Procrastination is a 4 letter word

The science of keeping up with yesterday
‘To actually not procrastinate takes planning, effort and will,’ expert says
DAWN WALTON

From Thursday’s Globe and Mail

CALGARY — Do not delay. Read this story now. Although I know some of you will likely never get to it, I understand. You have other things to do. Sleeping, watching television and checking e-mail.

But it’s not your fault.

“Procrastination is natural,” says Piers Steel, a professor of human resources and organizational dynamics at the University of Calgary, “To actually not procrastinate takes planning, effort and will.”

Prof. Steel has just published what could best be described as the Bible of time-wasting. It took him 10 years to plod through previous studies, reports and 691 correlations on procrastination to narrow down the factors that drive dawdling and to develop a mathematical formula to define it.

He hoped to get it done three years ago, but things kept getting in the way. TV and video games were long his main vices, but once he had a child, sleep seemed to take a higher priority.

His sweeping study titled, The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure, is published in the most recent issue of the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin.

It notes that 15 to 20 per cent of us are procrastinators. The condition is even more prevalent among the student population, where a third of most students’ days are eaten up by procrastinating, something he pointed out yesterday while students seated around him gabbed, surfed the Internet and slept in a lounge on campus.

“Usually when I have an assignment I put it off until later,” confessed Robert Maxwell, an 18-year-old biology student as he was distracted from his textbook on plants.

“It’s a bad habit.”

Three major factors contribute to precisely that habit, according to Prof. Steel.

Self-confidence is key. Those who believe they can, essentially, will and those who don’t, won’t. The value of the task is important in whether it gets done. Is it something to enjoy or dread? And finally, delay. When does the task need to be completed? It’s hard to get motivated about something that can be put off until some distant deadline looms.

“Journalists have daily deadlines so you don’t procrastinate,” Prof. Steel said, then paused to add, “Maybe in other areas of life you do.”

For many of us, that is especially true at this time of year, as we pledge to lose 10 pounds, quit smoking and stop cussing, but invariably fail as we don’t acknowledge our limitations or approach our goals in easily doable chunks.

According to Prof. Steel, procrastination can be explained in a tidy formula called Temporal Motivational Theory.

It calculates the desirability of the task by multiplying the expectancy of succeeding at it by the value of completing the task, divided by the immediacy of the task multiplied by the person’s sensitivity to delay.

(Perfectionists can rejoice, Prof. Steel noted. That particular affliction has little to do with procrastination despite the common claims of self-help books that heave on store shelves.)

The next step is to create a diagnostic measure to help people to stop procrastinating.

In the meantime, it seems the Luddites were onto something. Technology has hastened the pace of procrastination, according to Prof. Steel’s research.

“Multitasking destroys performance,” Prof. Steel said as he chided our BlackBerry addicted culture of instant messaging.

So stop checking e-mail! Yes, this one is such a time-sucker it deserves an exclamation point. Turning off the e-mail icon that alerts users to new messages will increase productivity by 5 or 10 per cent per day, Prof. Steel figures. Check e-mail only when it’s convenient — perhaps as you scarf down lunch at your desk — and finally shun that Pavlov’s dog-type reaction to the e-mail alert.

“If everybody in Canada stopped checking e-mail, productivity would probably increase by tens of billions of dollars,” he said.

The good news, according to researchers, is we procrastinate less as we age and learn.

Holly Crayston, chairwoman of the Calgary chapter of the Canadian Association for the Fifty-Plus, once considered herself a classic procrastinator — and Gemini — who tried to do too many things at once, figuring there’s always tomorrow to finish up. But she doesn’t think that way any more.

“I’m 73. I don’t have much time so I can’t procrastinate too much,” she said, laughing.

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Prof. Steel’s abstract

-Procrastination is a prevalent and pernicious form of self-regulatory failure that is not entirely understood. Hence, the relevant conceptual, theoretical, and empirical work is reviewed, drawing upon correlational, experimental, and qualitative findings.

-A meta-analysis of procrastination’s possible causes and effects, based on 691 correlations, reveals that neuroticism, rebelliousness, and sensation seeking show only a weak connection.

-Strong and consistent predictors of procrastination were task aversiveness, task delay, self-efficacy, and impulsiveness, as well as conscientiousness and its facets of self-control, distractibility, organization, and achievement motivation.

-These effects prove consistent with temporal motivation theory, an integrative hybrid of expectancy theory and hyperbolic discounting.

-Continued research into procrastination should not be delayed, especially because its prevalence appears to be growing.

Procrastination formula

Piers Steel has come up a procrastination formula called the Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (Greek letter gamma) and the person’s sensitivity to delay (D).