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“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.”
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).
But, then again, understanding may come quicker through comparisons to dieting and to our roots in nomadic clans.
Desiring fats and sugars isn’t necessarily a bad thing, says Steel. In the hunter-gatherer societies that fashioned us, if people had a chance to gorge, they took it, knowing their very survival could depend on it. But with food more and more available, that button’s been pushed too many times, and obesity has become a standard, everyday reality.
Just as eating too much is more likely to become a bad habit when there’s access to more and more food, so does the tendency to waste time grow when there’s access to more and more distractions.
“Procrastinators tend to be impulsive, focused on the here and now,” says Steel. As a result, they reach for the handiest way to kill time, and doing anything slides inevitably to the deadline.
“Undisciplined, vulgar, stubborn, wicked, malicious, lazy, depressed, and procrastinating; such an agent is called a Taamasika agent.”
— Krishna, from the Bhagavad Gita
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Joseph Ferrari, PhD, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, also has firsthand knowledge of the lazy, depressed, and procrastinating. “If there’s a free keg of beer in the dorm, they’re there,” he says, citing that 70 percent of students describe themselves as procrastinators.
Everybody puts something off, he adds, but one in every four Americans is a chronic procrastinator. “They delay RSVP’ing, delay getting gas in the car, wait until they get the third bill to pay [it]. For Christmas, they wait until the 24th of December to shop.
“That’s very high,” says Ferrari about the number of people dealing with chronic procrastination, “higher than clinical depression. Telling them to just do it is like telling someone who’s depressed to just cheer up.”
There are also different types of procrastinators. Ferrari divides the species into two distinct groups: the arousal procrastinators (who seek a thrill from working under pressure) and the avoidant procrastinators (who are so filled with the fear of failure, they can’t complete a project).
There are some handy time-management techniques for mild procrastinators, he says, but hard cases — you know who you are — need to understand that the only way to master procrastination is through therapy. No matter what they tell themselves.
“They’re very good at making excuses,” Ferrari says. “There’s always a reason for these people.”
He does disagree with Steel on a number of points, though. He argues there’s no data showing that the procrastination problem is getting worse — it’s chronic, he insists. He also says there’s no distinct tendency for men to lean toward procrastination more than women do. But there’s one point Steel and Ferrari do agree on: Technology is making it easier than ever to procrastinate.
“There was a time when you had to get it done three days in advance; now you can wait until three minutes,” says Ferrari. “We felt we needed to get a new technology to make things faster. I think we need to redirect all that energy from technology. Do we need a faster computer or a cure for cancer? We need to focus better. As a culture, we need to understand how fast is fast enough.”
Just saying that, though, won’t change much.
“… one of the general weaknesses …”
— Samuel Johnson, on procrastination |
If all you need in order to get through life is some sensible advice, says psychologist William Knaus, why don’t you eat your veggies, avoid sweets, and stick to the life plan, just like your mother told you to?
How to Stop Procrastinating
Do you feel like you match the description of a procrastinator? Here are a few tips from the experts to help you rid yourself of the habit or just learn how to handle your time better.
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Just do something. Now. Give yourself a five-minute plan that gets you focused on a single task. The idea is that one step in the right direction is sometimes all it takes to get back on track.
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On a more ambitious scale,
map out a series of short-term deadlines.
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Log your work in order to give you a clearer idea of how you work.
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Have the right job or mission in life. A real procrastinator is better off structuring life and work in a way that accommodates the condition. That novel you always wanted to write? Maybe it’s just not you.
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Reward timeliness. Ferrari insists that we need to do more to recognize society’s early risers; the recognition, he says, can benefit everyone.
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None of it’s working? Get some professional cognitive therapy. Not every condition can be mastered on your own. Professional guidance may get you there faster.
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“If you look at the abysmal results with the various diet programs, the hype about Pilates and Flexercise, and so on, and then look at the data, it doesn’t support the conclusion that any of these methods are useful in general,” says Knaus, who has written extensively on the topic of procrastination and who’s now collaborating with Ferrari on a new book.
Many people just have a fundamental disconnect with how they live. They want to be thin, but they don’t want to exercise every day. They want to be productive, but they don’t want to work through a schedule.
“Most people don’t think about doing anything different,” says Knaus. “They just want the change.”
He’s not just talking about the daily illusion of living some ideal. More than half the people who suffer a major coronary event go back to the same unhealthy lifestyle that got them in the hospital in the first place — and it may well lead them on a return trip to the ER.
Confucius said a journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step. For procrastinators, the trouble starts with that first step: They don’t take it.
Rather than procrastinate, do a task for five minutes — or even for just a minute, says Knaus. For the majority, the act of doing one concrete thing will lead to doing the next, and so on, until a project is done. The key is breaking the mental logjam that is sucking up your time.
The goal is to teach yourself some necessary skills.
“Procrastination is generally a process,” says Knaus. “You find something uncomfortable or boring, and then you do something different, off target, to get away.
“An executive I worked with several years ago was in deep water,” recalls Knaus. “He wasn’t turning in research assignments that were due. He went through all kinds of activities, making sales calls, walking through the plant — anything except digging into the research area.”
Knaus asked that he read a two-page paper on procrastination, and three weeks later the executive came back to describe how he’d wasted 30 hours avoiding the two-minute assignment. In the end, he swiftly read through it just before their meeting.
“That’s the magic of procrastination,” Knaus says. “Instead of tending to the relevant activity, you tend to divert yourself.”
Procrastination is easy, he says. Change is hard.
Cognitive therapy approaches help. You can build your awareness of how you spend your time, understand the patterns of your work and life, and log it all on a daily basis. You can try steps like the five-minute plan to get back on track. And then you keep working it.
“Find out what works and what doesn’t,” says Knaus. “Build mental and emotional toughness.”
By doing a daily exercise, you can teach yourself new work habits that can be just as hard to break as bad habits.
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
— Douglas Adams |
In a way, the procrastination problem suggests its own solution, says Steel. If you’re the kind of person who waits for the deadline, be sure to set some for every day so that you face a series of deadlines that culminate in the final act. If that means you have to set deadlines for every 20 minutes in order to keep focused, then do it.
Back to the food analogy: Diversions are like sweets — if one is within arm’s length, you grab it. So get rid of the diversions at hand. One quick way to bump up productivity by 10 or 15 percent, says Steel, is to get rid of that ding on your e-mail.
“If you don’t have to answer e-mail messages as soon as they come in, turn off the icon. You can check the icon whenever it’s convenient.” And get rid of any notion you have that multitasking is the way to go. Steel can cite figures that estimate the cost of multitasking at hundreds of billions of dollars a year in hours that are lost spent jumping from one task to the next.
“We focus on things that are close, so we often let opportunities go by to get small pleasures right now. I can’t imagine how many billions of dollars Minesweeper has cost,” says Steel.
For acute procrastinators, the only way to control the cravings for a new computer game is to uninstall the game at the end of every session and then reinstall it when they want to play it again. It’s the same approach with TV — fighting chronic procrastination may require that you take the batteries out of the remote each time you finish watching. The idea is to put a step between yourself and the comfortable time waster rather than let yourself slide into it like it’s a vat of warm oil, only to clamber out hours later with nothing to show for the time.
The best way to control your own personal level of procrastination is to understand yourself. If you’re easily distracted and can’t sustain long-term goals, you’d be better off looking out for the journalistic equivalent of the daily newspaper. Monthly magazines could damage your career. Book projects? Forget about it.
If you’re a morning person, plan to do your best work early in the day rather than in the afternoon, when you’re barely able to stay focused. Work best at night? Burn the midnight oil when you need to get something done.
“It’s about decision making,” says Steel. “It’s about choices, what you need to do now so you can accomplish later — like saving for retirement, investing in research, or upgrading equipment. Do I do it now or later? The tendency is to do it later. It’s a ubiquitous part of the human condition.”
But many people also have a hard time determining whether they fit the description of moderate or acute procrastinators.
“It’s not to say that they’re not getting anything done,” says Steel. “[They’re] just taking the edge off their game. I once did a presentation to a group of oil executives, and I asked how many were procrastinators. Virtually all put up their hands. Everyone said they would have done better if they were more on the ball.”
It’s also not all personal, says Ferrari. There are things that we can do as a society to change the culture.
“We don’t give the early bird the worm anymore,” he says. “In this age of political correctness, we want everyone to have the worm. We don’t give bonuses for being early; we punish for being late.”
The government fines you if you’re late filing your taxes but doesn’t reward you if you do it early. Wait until after a holiday to do your shopping, and you get a discount.
“Culturally, we should reward people for doing things early,” says Ferrari, who gives students bonuses for turning in their work early.
No doubt I could add to this story, but it’s already past deadline. And, besides, I have to check my e-mail and …
But you get the picture.
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