'The Procrastination Equation'

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To some degree, everyone struggles with procrastination -- unless one has entirely abandoned the struggle in favor of watching cat videos on YouTube. And academics, who juggle an array of work responsibilities -- many with apparently elastic deadlines -- are no exception. But recognizing that one is guilty of procrastination, and even that it may have serious consequences for one's career or personal life, never seems to make it much easier to click away from the kitten clip. (Seriously, Stalking Cat? Priceless.)

It's not your imagination, says procrastination expert Piers Steel: in the age of the Internet, video games, and TiVo, it is harder than ever to filter out diversions and focus on the tasks that you really mean to be tackling. In his new book, The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done (HarperCollins), Steel combs through a mountain of research on procrastination to get at its causes (evolutionary, technological, personal); its impact, on economies as well as individuals; and its antidotes: what methods actually help people change their time-frittering ways.

Inside Higher Ed conducted an e-mail interview with Steel, professor of human resources and organizational dynamics in the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary, to find out more about his book (and whether it might help IHE wean our reporters off cat videos).

Q: Can you give a brief explanation of what exactly "the procrastination equation" is, and how it works?

A. In 2007, I wrote a meta-analytical review called “The Nature of Procrastination,” published in Psychological Bulletin. Three big factors reliably popped up. By far the strongest reasons why we put stuff off was because we: i) lacked self-confidence in our ability to complete the task, ii) found the task boring or unpleasant, and iii) were impulsive. A separate paper of mine, “Integrating Theories of Motivation,” published in the Academy of Management Review, covers how many other major disciplines were saying more or less the same thing, from behaviorism to economics to personality, often formulaically. This allows us to put the pieces together a little more formally and create a Procrastination Equation. Here’s a stripped down version of it:


It is just a model of how we behave but it is a pretty good one. We lack motivation and put stuff off when we doubt our abilities (i.e., low expectancy), hate doing the task (i.e., low value), are sensitive to delay (i.e., high impulsiveness), and have to wait for the task’s rewards (i.e., high delay).

Q: What differentiates The Procrastination Equation from other self-help books?

A: Science doesn’t stand still, so nonfiction books, including my own, should eventually go out of date. Unfortunately, in the field of procrastination there have been few updates; pretty much the same books that were around 30 years ago are still around. Consequently, most self-help books on procrastination are based on the belief that we procrastinate because we are perfectionists, a three-decade-old theory that hasn’t been scientifically backed up. Those neat and orderly perfectionists tend to procrastinate less, not more, though they feel worse about it when they do delay.

Also, though I do research on procrastination, I’m also a meta-researcher, helping me to borrow from all the wonderful insights that researchers from other disciplines, including my own, generate. I’m not limited to just what I personally have done, which lets the book take a broader and more encompassing stance. In particular, I’ve been able to incorporate a lot of recent work conducted on how to manage our impulsive nature, which is the biggest single source of our procrastination.

Q: You write that "virtually everyone" procrastinates to some degree, but you do single out a "chronically procrastinating quarter of the population." On what do you base this estimate? Are the figures related to disorders like ADHD?

A: This is a tricky question. It is like asking, “What percentage of people are tall?” There is a subjective element to determining what “tall” is just as there is to saying what is “chronic.” I put chronic as anything over the midway part on a five-point scale, so people consider themselves as procrastinating more often than not. So chronic procrastination occurs when people, by their own standards, believe putting off becomes their default. Of note, the situation appears to be getting worse. Lately, the results I have from my website indicate it is closer to 50 percent chronic procrastination rather than the 25 percent we were getting even 10 years ago. Only some of that increase is likely due to self-selection.

Because procrastination is largely an impulse control issue, disorders which lead to heightened levels of impulsiveness are associated with more procrastination. Consequently, ADHD is the kingpin of procrastination conditions. Reading the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual symptom checklist, it is almost as if those with ADHD were genetically tailored to be prototypical procrastinators: easily distracted, trouble organizing, and often lose things. For ADHD kids, procrastination is even more of a structurally central, load-supporting column. They have difficulty getting started on tasks, often prioritize poorly and start the wrong ones, to which they allot too little time to complete. Once started, they are easily distractible and have to make the decision to work again and again.

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