The Procrastination Equation (2 page)

This is so common as to be unremarkable—except to the person who has suffered through the experience and knows the performance was not up to par. The relief at getting a job done doesn’t always make up for doing a sloppy job. Even if you managed to perform brilliantly, the achievement is tainted with a whiff of what might have been. And this kind of procrastination has likely cast a cloud on an evening out, a party, or a vacation, which you couldn’t fully enjoy because half of your mind was elsewhere, obsessing about what you were avoiding. You resolve that this will never happen again; the cost of procrastination is too great.

The trouble with such resolutions is that procrastination is a habit that tends to endure. Instead of dealing with our delays, we excuse ourselves from them—self-deception and procrastination often go hand-in-hand.
²
Exploiting the thin line between
couldn’t
and
wouldn’t,
we exaggerate the difficulties we faced and come up with justifications: a bad chest cold, an allergic reaction that caused sleepiness, a friend’s crisis that demanded our attention. Or we deflect responsibility entirely by saying, “Gee whiz, who knew?” If you couldn’t have anticipated the situation, then you can’t be blamed. For example, how would you respond to the following questions regarding your last bout of procrastination?

The honest answers are likely yes, yup, and definitely, but it’s difficult to answer honestly, isn’t it? And that is the problem.

Some procrastinators will even try to frame their self-destructive inaction as a thoughtful choice. For example, is it wrong to put off your career to pursue more family time? It depends on who you are. Some people relish the work-focused model of success, resenting time taken away from the job, and so they may miss out on family dinners and school plays. Others prosper in the home and community, enjoying the relationships nurtured there, at the expense of tasks at work. To the casual observer, it isn’t easy to tell which choice is procrastination and which is a purposeful decision. Only the procrastinator knows for sure.

In the back of their minds, many procrastinators hope they won’t need excuses. They bank on Lady Luck. Sometimes it works. Frank Lloyd Wright drew his architectural masterpiece, Fallingwater, in the three hours before his patron, Edgar Kaufmann, came to see the sketches. Tom Wolfe cranked out in a midnight panic forty-nine pages of almost unedited prose for an
Esquire
magazine piece on California’s hotrod and custom car culture. Byron Dobell, his editor, simply removed “Dear Byron” from the top of Wolfe’s memo and printed it under the title “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” and a new style of journalism was born. But I don’t need to tell you how rare such outcomes are. By your own standards, if you thought delay was a good idea in the first place, you wouldn’t be procrastinating.

THE PROCRASTINATOR’S PROFILE

If it makes you feel any better, procrastination puts us in good company. It’s as common as morning coffee. Across scores of surveys, about 95 percent of people admit to procrastinating, with about a quarter of these indicating that it is a chronic, defining characteristic.
³
“To stop procrastinating” is at any time among the world’s top reported goals.
⁴
Procrastination is so prevalent that it has its own brand of humor. Possibly the best excuse for missing a deadline came from Dorothy Parker. When asked by
The New Yorker
’s editor, Harold Ross, for a piece that was late, she woefully explained, using her dark and sorrowful eyes to full effect, “Somebody was using the pencil.” And, of course, there is the most infamous of all procrastination jokes. Don’t you know it? I will tell you later.

No occupational category seems immune from procrastination, but writers seem especially prone. Agatha Christie was guilty of it and Margaret Atwood admitted she often spends “the morning procrastinating and worrying, and then plunges into the manuscript in a frenzy of anxiety around 3:00 p.m.” Newscasters can also suffer from it; witness Ted Koppel’s quip: “My parents and teachers used to be exasperated by the fact I would wait until the last minute, and now people are fascinated by it.”
⁵
Procrastinators come from every letter of the occupational alphabet, from astronauts to Episcopalian priests and from X-ray technicians to zookeepers.
⁶
Unfortunately, whatever the job, procrastinators are more likely to be unemployed or working part-time compared to their non-procrastinating counterparts. Procrastinators can be of either sex, though the Y chromosome has a slight edge. A group of a hundred hardened procrastinators would likely be composed of 54 men and 46 women, leaving 8 unmatched males vying for a female dalliance. You see, procrastinators tend to be available . . . sort of. They are more likely to be single than married but also more likely to be separated than divorced. They put off ending as well as beginning commitment. Age also determines procrastination.
⁷
As we progress from grade school through to the retirement home and the closer we come to life’s final deadline, the less we put off. Those who have matured physically are, unsurprisingly, more mature in character.

This demographic exploration, though interesting, isn’t as useful as identifying procrastinators by their psychological profile. There is indeed a core trait explaining why we put off, but it might not be what you have heard. It is commonly thought that we delay because we are perfectionists, anxious about living up to sky-high standards.
⁸
This perfectionist theory of procrastination sounds good and even feels good. Perfectionism can be a desirable trait, as shown by the canned response to the interview question, “What is your biggest weakness?” When Bill Rancic was asked that question just before winning the first season of Donald Trump’s
The Apprentice,
he replied, “I’m too much of a perfectionist; it’s a flaw,” prompting his interviewer to interject, “Being a perfectionist is a good thing; it means you keep striving.” But the perfectionism-procrastination theory doesn’t pan out. Based on tens of thousands of participants—it’s actually the best-researched topic in the entire procrastination field—perfectionism produces a negligible amount of procrastination. When the counseling psychologist Robert Slaney developed the Almost Perfect Scale to measure perfectionism, he found that “perfectionists were
less
likely to procrastinate than non-perfectionists, a result that contradicted the anecdotal literature.”
⁹
My research backs him up: neat, orderly, and efficient perfectionists don’t tend to dillydally.
¹⁰

How, then, did we come to believe that perfectionism causes procrastination? Here is what happened. Perfectionists who procrastinate are more likely to seek help from therapists, so of course they turn up in clinical research about procrastination in greater numbers. Non-perfectionist procrastinators (and for that matter, non-procrastinating perfectionists) are less likely to seek professional help. Perfectionists are more motivated to do something about their failings because they are more likely to feel worse about whatever they are putting off. Consequently, it is not perfectionism that is the problem but the
discrepancy
between perfectionist standards and performance.
¹¹
If you are a perfectionist and are suffering from high standards that are unachievable, you might want to do something about that too, but you will need an additional book: this one is about procrastination.

What is really the main source of procrastination? Thirty years of research and hundreds of studies have isolated several personality traits that predict procrastination, but one trait stands above the rest. The Achilles Heel of procrastination turns out to be
impulsiveness;
that is, living impatiently in the moment and wanting it all now.
¹²
Showing self-control or delaying gratification is difficult for those of us who are impulsive. We just don’t have much ability to endure short-term pain for long-term gain.
¹³
Impulsiveness also determines how we respond to task anxiety. For those of us who are less impulsive, anxiety is often an internal cue that gets us to start a project early, but for those who are more impulsive it is a different story: anxiety over a deadline will lead straight to procrastination.
¹⁴
The impulsive try to avoid an anxiety-provoking task temporarily or block it from their awareness, a tactic that makes perfect sense if you’re thinking short term. In addition, impulsiveness leads procrastinators to be disorganized and distractible or, as my colleague Henri Schouwenburg puts it, to suffer from “weak impulse control, lack of persistence, lack of work discipline, lack of time management skill, and the inability to work methodically.”
¹⁵
In other words, impulsive people find it difficult to plan work ahead of time and even after they start, they are easily distracted. Procrastination inevitably follows.

LOOKING FORWARD

So there it is. Procrastination is pervasive. Almost as common as gravity and with an equal downward pull, it is with us from the overfull kitchen garbage can in the morning to the nearly empty tube of toothpaste at night. In the next chapter, I’ll let you in on the research that has helped me understand why we delay things irrationally and why procrastination is so widespread. I’ll reveal and explain the Procrastination Equation, a formula that shows the dynamics of this way of behaving, and then I’ll tell you about the amazing opportunity I had to study this phenomenon in the real world. Subsequent chapters will describe the different elements that are at play in our minds and hearts, and then we’ll look at the price of procrastination in our lives and in society at large. There’s always a good side to the kind of research I present—within the causes we can also find the cures. So the last part of the book will offer ways in which individuals, bosses, teachers, and parents can improve their own motivation and motivate others, in the hope that procrastination will be less of a scourge. The final chapter pushes you to put these proven practices into your own life. The advice here is evidence-based, as scientifically vetted and pharmaceutically pure as it gets; it’s the good stuff from behind the counter, so don’t overdo it.

Chapter Two
The Procrastination Equation

THE RESULT OF EIGHT HUNDRED STUDIES PLUS ONE

My own behavior baffles me. For I find myself doing what

I really hate, and not doing what I really want to do!

ST. PAUL

R
ejection is wearing thin on Eddie during his first sales job. He attentively attended each sales seminar, read all the recommended books, and dutifully repeats the positive affirmations “I can do it! I am a winner!” each morning in the mirror. Still, after another day without a sale he is looking at his phone with dread. As he picks it up and cold calls another prospect, the only response he anticipates hearing is yet another “I am in a meeting” or “click” as they hang up halfway through his introduction. Indeed, he is brushed off once again. “What is the point?” Eddie asks himself. Demoralized, he organizes his desk, fills out all the paperwork to update his benefits package, and surfs the Internet to get insights about competitors' products. He puts off his phone calls until later—the dregs of the day when most of his potential clients are leaving for home. His boss checks in on him and recognizes the signs. Eddie’s decision to delay is the beginning of the end of his sales career.

Valerie’s face is as blank as her computer screen. She stares at it, knowing that words should be there, words written by her, but nothing appears. Not even a letter. “Why? Why?” she wonders. It is not like she hasn’t done pieces like this before, but for some reason this assignment on municipal politics due tomorrow is mind numbing. “Write,” she thinks, “Press your fingers into the keyboard.” In response, “asdfkh” appears on the screen. Better than nothing. Convincing herself she needs a short break from interminable boredom, Valerie starts texting her friends who direct her to a nifty website spoofing popular bands. After watching a few music videos, she finds a satire site on television shows and texts that link back to her friends. Soon, Val’s virtual group is trying to one-up each other to find the funnier and cleverer clip. Hours go by, then it dawns on her that it is near the end of day and she feels even less inspired than when she first chose to take that “short break.” She dives into the writing but the end product reflects the effort and time put into it. It’s crap.

The vacation plans are set! Tom is for once ahead of the ball, booking time off in advance to fly to the Dominican Republic. Thanks to his foresight he even paid for his flight on points from his frequent-flyer program. The only detail left is to reserve a room at a hotel, but that can be done at anytime. But what can be done at anytime is often done at no time. As the months slip by, Tom pushes the task forward to each sub-sequent week or forgets about it altogether. There is always something more pressing to attend to, like his favorite television show. Finally, as he thinks about what to pack, he realizes that there are no more weeks to push the task forward into and that he has left it far too late. He goes online and, finding little available, makes a hurried and haphazard reservation. When his plane later sets down in the Dominican, he hopes that his hotel is as beautiful as the island. It isn’t. It’s too far from the beach, his room is decorated with dead mosquitoes, adjoins a disgusting bathroom, and the hotel dining gives him food poisoning.

Eddie, Valerie, and Tom are all procrastinators but they are not identical. Just as a car can stop running because of an empty gas tank, a blown tire, or a dead battery, there are a multitude of causes for procrastination—even if the outward behavior is the same. Eddie, Valerie, and Tom all procrastinated for different underlying reasons and each one represents a facet of the Procrastination Equation, the mathematical formula I derived that describes irrational delay. Understanding why Eddie, Valerie, and Tom put off their respective tasks is the essence of this book. To this end, we are going to do a little more assessment. In the last chapter, we established the degree to which you procrastinate. In this chapter, we are going to find out why you put things off. Are you an Eddie, a Valerie, a Tom or some hybrid of all three? Take this test by circling your response to each of the following 24 items and find out:

To score, add up your answers to each of the following questions:

Eddie’s Scale = 1 + 4 + 7 + 10 + 13 + 16 +19 + 22 =

Valerie’s Scale = 2 + 5 + 8 + 11 + 14 + 17 + 20 + 23 =

Tom’s Scale = 3 + 6 + 9 + 12 + 15 + 18 + 21 + 24 =

If you scored 24 or
lower
for
Eddie’s Scale,
you have some similarities with his situation. On the other hand, if you scored 24 or
higher
for
Valerie’s Scale
or
Tom’s Scale,
you really should give them a call as you have a lot in common. You see, Eddie, Valerie, and Tom represent respectively the three basic elements of motivation: Expectancy, Value, and Time. Once you grasp their situations, you will understand the components of the Procrastination Equation. After this, we will look at how each of these pieces fits together with the others to form the overall formula. Yes, there will be math, but don’t balk. A version of this principle was illustrated within just two glossy pages of
Yes! The Science Magazine for Kids.
If twelve-year-olds can get it, so will you.

LOW EXPECTANCY EDDIE

Eddie’s story is regrettably common in sales. Rejection is part and parcel of the job, and most sales people receive an ungodly number of “no’s” before they get a “yes,” especially at the beginning of their careers. Many aspiring salespeople, like Eddie, succumb to this steady stream of rebuffs and find themselves lacking the motivation to perform; it takes especially resilient people to rise above relentless negativity. What is sapping Eddie’s motivation and causing his procrastination? It is
Expectancy
—what he
expects
will happen. After a series of attempts that all resulted in failure, he began to expect failure even before he started. High expectancy forms the core of self-confidence and optimism: but if you start believing your goals aren’t achievable, you stop effectively pursuing them. Consequently, if during your self-assessment you
disagreed
with statements like “I am confident that my efforts will be rewarded” or “Winning is within my control,” you are like low-expectancy Eddie.

The results from thirty-nine procrastination studies consisting of almost seven thousand people indicate that while some procrastination stems from overconfidence, the opposite is far more common. Procrastinators are typically less confident, especially about the tasks they are putting off. If you are procrastinating about schoolwork, you likely consider the assignment difficult. If you are procrastinating about getting healthier, by starting an exercise program, for example, or by eating better, odds are that you question your ability to follow through. And, if you are unemployed, you are likely procrastinating on your job search because you are discouraged about your chances of getting hired.

The seminal work of Martin Seligman, one of the leaders of the positive psychology movement, demonstrates the connection between lack of self-confidence or optimism and procrastination.
¹
If you love dogs, as I do, please try to forgive Dr. Seligman; he experimented by jolting canines with electricity.
^2a
The gist of what he did was to yoke together two sets of dogs, and zap them at random intervals. Both sets received the same electric shocks and for the same duration, but the first group could press a lever that terminated the shocks for all the dogs. The second group had no control and was entirely dependent on their counterparts for ending the agony. Seligman then changed the setup; he tested both sets of dogs again but this time in a shuttle-box divided by a low barrier. One side of the box became electrified and
all
the dogs had the possibility of escaping simply by jumping over the partition. The first group of dogs, who previously had control of the lever, readily learned to jump over the barrier. The second group had also learned something from their previous experience. When the box was electrified, they didn’t jump, but lay down and took the shock. Like low-expectancy Eddie, these dogs had learned that what they did made no difference; they had learned they were helpless.
²

Learned helplessness is connected to quickly giving up, whether in a complacent acceptance of a prolonged sickness or in a lackluster school performance. Learned helplessness also helps explain why putting off decisions more than usual is one of the symptoms of depression.
³
The underlying cause is reduced self-confidence, which makes it difficult to invest in any demanding work.
⁴
On balance, a degree of learned helplessness is common. Many of us have been in situations where our world was seemingly not set up for our success. For low-expectancy Eddie, it was his sales job; for someone else it may have been a harsh upbringing in which family or classmates enforced rigid roles. Restraining beliefs can become internalized and be carried within us long after we leave the home or schoolyard where they started. Our learned self-perception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—by expecting to fail, we make failure a certainty. We never dig in and really try, and the end result is more procrastination.

VALERIE WITHOUT VALUE

How do you feel about what you are putting off right now? As you reflect on the question, you will be channeling Valerie. Like her, with her sluggish attempts at writing on municipal politics, we all tend to put off whatever we dislike. Consequently, that chore you are currently deferring is probably something you don’t especially enjoy. The technical term for this measure of enjoyment is
Value
and the less of it a task has for you, the harder it is for you to get started on it. We have no problem initiating lengthy conversations with friends over a few drinks and a decadent dessert, but most of us delay starting on our taxes or cleaning out our basement. Similarly, the top reason that students give for essay procrastination is that they “really dislike writing term papers.”
^2b
Although the fact that we are less likely to promptly pursue an unpleasant task may seem pretty obvious, the scientific field lacks your insight. Scientists have committed over a dozen studies involving a good two thousand respondents to reach the same conclusion. Well, at least now we are sure.

To the degree that some tasks are universally burdensome, they reveal some touchstones of procrastination.
⁵
Since everyone wants to put off whatever they detest, it is no surprise that we commonly avoid cleaning up, or organizing, or seeing our doctor or dentist.
⁶
Since many find exercising an imposition, 70 percent of us rarely use our long-term gym memberships.
⁷
Similarly, many find Christmas shopping stressful, thus helping to keep Christmas Eve the busiest shopping day of the year.
⁸
On the other hand, to the degree that individuals consider certain chores uniquely unpleasant, the exact bundle of procrastinating tasks will differ from person to person. Depending on the nature of their dillydallying owners, some households contain kitchen counters cluttered with dishes, while others have medicine cabinets stuffed with long-defunct prescriptions. Some have fridges needing to be filled with food, while others have dining room tables needing to be filled with friends.

Given the connection between what is pleasurable and what is promptly pursued, it makes sense, then, that chronic procrastinators tend to detest life’s allotment of responsibilities. Their jobs, their chores, their duties are all irksome, and they avoid tackling these tasks as long as possible. If you agreed with statements like “Work bores me” or “I lack enthusiasm to follow through with my responsibilities,” the absence of pleasurable value is likely a source of your procrastination. Laundry makes you listless, cooking makes you crabby, and washing dishes and paying the bills are hardships rather than innocuous incidentals. You have tremendous difficulty keeping your attention on the mundane. For you, boredom signals irrelevance and your mind slides off to something else.
⁹
This very characteristic has provided me with quite a challenge in writing this book. I am painfully aware of your fickle nature and your unforgiving attention span—meaning that I'd better keep a lively pace at all times. In other words, ever onward.