Of course, graduation day doesn't signal freedom from the hooks of
procrastination. Most adults still live and work in what Steel
terms "motivationally toxic" environments. And, he adds, that
toxicity has been rising steadily with the tide of technology: New
communications tools put us in touch with the office as well as
with the latest sports scores. New game systems come along,
demanding our attention with their persistent and compelling
presence. Various e-mail accounts beckon us like the mythical
Sirens, using an electronic ping instead of a song to lure us onto
the ever-waiting rocky shore of wasted time.
The last big-time zap hit when the Internet went high speed and the
BlackBerry became a communications necessity. It's comparable to
someone on a diet having a magic spoon of ice cream always floating
around his or her face, says the procrastination guru.
"You're working in the same environment," he says. "At the flip of
your wrist, there's
YouTube, chat rooms, jokes, humor - whatever's
your poison, it's all out there. It's all available. That's not a
good idea."
Steel's law: "We procrastinate when temptations become more easily
available."
An industrial psychologist, Steel says you can also reduce the
condition to a simple formula. To figure the Utility (U), which
Steel describes as preference for a course of action for
accomplishing a task, take your Expectancy (E), which refers to the
odds or chances of an outcome occurring, and multiply it by Value
(V), which refers to how rewarding that outcome is. Your
denominator, Gamma (G), refers to the subject's sensitivity to
delay. The larger G is, the greater the sensitivity. Gamma is
multiplied by Delay (D), which indicates how long, on average, one
must wait to receive the payout.
So, U = (E x V) / (G x D).