The Procrastination Equation (3 page)

TIME-SENSITIVE TOM

While Eddie’s Expectancy and Valerie’s Value are contributing factors to procrastination, Tom’s reason is at its core. Tom had to book a hotel room but couldn’t find the motivation until just before the deadline, letting himself get distracted every time he made an intention to act. When he finally did do something, he knew he should have acted earlier and he suffered for his tardiness. In all likelihood, if you procrastinate, you feel some kinship with Tom and have admitted that you too “get into jams” because you are “entranced by some temporarily delightful activity” or that you “choose smaller but more immediate pleasures over those larger but more delayed.” The biggest factor in determining what you pursue is not the associated rewards or the certainty of receiving them, but their timing. You value rewards that can be realized quickly far more highly than rewards that require you to wait; simply, you are impulsive.

As I mentioned in the last chapter, scientific evidence of the connection between impulsiveness and procrastination is unequivocal. Scores of studies based on many thousands of people have established that impulsiveness and the related personality traits of low conscientiousness, low self-control, and high distractibility are at the core of procrastination. I myself have collected personality profiles from more than twenty thousand people to take a closer look. And I found confirmation that of these traits, impulsiveness shares the strongest bond with procrastination. This isn’t surprising if you look at specific aspects of impulsiveness: intense cravings, a lack of caution and reserve, and an inability to see tasks through.
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Though all have their role in why we put things off, the last of these is almost equivalent to procrastination in itself: not seeing tasks through means agreeing to statements like “I'm not good about pacing myself so as to get things done on time.” People who act without thinking, who are unable to keep their feelings under control, who act on impulse, are also people who procrastinate.

The influence of time itself also contributes to the connection between impulsiveness and procrastination. We tend to see tomorrow’s goals and concerns abstractly—that is, in broad and indistinct terms—but to see today’s immediate goals and concerns concretely—that is, with lots of detail on the particulars of who, what, where, and when. Actions or goals framed in abstract terms, like “engaging in self-development,” are less likely to be immediately pursued than goals framed in concrete terms, like “reading this book.”
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Similarly, the broad goal of “exercising” is less motivating than “running for an hour,” and “getting a promotion” is harder to act on than the more immediate goal of “writing this report.” Since we consistently frame long-term goals abstractly, the result is that we are more likely to postpone them, at least until they become short-term goals and we start thinking about them concretely. Psychologists Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope have recently specialized in the scientific study of this phenomenon, but the basics aren’t that new. David Hume wrote about the same thing over 250 years ago in his book
A Treatise of Human Nature.
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Right now, if you like, you can experience the influence of time on whether you view events concretely or abstractly. Let’s plan a shopping trip for the distant future, say next year. Take a moment and imagine yourself twelve months from now. What would you buy? Do you have a clear picture or is the vision cloudy and smudged? Now imagine the money currently warming your pocket. If you had to spend it today, this very moment, where exactly would that money go? Likely, what you plan to buy a year from now seems generic, as vanilla as “nice shoes” or “good sports equipment.” Such goals are ghosts, ethereal and with no handles to grab onto. Today’s spending plans, however, are likely concrete and meaty, something you can sink your teeth into. Instead of “shoes,” they are Manolo Blahnik’s “Sizzle,” the python sandal that will make you the envy of every shoe fetishist. Rather than just “sporting goods,” you are obsessing over a TaylorMade Quad r7 425 TP Driver, the one with the oversized titanium sweet spot, used by the pros on the PGA tour. As you contrast these concrete and abstract options, the differences in their ability to excite you should be palpable. This is procrastination’s dark heart. It is largely because we view the present in concrete terms and the future abstractly that we procrastinate.

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

Eddie’s, Valerie’s, and Tom’s situations—that is Expectancy, Value, and Time—are the basic components of procrastination. Decrease the certainty or the size of a task’s reward—its expectancy or its value—and you are unlikely to pursue its completion with any vigor. Increase the delay for the task’s reward and our susceptibility to delay—impulsiveness—and motivation also dips. Understanding procrastination at this component level isn’t bad, but we can do better.
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The first step is to figure out how Expectancy and Value fit together. To this end, we can tap into an entire family of formulations called Expectancy Theories, the most famous being
Expected Utility Theory.
You might not have heard of it by that name but you are more familiar with it than you know. Expected Utility Theory forms the basis of mainstream economics; every successful gambler adheres to its rule. It proposes that people make their decisions by multiplying expectancy and value together. That is:

EXPECTANCY × VALUE

Here is how it works. Imagine there are two piles of money in front of you. The one on the right I will definitely give you—very nice of me—but the one on the left I probably won’t. If you could ask for only one pile, which would it be? My bet is that you would take the sure thing, revealing how
expectancy
affects your decisions. Expectancy, as you might expect, refers to probability or chance. We prefer
more
likely to
less
likely rewards. However, what if I told you the sure thing on the right was a much smaller pile of money than the riskier one on the left? This is actually a pretty common situation, like choosing whether to put your money into riskless but low rate government bonds or to speculate on the stock market. To make sense of your options, now you have to incorporate
value
into your decision making in order to judge how much bigger the pile needs to be to inspire you to take more risk. As I vary the size of a pile and the probability of you receiving it, your preferences will flip from right to left and vice versa. The formula “Expectancy × Value” does a fair job of predicting which pile you would end up choosing. Multiplying the two together, you go with whatever pile has the highest outcome. Economists try to understand all of human behavior using just this equation. From their viewpoint, every choice you make—from pouring milk on your cereal to wiping your child’s nose—is based on how much pleasure you will receive and the degree of certainty that you will receive it. Unfortunately, they are wrong.

You can’t rely on “Expectancy × Value” alone to describe human nature. For starters, the theory is considered an expression of rational decision making, meaning that it doesn’t leave room for any form of irrational behavior. No matter what you do, from eating an ice cream cone to getting hooked on heroin, it is all reasonable from an economist’s perspective. Consequently, their theory also excludes the possibility of procrastination—irrational delays—and since I am currently writing a book on the topic and you are currently reading one, let’s consider this a weakness.
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The economic model of human nature isn’t so much incorrect as just incomplete. Consistently, we do respond to incentives (i.e., value) to the extent we believe (i.e., expect) that they are obtainable, but that isn’t the entire picture. There is a third factor—time.

Economists need to update how their model of human nature deals with time, and I'm not the only one saying so. Back in 1991, in a lecture aptly titled “Procrastination and Obedience,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof spoke to the American Economic Association about how his field would be better off if it considered how we irrationally find present costs more salient than future costs. In the following year, George Loewenstein, an economics professor from Yale, co-authored
Choice Over Time,
which reviews how economics can best include time. Since then, behavioral economics, a sub-speciality of economics that integrates time, has opened up, with researchers such as Ted O'Donoghue and Matthew Rabin studying procrastination specifically. These behavioral economists are simply using observations of the world to refine their model, which is like using feedback from your eyes to keep the car on the road. Sounds very, you know . . . rational.

The theory of time that these behavioral economists are most attracted to is from the psychological field of behaviorism. Behaviorists developed a little equation called the
Matching Law,
which proved pretty good at predicting the average behavior of mice and men. Here it is in one of its simplest forms:

Since the product of Expectancy × Value is divided by Delay, the greater the delay, the less your motivation.

How important is the inclusion of time? Let me invent my own game show called
Now Deal or Then Deal.
You are a contestant and have won $1,000. It is put into your hands in ten crisp $100 bills, a short stack you stuff into your pocket. However, I also have a certified check—guaranteed money—postdated to one year from now. Here is the dilemma. What is the minimum amount that I have to put on that check to get you to dig into your pocket, hand back all those hundreds, trade me for the check, and wait 365 days to cash it? I have run this little thought experiment with hundreds of people in my classes, and most say that they would wait a year for between $2,000 and $3,000, especially if I ask for an immediate, gut decision. Unless you have been taught a reasonable rate of return and given time to mentally calculate it, thereby preventing yourself from reacting emotionally, it is likely that these responses are not so far off from your own. The more money you require to make the swap, the more sensitive you are to delay; that is, the more impulsive you are. Unfortunately, this sensitivity to delay is still missing from the equation.

Impulsiveness provides the last missing piece of the puzzle, updating the basic Matching Law. Impulsiveness provides a more sophisticated understanding of time by letting the effects of delay grow and shrink. The more impulsive you are, the more sensitive you will be to delay and the more you will discount the future—and, in the game of
Now Deal or Then Deal,
the more cash you'll require to endure waiting. Without impulsiveness, there wouldn’t be such a thing as chronic procrastination. Popping this into our equation, we have:

And there it is: the Procrastination Equation—inspired by the common elements that determine when we procrastinate, and crafted together from the most deeply researched elements of social sciences' strongest motivational theories.
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The Procrastination Equation accounts for every major finding for procrastination. As the deadline for any task gets pushed further into the future, Delay increases and our motivation to tackle the task decreases. Impulsiveness multiplies the effects of Delay, and so impulsive people feel the effects of time far less acutely, at least at first. Consequences have to be on their doorstep before they start paying attention to them—unless they are particularly large. And what makes consequences large? Expectancy and Value. The bigger the payoff and the greater the likelihood of receiving it, the sooner it will capture your attention. The Procrastination Equation also explains one of the most pernicious aspects of procrastination: the intention-action gap.

Studies show that procrastinators usually make the same plans to get to work as their more diligent counterparts. Where they differ is in acting upon their plans. Unfortunately, what was a heartfelt intention to work next week or next weekend seems a lot less important when the moment of truth actually comes around. Instead of buckling down to work, the procrastinator’s intentions buckle. Unsurprisingly, one of the most common laments of procrastinators is, “No matter how much I try, I still put things off!” This complaint illustrates an intention-action gap: you truly don’t want to slack off tomorrow but you constantly find yourself slacking off when tomorrow comes. This is exactly what the Procrastination Equation predicts and here’s why.