The Procrastination Equation

by Piers Steel

  THE FINISH LINE IS JUST AHEAD

  Almost invariably, reporters contact me about their piece on procrastination mere hours before it is due. Slate magazine, for example, which did a special issue on procrastination, confessed: it was “originally planned for the week of May 5. Seriously. We'd planned to publish that Monday morning, but there was one problem: only a handful of our writers had managed to get their work in on time.”60 My theory is that the fourth estate is full of unrepentant procrastinators, drawn there because it is one of the few places they fit. Every day the job itself generates a specific and proximal deadline: so many words on this topic by this hour or else! This is exactly the type of goal that procrastinators excel at meeting. To get motivated, they need a clear and close finish line. Their action curve follows directly from the Procrastination Equation; as delay shrinks, motivation peaks.

  To apply this principle to your life, you need a concrete and exact notion of what needs to be done because vague and abstract goals (such as “Do your best!”) rarely lead to anything excellent. The level of detail required differs from person to person but you should be able to sense when you've got enough. Goals should have a corporeal rather than an ethereal feel—you should be able to sink your teeth into them. “Complete my Last Will and Testament before flying on the 15th” is an achievable goal. “Get my finances together,” not so much.

  After creating a specific finish line, schedule it soon. You may need to break up a long-term project into a series of smaller steps. Consider the following chart, which represents most work situations. In the background, there is always a buzz of temptation and though it will have its peaks and valleys, on average, we can represent it by a straight horizontal dashed line. Until our desire for work exceeds this constant, we won’t be working. Typically, we allow the environment to set our goals for us and it is pictured by a single goal: the deadline. The triangle line represents a person with no self-set goals, whose motivation is mostly reserved until just before the deadline. What to do? How about artificially moving the deadline closer? The unadorned solid line represents a person who has broken down the task into two earlier subgoals, allowing work motivation to crest above the temptation line sooner. As can be seen, the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole, as the person who sets subgoals works for twice as long as the person who doesn’t.

  There are no hard rules for how specific and how proximal your goals must be to be effective. Your success depends on how impulsive you are, how unappealing you find the task, and what temptations you are battling. But keep in mind that too-frequent goals can be cumbersome. Daily goals typically provide a good balance; they are both effective and practical. Still, many find that the hard outer shell of a chore, the first few minutes, remains the initial obstacle. How many times have you put off a task only to realize it wasn’t so bad once you got started? Cleaning, exercising, and even writing are often difficult at first. It is a bit like swimming in the lake by my in-laws' cabin, just north-east of Winnipeg (the coldest city in the world with a population greater than 600,000). The water is deliciously invigorating but, for most, the initial temperature shock is an effective barrier against reaping the subsequent reward. By focusing solely on the initial jump off the dock, I can plunge in and, after a few intense seconds, enjoy myself. An extremely short-term or mini-goal, then, is excellent for busting through such motivational surface tension. Ten-minute goals are an application of this technique, such as the ten-minute clean-up around the house. Consequently, if you have trouble writing, just sit down and type a few words. If you don’t want to exercise, at least get your workout clothes on and drive to the gym. Once you have completed your mini-goal, re-evaluate how you feel and see if you are willing to immediately commit to a longer stretch. Having broken through that motivational surface tension and immersed yourself in the project, you, like most, will opt to continue.

  Your final choice is how to structure your goals. Do you prefer inputs, the time invested, or outputs, what is produced? For exercise, are you going to run for an hour or for five miles? Both are good options. A modest but regular schedule, if it really is regular, produces wonders. B.F. Skinner thought “fifteen minutes [of writing] a day, every day, adds up to about a book every year,” though most professional writers aim to do far more than a quarter of an hour.61 Others go by the word count; science fiction author Robert Sawyer, for one, writes two thousand words each day, including his blog. Ernest Hemingway combined both inputs and outputs, writing for six hours or producing about five hundred words, a useful strategy. If you have a fruitful day and hit your output quota early, be it words or widgets, reward yourself and go fishing; if the productivity doesn’t come, the input or time requirement ensures that something is produced. To help keep you honest about your productivity, try using free software like ManicTime or RescueTime.62 They are nifty applications that automatically track your computer work habits, allowing you to easily monitor your activities. How much time are you spending on e-mail? How about web surfing? How much do you actually spend on work? This kind of reality check will make you aware of your productivity and I'll personally vouch that it is useful for winding down an Internet gaming habit.

  FULL AUTO

  Occasionally, on my ride home from work, I am charged with stopping off at the grocery store to pick up milk or diapers. This side trip entails taking the earlier exit off the highway, which I invariably drive right past. I then need to negotiate a laborious series of travel corrections to get to where I should already be. The problem is that I've done my commute so many times that I'm on autopilot. We have dozens of these automatic routines in our lives, which we can perform even when dead tired. In a mindless blur, we eat breakfast, brush our teeth, and tie our shoes. Despite their zombie-like quality, these routines have power we can tap—the force of habit.

  Both the strength and weakness of routines lies in their lack of flexibility. Their weakness is that once we fall into a habit, we tend to follow through even when a change of pace would be beneficial. We go to the same restaurants, order the same food, watch the same shows, without really considering possibly better options.63 On the other hand, routines are easy to maintain and can be undertaken even when we're exhausted.64 By intentionally adopting a routine, we can pursue long-term goals even when our wills are weary and temptations abound. We push forward oblivious to other choices, choices that might mean stopping, resting, doing otherwise. The fewer moments of choice there are, the less likely you will be to procrastinate.65 That is, if you have the right kind of habits. Routines are like Don Quixote’s windmills; they can raise you up to the heavens or drop you down into the mud. Though we have our share of bad habits—reflexively turning on the TV or finishing a bag of potato chips—we can create good ones. We can turn exercising, cleaning, or working into at least semi-automatic routines. Scientific study confirms the benefit of this effort; procrastinators perform as well as anyone else when the work is routine.66

  Building a routine requires activating many of the same precepts as stimulus cues. You want predictability. Devise rituals of performance, keeping as many of the environmental variables as stable as possible, especially time and place.67 Exercise programs, for example, should take place at regularly scheduled times, leaving little guesswork about where and what the fitness activities will be. Like clockwork, every Tuesday afternoon at 5:00, you go and lift weights, and every Thursday morning at 6:00, you go running. Take whatever you have been putting off and specify where and how you intend to implement it. For instance, make a vow: “When breakfast is finished on Saturday morning, I will clean out the storage room.” This seems so easy and simple that it couldn’t work, but it does. When you make an explicit intention to act, the desired behavior just happens. The expert on the psychology of intentions, Peter Gollwitzer, finds that forming intentions almost doubles the chances that you will follow through with almost any activity. The effectiveness of explicit intentions has been scientifically confirmed on everything from cervical screeni
ng to testicular self-examinations and from recycling to writing a research report over the holidays.68 In terms of ease and power, this is as good as it gets. Making an intention is a remarkably accessible back door into your brain; it programs your limbic system to effortlessly act on cue as you see fit. Intentions can even be used to implement other self-regulatory techniques, especially when expressed in an “If . . . then” format. If you have energy issues, make the intention of “If I get tired, then I will persevere.” If you are easily distracted, it would be “If I lose focus, then I will move my attention back to the task.” And of course, “If I am pursuing a goal, then I will use implementation intentions.”

  Be warned that when trying to start your routine, you will invent a ceaseless onslaught of excuses not to follow through. You will get sick, go on vacation, have extra work, fall behind elsewhere, and find it ever so convenient to let your schedule slip. Defend fiercely against these slippages! Routines get stronger with repetition, so every time you slack off, you weaken your habit and it becomes even harder to follow through the next time. If you protect your routine, eventually it will protect you.69 At the start, your regimen will need constant nursing.70 Some temporary professional assistance can be a good investment; after all, you are investing in yourself. Personal trainers to run you through your paces or professional organizers to help you clean up can help launch you in the right direction.71 To draft your last will and testament, hire an estate planner or a wills and estates lawyer.72 They provide as much motivational help as legal expertise, structuring the process to maximize your follow-through. But hired help can’t do it on their own, nor can this or any other book. In the end, the responsibility lies where it has always been—with you.

  3. Action Points for Scoring Goals: This is really saving the best for last. Goal setting—proper goal setting—is the smartest thing you can do to battle procrastination. Though every other technique discussed so far has its place, goal setting alone may be all you need. Along with making your goals challenging (chapter 7) and meaningful (chapter 8), follow these remaining steps. Regardless of what other books say, this is what’s proven to maximize your motivation.

  • Frame your goals in specific terms so that you know precisely when you have to achieve them. What exactly do you have to do? And when do you have to do it by? Instead of “Do my expense report” it should be “Gather all my receipts, itemize them and record them by lunchtime tomorrow.”

  • Break down long-term goals into a series of short-term objectives. For particularly daunting tasks, begin with a mini-goal to break the motivational surface tension. For example, a goal of tackling just the first few pages of any required reading can often be enough to get you to finish the entire text.

  • Organize your goals into routines that occur regularly at the same time and place. Predictability is your pal, so open your schedule and pencil in reoccurring tasks. Better yet, use an indelible pen.

  LOOKING FORWARD

  If only time-sensitive Tom could have read this chapter! He put off booking his hotel and subsequently had a vacation to forget instead of one to remember. He probably didn’t even need all the techniques in this chapter to have changed his fate. Perhaps it would have been enough to set a specific deadline for himself, say, next Thursday night, and frame his intention to act in explicit terms, as in: “Immediately after dinner I will research hotels in the area and book a room.” For good measure, he could have imagined some worst-case scenarios, such as: if he continued to procrastinate, then his room would be far away from the beach and in desperate need of redecoration. Those of you who scored 24 and above on the impulsiveness self-assessment scale in chapter 2 should pay special attention to the techniques here, but almost everyone would benefit from them as well. Though some of us are more impulsive than others, we all can make regrettably impulsive choices.

  The fundamental challenge in implementing these steps is that attempts to increase self-control require some self-control to begin with. The obstacle is similar to strength training; in order to initiate the process, we need to be able to lift at least the lightest of the available weights. As for procrastination, the worse it is, the harder it becomes to remedy. The very motivational deficits that create your procrastination also hamper your attempts at change. If you are unable to delay gratification, for example, methods to increase your patience must initially be immediately rewarding in themselves. Otherwise, advice becomes useless shouting from the sidelines, annoyingly extolling you to “do first things first.” If you could simply do that, you wouldn’t need the advice in the first place. Fortunately, most of these techniques are easy to adopt, like turning off your e-mail ding or making those explicit intentions to act. These immediate successes will give you the confidence and the self-control to increase your efforts, all of which will become even easier with practice. From here on out, life becomes better, not harder.

  Chapter Ten

  Making it Work

  PUTTING THE PIECES INTO PRACTICE

  Do or do not do. There is no try.

  MASTER YODA

  Before I get into this chapter, I want to thank you for persevering. People who procrastinate tend to get distracted and turn to other things. So since you have reached chapter 10—and I am assuming you haven’t skipped ahead to the end—you deserve a little praise. After all, the tendency to put off has such a deep resonance in our beings that it is more remarkable when we don’t procrastinate than when we do. Having read through the book, you have a good grasp of the underpinnings of procrastination, how it emerges from our brain’s architecture, the ways in which the modern world makes it worse, and what you can do about diminishing it. There is just one last step to putting procrastination in its place. You need to believe what you read.

  I can’t really blame you if you are a little suspicious. If you are familiar with self-help books, you have certainly earned some cynicism. There is so much misinformation in the field of motivation—so many promises that don’t deliver—that “What if someone wrote a self-help book that actually worked?” is the premise of Will Ferguson’s international bestselling novel HappinessTM. Satirizing the self-help industry, Ferguson invents the character Tupak Soiree, who writes What I Learned on the Mountain, a tome that genuinely helps you lose weight, make money, be happy, and have great sex.10a Now I can’t promise the last of these, but The Procrastination Equation is about making the rest of What I Learned on the Mountain a reality. Every technique in this book is based on the bedrock of scientific study, so it had better work. Just flip ahead a few more pages and look at the research I have laid out in the Endnotes.

  The Procrastination Equation, just like What I Learned on the Mountain, is still only an inconsequential book if the techniques stay locked inside its covers. In Ferguson’s novel, the challenge was just getting people to read it. For a while, What I Learned on the Mountain’s potential effectiveness was derailed, as you might guess, by procrastination. As Edwin, the book’s editor, concludes: “I forgot about procrastinators. Don’t you see? All those people out there who purchased the book or were given it as a gift and still haven’t got around to reading it.” For my book, the requirements are a little steeper, but as you can see, you have already pretty much finished it. To make what you are reading effective, you also need to take its contents seriously. You need to adopt these techniques into your life and start seeing your decision making in terms of that interplay between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex. To lift the ideas off these pages and into your life, we are going to take one parting look at Eddie, Valerie, and Tom and imagine how they are getting along. You'll see that they are using all these techniques in combination, and thriving because of it. And if you can see yourself doing the same, then you will be able to get your act together, and you will soon be putting procrastination behind you as well.

  EDDIE AND VALERIE

  After Eddie lost his sales job, he was depressed for a long time—that is, until he met Valerie. She always found a way of putting
a smile on his face and it was natural that the two got married. Now in their thirties, with two full-time jobs and a lovable toddler named Constance, they have a wonderful life. But they are always on the run, and lately the demands have been getting worse.

  Valerie is often on crushing deadlines, and her home responsibilities take second place when she is in a crunch. She knows how lucky she is to have a job at the local newspaper, but there have been cuts, and she is now doing the work of two people, maybe more. The pressure to meet all her deadlines is serious—this isn’t about career advancement, it’s about staying employed. Eddie has to travel for his job in marketing, which means that he leaves before dawn and is away for days, leaving Valerie in a lurch. When Constance gets sick, all hell breaks loose. She keeps them up at night, and somebody has to stay home with her. When the washing machine breaks down, somebody has to wait for the repairman. Valerie and Eddie feel as if they haven’t had enough sleep in years. And they are right. They know how lucky they are to have two jobs and their little girl, but they are stressed beyond words.

  Valerie and Eddie shuttle between work and home like mechanical dolls, always late, grabbing a kiss or a donut on their way out. When they are at home, they worry about the work they are not doing, and so they often go to the computer after the baby is asleep, working through exhaustion late into the night. If the baby is sick, the one who goes to work frets about how she is, and when she is well, they are both checking her out on the webcam at daycare—spending precious work minutes monitoring her well-being. They can hardly handle paying the bills and getting to the pediatrician’s office for checkups and shots. They e-mail each other dozens of times a day, and Eddie has to control himself from texting Valerie from the car on the way to his next meeting.