The Procrastination Equation (16 page)

Finding your perfect job is at least as difficult as finding your soul mate. With almost 50 percent of marriages in our culture ending in divorce, the challenge is a tough one. With love, we seek the person who complements us; with work, we seek the job that could become a calling. In either case, a satisfying match is known as congruence, and it can be darn difficult to accomplish. The best predictor of love is familiarity brought about by physical proximity,
^8d
a good recipe insofar as it keeps down travel costs while dating.
³⁷
At work too, we gravitate toward the best of our known options, not the best of all possible jobs. Expanding our world and improving our career choices is not a simple matter. We need to better understand ourselves and what different jobs can offer us, and then find a way to link the two.
³⁸

For most people, finding themselves and their calling is an ongoing struggle. If we all went with our first impulse, the working world would be primarily composed of firefighters and ballerinas. If we followed the dreams of our teenage years, we would mostly be professional athletes, fashion designers, or rap stars. Ask college students, and many of them want a career in film. On the other hand, choosing sensibly to be a doctor or a lawyer doesn’t always pan out either; these were the initial career paths of Graham Chapman and John Cleese before they created Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Most of us have to search for a calling while we are already working, deepening the commitment to a current and perhaps inappropriate career path. We may need the help of a matchmaker or, as we call them in the world of work, a counseling or vocational psychologist. These professionals assess your personality as it relates to work, typically relying on an assessment tool that divides interests into six themes: realistic (doing), investigative (thinking), artistic (creating), social (helping), enterprising (persuading), and conventional (organizing).
³⁹
Jobs are profiled too, with firefighting falling under “realistic” and ballerina under “artistic.” Vocational counselors will point you toward a variety of job choices, though it is up to you to at least try “dating” them. The assessment on the next page is my own, completed when I was seventeen years old. One profession clearly dominates my profile, one that requires a combination of investigative and artistic interests—a professor. I did not take these findings seriously at the time, but drifted about for a decade before finally coming to the same conclusion. Blame my strong need for autonomy.

As in seeking love, there is more involved in finding your calling than identifying what you desire. Though a certain job could be the one for you, your feelings may not be reciprocated. Some jobs are out of our league because they are already being pursued by an excessive number of applicants. Supply and demand is harsh, and there may not be a demand for what you supply. Fortunately, there are plenty of other jobs that you could like just as much. The O*NET program in the United States catalogues nearly a thousand jobs, identifying those that are in demand by employers and that fit your profile.
^8e

After accounting for your personality and for the job market, you will also need to consider your abilities.
⁴⁰
Can you do what the job requires? Firefighters and ballerinas need to be athletically gifted, ranking in the top positions of the physical fitness category. If you want to be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon, you'd better be blazingly smart. Linking individual abilities, such as stamina or mental capability, with the world of work isn’t easy.
⁴¹
For example, I can tell you that if you are five feet tall, you shouldn’t foster aspirations for a career in the NBA. But most of the time it isn’t obvious whether you are following a dream or pursuing a lost cause. Just be aware that you want to find work that you not only love but have the capacity to excel at too.

5. Action Points for Let Your Passion Be Your Vocation:
Not everyone has job mobility. Some are tied down by obligations and economic constraints and have to make choices based on security or availability. If you have the gift of choice, don’t blow it! For the next little while, finding a compatible fit between what you do and who you are should be an ongoing occupation.

• Look at careers involving activities you love or like doing.

• Filter out all the occupations for which you don’t possess (or aren’t willing to learn) the necessary skills or abilities.

• Rank the remaining careers by what is in demand. The harder the economic times, the fewer your choices will be.

• If you need help answering any of these questions, find a reputable career service for employment advice.
^8f

• Start job hunting!

LOOKING FORWARD

In chapter 2, Valerie Without Value hated to write and put off her municipal politics assignment for so long that what she produced was second-rate. Instead of working, she indulged in the far more pleasurable acts of texting her friends and binging on video snacks. Hers is a regrettably common story, especially among writers.
^8g
To stop procrastinating, Valerie needs to find a way to heighten the value of her work. Connecting it to her greater career goals would be a good start. By identifying the type of writing she wants to do and framing the present task as a stepping-stone toward this goal, she should enact strategy elements of both
Let Your Passion Be Your Vocation
and
Games and Goals.
Also, she could have started earlier in the day, when she had the most energy, instead of toward the end, when her willpower was weakest (see
Energy Crisis
). And at the very least, she could have tried
Double or Nothing
and used that municipal politics piece to motivate her to get other work done, procrastinating productively rather than cyberslacking.

If you scored 24 or above on Valerie’s scale about value from chapter 2, you probably can relate to her life, though your problem might lie elsewhere than in writing.
⁴²
If so, reviewing the techniques in this chapter would be a good idea, as there is indeed some wiggle room in the world to find work that suits us better and to fashion this work into something we love (or at least like). Let’s transmute those motivationally inert and tire-some tasks into golden goals that engage you. Just think, it might even be fun!

Chapter Nine
In Good Time

MANAGING SHORT-TERM IMPULSES AND LONG-TERM GOALS

He that has not a mastery over his inclinations, he that knows not how to resist the importunity of present pleasure or pain, for the sake of what reason tells him is fit to be done, wants the true principle of virtue and industry, and is in danger never to be good for anything.

JOHN LOCKE

I
mpulsiveness is the last cause of procrastination we will address, despite its overwhelming desire to be first in all things. “Now, now, I want it now” is its mantra. If we have an inner child, this is it, and it wants that candy right away. Impulsiveness runs through every vice that involves weakness of the will. Not only does impulsiveness form the core of procrastination but it is strongly connected to dysfunctional relationships, lousy leadership, suicide, substance abuse, and violence. In their groundbreaking book
A General Theory of Crime,
criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi argue that most misdeeds and misdemeanors are due to impulsiveness alone.
¹
What inevitably happens when vices give more immediate satisfaction than virtues? The most impulsive person will be the most corruptible.

Consequently, impulsiveness stands at procrastination’s center-field, and has a much more intense relationship with procrastination than with any other personality trait. Whereas low self-confidence (expectancy) and propensity for boredom (value) have definite roles in creating procrastination, they are not in the same league as impulsiveness. Impulsiveness multiplies the effect of delay, making it a major determinant of the Procrastination Equation’s outcome. A person with twice the average level of impulsiveness as a typical person will generally let the deadline become twice as close before starting to work. Unfortunately, if you are impulsive, you will always be somewhat susceptible to putting life off. Though you will experience a modest decrease in impulsiveness as you age
²
and not all situations will trigger impulsive action,
³
you can’t escape your fate. Impulsiveness is not something you have, but something you are.

So what can we do about a chronic lack of self-control? Civilization has been chewing over this problem for thousands of years, figuring out how to tone down the limbic system and pump up the prefrontal cortex.
⁴
Since every generation has to rediscover these solutions in their own words, it is time for us to revisit and reframe a little ancient wisdom. Let’s go back to the beginning of the Greek empire, its legendary poet Homer, and his epic
The Odyssey.

COMMIT NOW TO BONDAGE, SATIATION, AND POISON

Known as Odysseus or Ulysses, this King of Ithaca reigned more than three thousand years ago, but is widely remembered to this day. In the battle to retrieve the beautiful Helen, it was Ulysses who thought up the famous Trojan horse, a giant wooden statue in which forty Greeks were hidden. Since the phrase “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” was still hours away from being coined, Troy accepted the peace offering, only to have Ulysses and his men descend from the horse’s belly behind their lines. For us, the most important of Ulysses' stories happens afterward on his sea voyage return. In a poorly planned itinerary, he fights dozens of monsters—the Cyclops, giants, drugged-out hippies known as lotus-eaters—but most important of all, the Sirens. These beautiful women, despite being perpetually naked and available, are unattached for good reason. They sing and their voices are so pure and captivating that they are irresistible; enthralled by their melody, you will want nothing but to listen and will blissfully starve, die, and rot. What do you do? Fortunately, on one of his previous stops, Ulysses had met the goddess Circe, who gave him some handy advice: fill his men’s ears with wax to make them deaf and bind himself to the ship’s mast so he could hear the irresistible song but couldn’t act upon his urges. The bondage worked and Ulysses traveled on.
⁵

How does this apply to us? Consider Ulysses' situation in terms of the Procrastination Equation in the chart on the following page. On the vertical axis, we have Ulysses' desire, showing that he always acts on what he wants most. On the horizontal axis, there is the time dimension, starting off on the left with the way he feels right now and then moving to the right, tracking the way his desires change over time, especially as he approaches the Sirens and then Ithaca. Initially, he wants to go home to Ithaca, surprise his wife, Penelope, after his twenty-year absence, and slaughter all the suitors vying for her hand—as represented by the dashed line. He is noticeably less enthusiastic about dying at the hands of the Sirens, as represented by the solid line. However, his preference reverses when he reaches the island of the Sirens, where briefly the solid line peaks above the dashed line. If he hadn’t taken Circe’s advice and protected himself and his crew, they would have all stayed and died on the island. This is exactly what the Procrastination Equation predicts. As you get closer to a temptation, your desire for it peaks, allowing the temptation to trump later but better options. This probably happens to you all the time.

Right now, I'm sure you have no shortage of long-term goals: you want to lose ten pounds, stop smoking, get out more, or work harder. Maybe you want to start saving money for retirement or just for a trip. Standing between us and our aspirations are our Sirens. Instead of beautiful bare-breasted babes, they are the dessert cart, the television, or the amazing videogame. We wake in the morning with a clear desire to hit the gym in the afternoon only to succumb to the succubi of the immediately available. We want to diet but when some apple-crumble cake wafts under our nose, our willpower crumbles too. But if you can anticipate these powerful temptations, you can act in advance to ward them off. You can use the concept of
precommitment.
⁶

Because he heeded the warning about the Sirens, Ulysses acted before the urge was upon him, precommitting now to prevent himself from later weakness. Because he followed Circe’s advice, Ulysses lived to sail another day. Unfortunately, we don’t have our own goddess to warn us of our Sirens; it is notoriously difficult to anticipate our own temptations in the moment. Using economic terminology,
sophisticates
acknowledge their self-control problems, while
naïfs
are caught unaware by sudden shifts in their inclinations.
⁷
Most of us are
naïfs,
unable to fully anticipate how we will feel when cravings leap upon us.
⁸
In biological terms, our prefrontal cortex and limbic system just don’t get each other, so we tend to underestimate the power of our own arousal—the heat of the moment—whether it is hunger, anger, or sexual excitement. And we forget the degree of regret we will feel after acting on these urges. Looking groggily into the mirror the morning after, we are mystified by exactly what our limbic system was thinking the night before.

Though we might be slow learners in regard to the power of our temptations, we do eventually learn. Give it some thought. When you are procrastinating, what are you doing? Do a few specific distractions come to mind? Can you name your Sirens? If so, let’s start precommitting. Keeping true to your goals can be a limited time offer, so here’s how to act now.

THROW AWAY THE KEY

A common military strategy to prevent your ships from being captured is to destroy them yourself, but such destruction has another purpose. The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés scuttled his own ships after landing in Mexico by filling them with water, even though the enemy was not yet in sight.
⁹
Similarly, William the Conqueror burned a few of his boats symbolically and had the rest dismantled when he made landfall in England.
¹⁰
In both cases, these men profited from their decision and went on to establish new dominions. Cortés destroyed the Aztec Empire and took their ruler Montezuma hostage. William’s conquest of England ensured that the native-born nobility were replaced by those of Norman origin for centuries to come. By eliminating the means of retreat, they left their troops no option but to win, a strategy that dates back thousands of years. Sun Tzu summarizes it in his sixth-century text,
The Art of War:
“Throw the troops into a position from which there is no escape, and even faced with death they will not flee. For if prepared to die, what can they not achieve? Then officers and men together put forth their utmost effort.”

Applying this principle to procrastination, we can also shield our long-term goals from immediate temptations. Our ships in this case are our alternatives, which we try to eliminate. Herman Melville reportedly had his wife chain him to his desk while he wrote
Moby-Dick.
To keep writing, Victor Hugo had his servant strip him naked in his study and not return with his clothes until the appointed hour.
¹¹
Knowing that I will devour half the Halloween candy ahead of time, I don’t buy it until hours before the trick-or-treating starts and take leftovers to the office for my colleagues the day after. Smokers, attempting to quit, give their packs away, telling friends not to lend them cigarettes. Revelers going out to the bar leave their credit cards at home and bring limited cash so they don’t break their budgets.
^9a

Unfortunately, as with so many of the strategies we have already encountered, precommitment can be difficult to enact, especially on your own. Ulysses had his crew to tie him up to the mast, but we usually find ourselves without sailors at our command. Technology is beginning to fill this gap. A few years ago, I was interviewed for an article in
Newsday
celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the snooze button.
¹²
The snooze button is the devil’s device, a procrastination-enabling technology that lets you easily put off your original goal of waking up, in order to grab a few more minutes of low-quality slumber. To counteract this temptation, people hide their alarm clocks across the bedroom, or make use of Clocky, a clock on wheels that, after you hit the snooze button once, bolts off your nightstand and beeps and flashes like a robot in distress. A number of similar applications have been developed for the computer. Google has the “Take a break” button, which disables your e-mail for fifteen minutes. Another feature is Mail Goggles, which prevents late-night drunken e-mailing by requiring you first to solve simple math problems after 10:00 p.m.
¹³
Others are being constantly developed, including a wide selection of add-ons for the Internet browser Firefox (
MeeTimer,
LeechBlock
); for Apple users, there is the
Freedom
program, which will block your access to the Internet for up to eight hours. Unfortunately, most elaborate commercial time-control software, such as
Chronager,
is based on the idea of parental control instead of self-control; once you have the system of checks and balances set up, you will need a friend to surreptitiously change your password and keep the new one a secret.

Despite their usefulness, however, such precommitments aren’t entirely effective. Most of these examples merely make succumbing to temptation difficult but still not impossible. The crux of the problem is that the same cunning you employed to set them up is now turned against you; indeed, you are your own worst enemy. You can always run to the store to buy another treat, reformat your computer to get around nanny software, and throw pillows to suffocate Clocky. Samuel Coleridge hired thugs to prevent him from frequenting opium dens, only to fire them when the urge came upon him once again. In
Trainspotting,
Ewan McGregor’s character nailed himself into a room so he could quit his heroin habit, only to extract himself later with the same determination.
¹⁴
More realistically, the mechanism at work here is delaying—not preventing—your access to temptations. As the delay lengthens, with luck the desire for the temptation is reduced in strength. A bowl of ice cream might beckon if placed within arm’s reach, but its voice is muffled when shut inside the freezer. Naturally, the greater the desire for the vice, the greater the distance required to silence it.

SATIATION

Have you ever gone to the grocery store hungry? Bad idea. You likely wheeled down the aisles, filling your cart with indulgences that weren’t on your list. Unpacking the bags at home, you loaded your cupboard and freezer with goodies that took you weeks to plow through and added pounds to your midriff. Really, all you needed was a small treat but in your state of deprivation you impulsively bought yourself a sizable feast. The pearl of wisdom, aside from “Never grocery shop on an empty stomach,” is that more basic concerns must be attended to before concentration can be applied elsewhere.
¹⁵
Abraham Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology, based his theory of self-actualization on this insight, positing that we have a hierarchy of needs whereby basic, more visceral desires, like food and safety, must be attended to first.
¹⁶

To precommit using satiation, we try to meet our needs in a safe and managed manner before they intensify and take control. If your appetite becomes too extreme, you will gorge yourself in seeking to satisfy it. Two common precommitment strategies are having a glass of water and garden salad at the beginning of a meal and grazing on small healthy snacks throughout the day.
^9b
A rather fun way of encouraging fidelity is to make love before your partner leaves for a prolonged trip, endorsed by no less than St. Paul the Apostle.
^9c
Smokers use the nicotine patch to reduce their cravings while heroin users take methadone. A broader use of this strategy is to schedule your recreational activities in your calendar first. Then pencil in your chores. Called an “unschedule,” it can breathe energy back into life’s grind.
¹⁷
In all these cases, the idea is to let off a little steam before our boilers burst.