Between the late 1990s and the mid 2000s, Steel spent countless hours poring over the results of 553 studies – including published articles, dissertations and papers that researchers had stashed in their filing cabinets – translating their diverse statistical findings and research designs into common mathematical currency. In the case of just one suspected cause of procrastination – perfectionism – researchers had published nearly 70 studies, some reporting a strong link, others discerning no link at all. To reconcile these conflicts, Steel examined and evaluated each study, giving greater weight to those with the most subjects and the strongest research designs. He gradually built up a mega-database. “It was a very mathematically intensive endeavour,” he says. He published his analysis in 2007.
So what did he find? First, some people are more at risk of procrastination than others. Men postpone things slightly more than women, and the young tend to loiter over tasks considerably more than seniors do. “I joke that this is because older people are coming closer to the final deadline, so they can’t afford to put things off,” says Steel. Surprisingly, there was no evidence that rebelliousness, neuroticism or perfectionism caused people to put things off. “Actually, perfectionists procrastinate less than other people,” he says, “but worry about it more.”
There were, however, four factors that stood out as the most strongly linked with
procrastination: how confident a person is of completing a particular task successfully; how easily distracted an individual is; how boring or unpleasant the task is; and how immediate the reward for completion will be. The more uncertain of success or easily sidetracked you are, the more likely it is that you will put off an assignment or chore. Conversely, the more
Get on with it!
No one is entirely immune to procrastination, so Piers Steel at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, has devised several strategies to help us do away with delay.
■ Make a firm commitment to your boss or partner to finish a task by a certain time. This will make delays more embarrassing and difficult to cover up.
■ Strip your workspace of all distractions, from your iPhone to your Xbox. Then turn off your
email alert. “We have all these temptations,” says Steel. “We’ve made our world motivationally toxic.”
■ Many people say that they put things off because they are too tired to deal with them, so get a good night’s sleep and try tackling the most unpleasant and difficult tasks early in the day.
■ Set a series of realistic goals. Some counsellors and therapists recommend drawing up weekly, daily or even hourly goals. The
more readily sidetracked you are, the more you need to divide your main task into smaller chunks.
■ Promise yourself a reward for each goal that you meet.
■ Believe in yourself. “The old saying is true,” says Steel. “Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you are probably right.”
■ Outsource your motivation. Get someone else to regularly goad you into action.
PU NCH S T O CK
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pleasant the task and the more immediate its payback, the greater the chance you will get on with it quickly. “We prize the now so much more than the later,” says Steel. “So if a task can be realised now and we can have the pleasure now, we value that a lot more than something that will have a larger reward with greater certainty later.” Such findings, says Steel, reveal that procrastination cannot be chalked up to just one factor. It arises both from individual differences in personality and from the particular situations we find ourselves in. Moreover, he even suggests that he can predict when dallying is likely to occur. “Procrastination can be understood, or summarised at least, by a mathematical equation,” he says. This calculates how likely you are to do something immediately – the task’s utility – by taking into account the four key variables, each of which can be quantified or measured by questionnaire: how confident you are of succeeding in the task (E); how pleasant you perceive the task to be (V); how easily distracted you are (gamma, K); and how much time will elapse before the reward for completing the task arrives (D). It reads as follows:
Utility = E × V
K × D
More recently, Steel has been looking at the way procrastination affects the ability to see a task through to completion. While his original formula seems to hold true for starting a task, the pursuit of a goal is more dependent on an individual’s impulsivity, Steel says. “Boredom is a wonderful predictor, too,” he adds.
Mañana!
Intriguing as Steel’s conclusions are, they garnered a mixed reception. Tim Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, says his work with extreme procrastinators reveals a different story that has nothing to do with balancing these competing factors. “They don’t talk about this mental calculus,” he says. “People say that they put things off because they are debilitated by guilt or shame, or because they love the rush of the last-minute effort.”
Others, however, think that Steel is on to something. “People have a perpetual competition between satisfying their present
selves or their future selves,” says management expert John Kammeyer-Mueller at the University of Minnesota. Steel’s formula illuminates many puzzles of human nature, he says, from why teenagers drop out of school and why people are unfaithful to their partners, to why those who are overweight fail to stick to their diets. “Steel provides a good set of tools for understanding how the internal conflict between desires plays out.”
Steel believes it also explains why some drug addicts refuse to enter rehab or why some farmers drag their heels on conservation, for example. In short, they live in the moment, rather than preparing for an uncertain future. Governments could be seen as especially prone to this kind of failure of will. “Some people would characterise the climate debate in these terms,” Steel says. “Should we suffer a little bit now in order to avoid the chance of huge devastation later on down the road? We have the technology to deal with climate change now, but wanting to deal with it is another matter entirely. The cure is in the long
term, but the medicine is in the short term.” So what is to be done to limit this damaging dilly-dallying? Some individuals can take a disciplined approach to tackling the tasks before them, but with others a lack of confidence and a tendency to become sidetracked make procrastination the norm. If the job at hand is seen as unpleasant, procrastination is even more likely. However, Steel says that we can all find ways to increase our motivation – from making a task appear less unpleasant or more immediately rewarding, to minimising the distractions we face (see “Get on with it!”, left).
If the worst comes to the worst, diehard procrastinators can always follow the example of Douglas Adams and surround themselves with friends and colleagues who will hold their feet to the fire. Steel describes how on one occasion, Adams’s editor booked him into a hotel room and stood guard over him until he finished a promised manuscript. “Adams tried to outsource his motivation,” he says. “That was his way around the problem.” ■
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