Piers Steel | the American College | University of Calgary | professor
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The Art Of Procrastination...
by John Carroll
"A man who puts off work is
always at hand-grips with ruin."- Hesiod
Piers Steel knows a thing or two about the
hand-grips of ruin. He took 10 years to complete a study on
procrastination, and he's the first to chuckle over the
inevitable jokes that crop up every time he talks about
it.
He's even got a few one-liners.
A lot of people say research is me-search," puns Steel. "Count me
guilty."
Procrastination is nothing new, says Steel, who first studied it
at what amounts to the field's ground zero: the American college
campus. College students report that they spend an average of a
third of their day procrastinating, says this longtime student of
one of society's most common dysfunctions. In grad school, it's
even given an acronym - ABD, for All But Dissertation, a condition
that afflicts PhD candidates who can never quite get around to
wrapping up their last big project without a hard-and-fast deadline
to motivate them.
"They keep pushing it off," says Steel, a University of Calgary
professor, "and there's always something more immediate to do.
Nobody can procrastinate like college students. As we grow older,
we procrastinate less, which is an element of maturity. In college,
all deadlines are distant; everything's due at the end of the
semester. You should start on it, but there are temptations - fun
stuff to do and lots of young people with the same interests."
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