The Procrastination Equation (17 page)
Read The Procrastination Equation Online
Authors: Piers Steel
TRY POISON
Even though registration deadlines are posted months ahead and reinforced with early bird discounts, the crush of applications for anything from training courses to 10K races typically occurs just before the deadline.
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No surprises here. Presenting at a conference in New York a few years ago, I met Victor Vroom, an expert in leadership and motivation. Crossing Times Square with him, I noticed that neither of us had managed to secure rooms in the main hotel because we had both registered too late. Procrastinators, however, are paradoxically not always the last to sign up; sometimes they are the first. In an effort to precommit, they sign long-term health club contracts, buy season subscriptions to the symphony, or request home delivery of highbrow films from DVD movie clubs far in advance.
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By acting now, they hope to irrevocably force their future selves to do what their present selves are unwilling to pursue, even if it means poisoning other alternatives.
A one-time common form of this precommitment device was the Christmas Club.
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Invented by the Carlisle Trust Company in 1909, banks offered low-interest savings accounts that penalized you for early withdrawal. Despite today’s easier access to credit, variations on Christmas Clubs still exist.
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Why would anyone use them? Because they want to be under the threat of punishment: without the looming penalty, they fear they will withdraw and spend their money prematurely, and have nothing but good intentions to leave under the tree. The same principle can be useful in preventing weight gain. Weight Watchers is an international company designed to punish people for putting on the pounds. It provides assistance and advice for getting to and maintaining a target weight. Once you are firmly established at your ideal size, you receive a free Lifetime membership. But there is a catch. You must weigh in once a month and if you are more than two pounds over, the membership fees are reinstated until you again shed the pounds. I've also heard of a Danish chain of gyms that offers membership free of charge as long as you show up once a week.
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Fail to exercise regularly and you have to pay.
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With the help of a merciless friend or perhaps an agreeable enemy, you too can raise the stakes on any venture. Just make a painfully large bet that you will lose only if you put off striving toward the goal you want to attain. Economists John Romalis and Dean Karlin, for instance, opted for their own enhanced version of Weight Watchers. In their pact to stay trim, either of them can call an impromptu weigh-in, with the fine for weight gain being $10,000.
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Karlin later teamed up with a different economics professor, Ian Ayres, to create
stickK.com,
a website to help others devise their own precommitment contracts. A similar but earlier effort is the website “Covenant Eyes,” founded by Ronald DeHass. To curtail pornography consumption, it tracks and e-mails all your Internet visits to the “accountability partner” of your choice. It could be a friend, a spouse, or perhaps a pastor. For a technological solution in the same cast as Clocky, there is the alarm clock SnuzNLuz. Every time you press the snooze button, it donates ten or more dollars to your most detested charity; a little extra sleep comes at the cost of assisting groups that represent the antithesis of your political position, sexual orientation, or environmental stance.
Like all precommitment methods, these devices aren’t foolproof. To begin with, they are inflexible, so you can’t change your mind even for legitimate reasons. Where would Ulysses be if his ship started sinking or was attacked by pirates with him still bound to the mast? You might desperately need the money you've tied up in Christmas Clubs or fall ill and be unable to use long-term gym memberships. On the other hand, if you don’t make them strong enough, disincentives can be circumvented. In keeping with the saying, “Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address,”
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be careful that your future self isn’t smarter or more determined than your present version. If there is a will—and there most definitely
is
a will—then there'd better not be a way. Adults who nail-bite will coat their fingers with the same bitter ointment used to discourage children from sucking their thumbs, only to endure the taste or find inventive ways to wash it off.
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Similarly, in Mordecai Richler’s novel
Joshua Then and Now,
Joshua Shapiro helps his friend Seymour overcome a precommitment strategy by swapping underwear with him: Seymour was wearing “black satin panties with a delicate lace trim” to prevent his adulterous ways.
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After all, what type of woman would want to sleep with you after she found out that you clad your manliness in lacey undergarments? Well, I guess it depends on what crowd you hang with, but that’s beside the point.
1. Action Points for Commit Now to Bondage, Satiation, and Poison:
Staying true to your goals can be a time-limited offer, requiring you to act before temptation overcomes you. You first need to identify your temptations, what distracts you when you should be working. If you need assistance, ask your family and friends. They likely know. After identifying your temptations, you have three options about what to do about them. Take your pick.
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Bondage:
Put these temptations out of reach or at least far away. For example, erase your video games or disconnect your Internet connection. Remove the battery from your PDA or unplug your television set.
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Satiation:
Satisfy your needs before they get too intense and distract you from your work. Ironically, you can often work harder if you first schedule in some time for leisure.
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Poison:
Add disincentives to your temptations to make them sufficiently unattractive. For example, a monetary bet with someone else that you won’t give in to your temptation can be applied to almost anything.
MAKING PAYING ATTENTION PAY
About the time I was born, the award-winning psychologist Walter Mischel started experimenting on children using marshmallows to test the power of their will.
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In a series of studies, he would offer the kids a marshmallow, but tell them if they could wait a little while, they would get two marshmallows. Some waited a little, others a lot, with the average being about five minutes. The children’s ability to delay gratification and get the larger but later treat proved critical as they grew up. The self-control they exhibited as kids predicted everything from their Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores to their adult social skills.
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Character is indeed destiny. Subsequently, Mischel tried to change the destiny of a new cohort of children by improving their strategies for dealing with temptations, usually tripling their self-control, getting them to wait three times as long. What was his magic? He simply showed them how to pay attention.
Mischel’s approach to conquering inattention will seem very familiar. As I do for the Procrastination Equation, Mischel emphasizes our mind’s dual nature; procrastination arises from the interplay between our limbic system and our prefrontal cortex. To master attentional control as a means of increasing our self-control, we must first go from the inside out, to change what we see and how we see the world. Second, we go from the outside in, to remove or reinforce external cues, changing the world we see.
INSIDE OUT: PAY ATTENTION PLEASE!
It is time to play a game called “The Unlikely Beast.” It will take precisely a minute. Take out your watch to time yourself and for the entire minute don’t think of a
pink elephant.
No pink elephants, not even one. Got it? Since you probably didn’t think of any pink elephants today, this should be pretty easy. If you can make it an additional sixty seconds without thinking of pink elephants, you win. Are you ready? Go!
INSERT SIXTY SECONDS HERE
Did you win? I doubt it. According to Daniel Wegner, who wrote the book on thought suppression, the game is rigged against you.
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To make sure you aren’t thinking about pink elephants, you have to keep some notion of them in mind, otherwise you can’t watch out for violations. Ironically, by actively suppressing thoughts, you help to maintain them. This mechanism forms the basis of Freudian slips; trying to repress a trauma or a temptation seems to cause the dreaded idea to surface. For the few of you who did suppress the beast successfully for a whole sixty seconds, did you notice the post-suppression rebound? Your mind, in a sigh of release, probably indulged in a series of pink elephant fantasies as soon as the time was up.
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Despite its disastrous track record, thought suppression is a popular technique used to combat—ineffectively—everything from homosexual urges to racial stereotypes. If you find yourself pestered with an intrusive temptation, whether it be for an illicit lover or a new television show, you can find better ways to stop thinking about it. Here’s what works.
Instead of avoiding thinking about your temptation, you can mentally distance yourself from it by framing your temptation in terms of its abstract and symbolic features. For example, Mischel had children delay eating pretzels by having them focus on the snack’s shape and color (“the pretzels are long and thin like little logs”) rather than on their taste and texture.
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Similarly, anthropologist Terrence Deacon managed to get chimpanzees to make food choices more strategically by using a form of symbolic representation called lexigrams.
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The chimps were to choose between two portions of fruit, kiwis and strawberries, and received the fruit
they didn’t select.
Only chimps who learned the lexigram equivalents of kiwis and strawberries (respectively a black square with a blue “Ki” versus a red square with two horizontal white lines) were able to enact the winning strategy of pointing to the less desirable fruit option and, in return, receive the more desirable one. As Deacon concluded, seeing the world in symbols tips the balance away from the stimuli-driven limbic system toward the abstraction-loving prefrontal cortex, enabling us to make better choices.
9d
To take advantage of this quirk, we need to keep our thoughts as airy and formless as possible, as if seeing temptations from a great distance. As the seventeenth-century Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi wrote in the
Book of Five Rings:
“Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.”
Your second line of defense is to run a “smear campaign” on whatever features your limbic system finds desirable. You can ascribe negative qualities and consequences to every temptation to counteract its enticing features. Those pretzels, for example, could be stale or sneezed upon. The more such disgusting possibilities you generate, the more unpleasant the indulgence will seem.
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Furthermore, by imagining some really horrific outcomes, you engage in something called
covert sensitization.
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This technique is to pair your temptation with an undesirable image, hopefully infusing the former with the latter. Here is a generic one I developed specifically for procrastination:
I want you to imagine you've just put off a major project, one that you thought you still had plenty of time for. You are doing other less important work, surfing the Internet, watching TV at home—procrastinating. Finally, the moment comes when you can’t really put it off any longer and, though it will be stressful, you should be able to handle it—except you just came down with a throbbing headache. Given all the extra time you had to take on the project, you can’t use this as an excuse without looking lazy and incompetent. You start working on it, but the headache gets worse and worse, like a knife twisting behind your eyes. You are producing nothing of value despite the excruciating pain as you try to work. As your eyes almost tear up with agony, you take some pain medication only to find that it makes you sleepy, and indeed you do sleep. When you wake up, it is morning and you are late for work. Rushing to get there, you find that your boss has decided to gather all of your colleagues in the boardroom for you to present your project. The president of your company stops by and decides to listen in too. Being late, you are rushed to the front of the podium and everyone waits for you to get started. As you try to explain you have accomplished nothing because of a headache, you stumble over your words and look like an utter fool. There is a long silence broken only by a few sniggers, with your colleagues looking away, embarrassed to be associated with you. Afterward, your boss explains that she was thinking of promoting you but now she will have to fire you instead—what you have done is inexcusable. One of the people at the meeting recorded your “presentation” with her cell phone and posted it on YouTube, where people everywhere mock you. No one in your industry will even give you an interview and your career is ruined.
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Feel free to change this scenario to fit your situation, tailoring it to your specific distractions. Joshua Shapiro’s friend Seymour, for example, might have had better luck with fidelity by focusing on negative possibilities, like getting a stranger pregnant, catching a disease, or destroying his marriage. For yourself, just remember that when you leave tasks to the last moment, you can get sick, competing emergencies do happen, and work almost always takes longer than you thought. As for the dire outcomes that result from your procrastination, imagine the worst. The consulting company Opera Solutions lost a million-dollar contest by submitting their solution twenty minutes too late.
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Elisha Gray lost credit for inventing the telephone to Alexander Graham Bell by submitting his idea to the patent office a day late. Delay makes bad things happen. Why not to you?
Attentional control and covert sensitization aren’t perfect techniques, though. They require effort, and will eventually exhaust your energy stores—you can’t avert your eyes forever. As Mischel’s work showed, children’s ability to delay gratification was increased, but remained limited. Still, some delay may be enough for your purposes. Many temptations are time sensitive, like dessert at the end of dinner; if you can avoid them for an hour or so, the desire to indulge will disappear. It isn’t perfect, but it is better. If you are looking for more long-lasting solutions, read on.
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