air is usually injected to help inflate your bowel and allow a good look around. The doctor looks through the colonoscope and into you for about thirty minutes and your buttocks will feel greasy for a while afterward, but that’s about it.

You should start getting these colonoscopies pretty regularly after the age of fifty, if not earlier, but a surprising number of people put it off, including oncologists. Even my father-in-law, who ran a large health sciences center and should have known better, unduly delayed his. It does sound unpleasant, but the downside of delaying a colonoscopy is potential death from colorectal cancer, the second most deadly form of cancer, right behind lung cancer. But unlike lung cancer, colorectal cancer is very treatable and preventable if you catch it early. It comes in stages, from 0 to 4, the survival rate plummeting with each successive stage. The number one reason for failing to get screened is procrastination. Putting off a recommended colonoscopy because of fear, discomfort, or embarrassment is a widespread problem even among the most capable. Katie Couric, while she was co-anchor of the
Today
show, lost her husband to it. My father lost his second wife. By the time she finally went to see her doctor, a colonoscopy wasn’t needed because you could already feel the cancer through the wall of her stomach. After seeing her vibrancy slowly fade away in my father’s care over her last year, I can confidently say that this is as serious and tragic as it gets. However, the story of colonoscopies is not unusual for medicine. For many diseases, infections, growths, and general ailments, early detection and treatment is always better, and yet people consistently delay. Given this lead up, I'm sure you won’t be surprised to learn that procrastinators tend to be among the least healthy of people.

To rub salt into the wound, not only are procrastinators less likely to pursue treatments but they are more likely to indulge in the very behaviors that create the need for treatments in the first place. Procrastinators are health risks because their impulsive nature makes them susceptible to vices, attracting them to short-term pleasures despite their long-term pains. On the other hand, they are less predisposed to virtues—that is, short-term pains with long-term rewards. For example, do you floss? Though you know you should and often plan to, if you are a procrastinator, you very likely don’t.
²²
Exploring the effects of this oversight, I asked my dentist about the worst case he had seen. He recalled one patient with more tartar than tooth, tartar so thick that it formed a solid wall, obscuring the teeth. He offered to show me a picture; I wisely declined. Here are a few other misbehaviors that affect procrastinators' health.

If you are a major procrastinator, you likely have some cigarettes on you. At least, they are tobacco-based rather than cannabis (but you probably have had those too at some point). And what goes better with a cigarette than a drink, one that has a little alcoholic bite to it? Better not have too many—you don’t want to pass out while smoking, because you haven’t checked your smoke detector or changed its batteries in quite a while. And that wasn’t a salad you had for dinner, not with all those calories. Well, if you got it at a drive-through, what do you expect? This brings up your driving. Have you noticed that most people are scared when you are behind the wheel? Don’t get angry with me, though you do tend to get angry quite a bit. Don’t you?
²³

In short, smoking, excessive alcohol use, drug abuse, recklessness, overeating, risky driving, and fighting, not to mention promiscuous sex, are all activities that procrastinators tend to do a little more of rather than a little less. They all tap into procrastinators' impulsiveness, making gratification the one thing they don’t delay. If you currently partake in even half of these vices, you are not exactly a poster child for a healthy lifestyle. Odds are, your choices will catch up with you.

RELIGIOUS PROCRASTINATION

Despite being born in the fourth century, St. Augustine is interesting enough to this day that a musician, specifically Sting, has written a song about him. Prior to his conversion, St. Augustine was a follower of what was then the world’s most popular religion, Manichaeism, and he knew the pleasures of the flesh way better than you would expect of any saint. Though Manichaeism was against procreational sex—which partly explains why it died out—it found recreational sex more forgivable, an option that St. Augustine and his multiple mistresses indulged in enthusiastically.
²⁴
Their libidinous lifestyle more than explains how St. Augustine became the patron saint of beer or, at least, of brewers; it became his defining temptation. After converting to Christianity in a.d. 386, he had trouble turning his back on a woman’s embrace, his most famous quote being, “Please lord, make me chaste, just not today!” He kept putting off celibacy, feeling utterly defeated by his procrastination.
^5c
Then one day, in his garden in Milan, he heard God directing him through a child’s voice to “take up and read.” He grabbed the Bible, which opened to this precise passage from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans “ . . . not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.” With such a direct message, he redoubled his efforts for a holier life.

St. Augustine’s plight is a common one.
^5d
The world’s great religions are tough on procrastination, universally viewing it as a detour from the path of salvation and enlightenment.
²⁵
Their disapproval makes sense, because putting off good acts in order to sin will put you in spiritual jeopardy. Here are some samples that show how.

Hinduism, to start with, is defined by the
Mahabharata,
especially a section called the
Bhagavad Gita,
a religious text preached by the god-figure Krishna.
²⁶
In it Krishna declares, “Undisciplined, vulgar, stubborn, wicked, malicious, lazy, depressed, and procrastinating; such an agent is called a Taamasika agent,” unworthy of rebirth. In Islam, postponement of good deeds is primarily what the Arabic word for procrastination,
taswif,
refers to.
²⁷
Similarly,
The Pillars of Islam,
the foundational book on Islamic law, has much to say on procrastination, none of it good.
²⁸
The same is true of Buddhism, despite its often being taken to be the world’s undemanding and unobtrusive feel-good religion. From the Pali Canon, the earliest written Buddhist scriptures dating from about the first century
B.C.
until today, the message has been consistent and clear.
²⁹
As the American-born lama, Surya Das, says: “We have to stop procrastinating, pretending that we have forever to do what we want to do and be what we long to be.”
³⁰
But the religion in which procrastination appears to be the biggest problem, judging from the number of times it is mentioned, is Christianity. Sermons aplenty preach against procrastination, mainly because the faith emphasizes repentance.
^5e
People may lead a sinful, selfish life, but can seek forgiveness on their deathbed and still be redeemed, cramming for the finals so to speak.

Procrastination is a universal theme in all these religions because we cannot predict when we will die; thus, the best time to repent, to act morally, to commit ourselves to doing good is now. A parable from
The Mahabharata,
Hinduism’s epic narrative, demonstrates this reasoning. The hero, Yudhisthira, promises to donate some money to a beggar
tomorrow.
His younger brother Bhima hears of this and runs out to ring the court’s victory bells. “Why,” asked Yudhisthira, “did you ring the bells?” Bhima replies, “To have made such as promise, you must have victory over life. Otherwise, who knows what tomorrow will bring?” Similarly, Sayyiduna Ali Murtadha, the fourth Caliph of Islam, wrote, “Everyone who is taken by death asks for more time, while everyone who still has time makes excuses for procrastination.” If our clock suddenly stops, our souls may be damned if we put off good deeds, meditative practice, and requests for forgiveness.

The universal holy war, then, isn’t against forces of darkness but against forces of nature, our own human nature. Religions are all battling procrastination among their believers and converts because whatever promised lands or promised rewards they offer will most likely be granted in the
distant
future. Inevitably, everlasting salvation is being deeply discounted against a backdrop of sins that provide pleasures immediately. The world may be spiritually divided by how we view God or the good, but when it comes to damnation, procrastination leaves no doubt that all religions have a lot in common.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

If procrastinators tend to be less wealthy and healthy than the doers among us, it is likely that they are going to be less happy too. And they are. This is partly on account of the stress of procrastination, which frequently gives rise to guilt. It is not unusual for procrastinators to suffer more for putting off the work than they would have suffered by actually doing the work itself. Consequently, when they finally tackle the task, they are often relieved, admitting, “This isn’t as bad as I thought.” Rita Emmett, in her
Procrastinator’s Handbook,
considers this a law, which she codifies under her own name, as Emmett’s Law: “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.”