The Procrastination Equation

by Piers Steel

  “That’s an awesome point, Tim.”

  “Thanks,” Tim said warmly, oblivious to the immediate use of the strategy he had just recommended.

  “I really like it,” said Tom. “If it gets me out of my own office a little more, that’s great. I like one-on-one conversations more than those weekly meetings anyway.”

  “You're lucky. Many managers are promoted solely on technical skills and find the interpersonal part of the job difficult. Since you are so good at it, start using the Games and Goals strategy too. You know the story of the bricklayer, right?”

  “Umm, remind me,” said Tom, not willing to admit he hadn’t heard of it at all.

  “It’s short. When two bricklayers were asked what they were doing, the first bricklayer replied, 'Building a wall.' The second took his time and, after some thoughtful reflection, responded, 'Building a cathedral.' You want to instill the bigger picture, why what they do matters, because if you do . . .”

  “ . . . all my dreams will come true,” said Tom. “I see what you're doing—giving me the bigger picture. Got it. Timely recognition and frame the picture—communicate why what they do is important.”

  Tom allocated an hour a day to walk around the office, checking in on people to see how they were doing. If they impressed him, he told them so and sometimes did a little bit more; when one of his employees did a brilliant job presenting, he spontaneously offered to buy her lunch that day. Explaining the significance of the work was a little bit harder. He found that his employees needed the bigger picture to be framed in different ways. For some, how it would help their career made sense; for others, it was positioning an assignment as a symbol of responsibility; and for still others, it was about how their work affected their colleagues. Finding the right frame for the right person was a bit of a puzzle, but he got it correct more often than not. With one difficult employee, he explained it this way: “When you are done with your piece, it passes on to Suzanne. If you are late, she has to stay here late, which means scrabbling to find someone to pick up her kids from daycare, feed them, and put them into bed. You finish early, you make Suzanne’s life easy. You finish late, you make her life hell.” He never had trouble with that employee again. For good measure, he also tried to respect his employees' chronobiology and energy levels by instituting some flextime. Looking up some research, he found that just as students improved by a letter grade when allowed to sleep in by an hour, corporations that enabled flextime, allowing their employees to show up later but stay later in return, saw a nice bump in work performance.3

  One night after work, Tim picked up Tom for dinner at a favorite restaurant. After they were seated and had ordered their food, Tim asked, “How’s the leadership thing going?”

  “Great,” bragged Tom. “This transformer leadership is a snap.”

  “That’s transformational leadership,” said Tim. “Transformer is a type of robot, like Megatron or Optimus Prime.”

  Tom had been joking, but he corrected himself, “That’s right, transformational and transactional.” Then, he quickly changed the topic. “Speaking of which, you never told me about transactional leadership.”

  “Well, most people tend to favor one style or the other,” said Tim, “but the best leaders have a combination of both. Transactional leaders excel at making plans, assigning tasks, and goal setting.”

  “Aah! This makes so much sense,” said Tom. “I never knew what a pain my procrastination was to other people until I had to deal with procrastinators myself. Goal setting worked for me and it'll work for them too.”

  “Yup. That’s what transactional leaders do. They divide distant deadlines into a series of short-term, specific, and realistic goals for their employees. Of course, too many goals and you become a micro-manager, also known as a control freak.”

  “I'm in no danger of becoming that. But still, how many goals do I need to set?” asked Tom.

  “There’s no firm answer on that,” admitted Tim. “Essentially, people work hardest as the clock runs out, so you want to set as many deadlines as practical. At least have regular meetings, where you review people’s progress and set new milestones. Keep in mind that some are already self-motivated and don’t need much, while others need a lot.”

  “Yeah, I'm thinking of a few people who could benefit from minute-to-minute goals,” said Tom.

  “Just don’t do what I have seen your company do,” said Tom, as he began mimicking a pompous corporate voice: “'We want to raise revenue by 20% by year end!' That never works. I don’t even know why they bother.”

  “I know what you mean. It’s so distant and abstract, nobody can get motivated by it. Also, I don’t know if anyone thinks it’s even realistically achievable, especially with the downturn in the economy.”

  While looking over Tom’s shoulder to see if their food would be arriving, Tim said, “Last year, your company made the goal too easy. When it’s too easy, people do what they do when they cross any finish line—they coast, leaving extra performance on the table.”

  “Just like my initial goal,” said Tom, “where everyone beat my schedule by exactly one day. I thought it was suspicious. I guess it’s time for me to set the bar a little higher.”

  “When you do—and if I know you, you are going to love this—try partying,” said Tim.

  “You've got my attention. Go on.”

  “Don’t forget to have a party at the end when you do accomplish it,” said Tim. “People remember two things about a task: its best moment and the end moment. A party at the end will make it seem all worthwhile.”

  “I get it. Like good food at the end of a long conversation,” said Tom, noticing that the waitress had finally arrived with their order.

  Tom started to incorporate effective goal setting. When asking what his employees were up to, he kept pushing them to make concrete, short-term, and challenging goals. When he met them later, he had them give him updates on their progress. Some were naturals at this and used the opportunity to brag, which was fine with Tom—he was paying them with recognition. Others needed to be coaxed. Finally, he set a big group goal: they were going to cut production time by a week this month and if they could do it, which he told them he was sure they could, they were going to cut out early the following Friday for a party. Babysitting for parents and cab rides home for everyone would be on the company’s tab. For the rest of the month, his team worked with a purpose and met the goal. The party was fantastic—as much a reward for Tom as for his team. He loved parties. In fact, whenever “his crew,” as he started to call them, looked as if they weren’t going to meet a goal, he doubled his efforts to make sure they met it and won the blow out. “Next time,” he thought, “I'll put some money in the budget for a white-water rafting extravaganza. I can probably expense it as a team-building exercise anyway. And a prize for whoever gets the most reports out this month too.”

  Just when Tom was starting to get comfortable in this role as leader and manager, word came down from higher up. Unlike most other department heads, Tom was getting his budgets in on target and did his performance appraisals ahead of time. His performance was exceptional and his department was consistently the most satisfied and the most productive in his workgroup.4 Inevitably, he was to be promoted once again. The secret to Tom’s success was simply learning that what motivated other people was pretty much the same as what motivated him. To follow in his footsteps and become a better leader, you need to do the same. Good leadership is a skill that the world eagerly, even desperately, wants you to possess.

  A WORD OF WARNING

  Eddie, Valerie, and Tom benefited from enacting the principles of the Procrastination Equation, repeatedly hitting the three key components of expectancy, value, and time. When you put into practice the suggestions put forth here, you will benefit too. Just don’t overdo it. While procrastination can lead to an inauthentic life, in which long-term dreams sour inside you, so can our efforts to completely eliminate procrastination.5 A genuine and autonomous indiv
idual seeks a life endorsed by the whole self, not just a fragment of it. Trying to squelch your impulsive side entirely is ultimately self-defeating; the wants and appetites that propel a life depend upon being attended to. Overregulation—seeking the perfect over the real—isn’t healthy and won’t make you happy.6 You are going to have to find a balance.

  Just as the Procrastination Equation’s techniques can work too well, so could the techniques in Will Ferguson’s fictional self-help book. In his novel, after people read What I Learned on the Mountain, they did become blissful, contented, kind, and vice-free. They replaced their cigarettes and alcohol addictions with hugs and self-acceptance and swapped their oversized cheeseburgers with sensibly sized ones made from tofu. But all this virtue came at a cost: though everyone was equally content, they were also equally bland, interchangeable, and forgettable. Their personalities were whitewashed by their yearning to overcome all their flaws, and along with their vices so went desserts, fashion sense, and desire.

  Procrastination represents a single swing of the pendulum, an emotional short-sightedness that sees only the present. As the pendulum swings to the other side, rational far-sightedness can become equally troublesome; we tend to focus only on the future.7 When asked about their past regrets, workaholic employees wished they had occasionally goofed off, and exceptionally industrious students regretted studying through Spring Break.10c Consequently, optimal self-control involves not the denial of emotions but a respect for them.8 Not all indulgent delays are irrational. You need to have moments of expression, when you can laugh freely with friends, or let yourself go to be indulged and pampered. Using the words of W. H. Davies, a vagabond Welsh poet of my mother’s youth: “What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.” To be idle, frivolous, spontaneous, and whimsical—these qualities deserve a place in our lives too.

  LOOKING FORWARD

  Nine thousand years ago, procrastination didn’t exist. Back then, if we worked when motivated, slept when sleepy, and acted on other urges as they came upon us, we did so more or less adaptively. In that golden age, our compulsions fit our daily demands like jigsaw puzzle pieces. We were designed for that world, life before the invention of agriculture. Fast forward nine thousand years and that same human nature has equipped us with inclinations that are ill-suited to the everyday. We have to-do lists filled with diets, early wake-ups, and exercise schedules, among a host of other ugly and motivationally indigestible ordeals. Almost every aspect of our lives reflects this maddening mismatch between our desires and our responsibilities, as we overemphasize the present and sacrifice the future. We overindulge in the immediate pleasures of fats, sugars, and television, putting off dieting and exercise. We let loose anger and rage, putting off needed reflection and reconciliation. We have predilections toward the easy pleasure of promiscuity, risking long-term relationships and reproductive health for the forbidden but immediate. Each of these examples reflects a nature that was once adaptive but is no longer, a nature that outrageously values the now more than the later. The story, however, doesn’t need to end here.

  As The Procrastination Equation stresses, irrationally putting off is a tendency, not an inevitability. If we can accept our internal state of affairs, we can counter it. Instead of believing we have the temperament of divine beings, we can reconcile ourselves with our humanity—to the fact that we are flawed and compromised creatures—and act accordingly. We can make procrastination an irrational delay of yesterday, what we all once did or didn’t do, but only if we acknowledge our own limitations and adopt advice consistent with this understanding. To put it all into practice, you don’t need to ask permission. There will be no handwritten invitation. To live your life as you always wanted to, to be the person you always wanted to be, you know what to do. You are holding all the answers in your hands. Now do it.

  Postscript

  Procrastination’s Chapter 11

  The beauty of procrastination is its ubiquity; tracking its scent leads into dozens of scientific fields. If you duplicate my path, you will start with psychology, where the bulk of the work has been done, but you will quickly find yourself in economics, which is becoming a dominant force on the topic. You will take a stroll through the applied issues, like retirement or debt procrastination, perhaps taking a peek into the legal implications, such as suggested bankruptcy laws. From economics, you would naturally wander into neuroeconomics and become interested in the neurobiology of procrastination, a detour that, of course, would give you a chance to look at the basis of all biological study, evolution. You would learn that procrastination is a common and consistent human trait, one we share with species across the animal kingdom. Then, instead of considering where we came from, you might reverse your perspective and see where we are going, getting into societal issues, especially long-term concerns like environmental degradation. If you start wondering why the government doesn’t do more, you will discover that they and other organizations have procrastination problems of their own.

  Having been studied in so many disciplines, procrastination has become a Rosetta Stone, where the same phenomenon is translated into a dozen tongues. This pool of resources allows us not only to translate findings from different fields, such as from economics into psychology, but also to form a common language of human behavior, an Esperanto of the social sciences. It’s an important accomplishment.1 As Christopher Green concludes, writing in psychology’s premier journal, “it [integration] would doubtless be considered the greatest scientific victory in the history of the discipline,” one that can rescue psychology from the realms of a “would-be science.”2 And if you can integrate psychology with economics, sociology, and biology too, even better. This was actually my original purpose in creating the Procrastination Equation—to help integrate the social sciences.3

  Unfortunately for procrastination, its pervasiveness makes it an obvious target. Having a common basic model, one that each discipline can adopt and customize, could be incredibly dangerous to our familiar enemy. Integration enables exponentially more progress in all disciplines. This understanding has already permitted the physical sciences to provide an endless stream of game-changing advances, from the laptop I am using to write this book to the nuclear energy that powers the electrical lines.4 By working from a common model of reality, the physical sciences share and pass knowledge across specialties and research foci. Similarly, such synergy could supercharge the social sciences. Herbert Gintis, an economics professor emeritus from the University of Massachusetts who has long argued for integration, concludes: “The true power of each discipline’s contribution to knowledge will only appear when suitably qualified and deepened by the contribution of the others.”5 You see, it is all connected, all of it, as we are all studying the same thing: people’s decision making and behavior.6 As one area informs the other, our fight against procrastination necessarily gives insights into reducing obesity, building better retirement savings programs, and much, much more.

  Once disciplinary integration comes about, we will have gone a long way toward truly mastering our own minds. As it currently stands, we as a society can do better. Consider that the top two ways that people procrastinate are through their televisions and through their computers—about a quarter of their waking hours in some parts of the world. People seeking help to curb their addictions freely acknowledge that they use these temptations to excess.7 Because TV watching has been associated with the rise of obesity and the erosion of the family, huge efforts have been put forth to reduce our consumption.8 Nothing has been truly effective; the hours used and incidence of abuse rise yearly. If we adopt a more integrated viewpoint, using some of the principles from The Procrastination Equation, we can change this. We only need to apply the principles of self-control to our own technology.9

  When I watch too much TV, I blame my digital video recorder (DVR). It makes it easy for me to find a show I like and watch it when I want. Naturally, the easier it is to find good programming and the faster it c
an be accessed, the more I will make use of it. You will too. Though DVRs are part of the problem, they are going to be part of the solution too, as they are also the perfect platform to enable self-control techniques. Self-control improves when we receive accurate feedback about our behavior, which we can then use as reminding cues and to help us set goals (see Scoring Goals and Making Attention Pay). An add-on for a DVR could be a prominent digital display that reflects how much TV you have watched today or this week. As you see the hours visibly rise while you watch, so will the desire to turn off the set. The DVR could even track your long-term viewing, calculating when and what you are watching.

  Also, DVRs could permit precommitment. Devices are available to enable parents to limit the viewing habits of their kids, but there are few options for parents themselves. With a DVR, a series of precommitment measures could be incorporated. The first few could just be devices for enabling delays. A long code, for example, could be laboriously inputted before viewing. Alternatively, it could lock you out for a few minutes, or perhaps require confirmation multiple times, giving you a chance to have second thoughts. As delay lengthens and impulsive choices become impossible, you should be able to make more rational use of your viewing time. If this isn’t enough, you could lock yourself out temporarily, perhaps only allowing viewing within given time periods or up to a total number of hours each day. Best of all, whichever of these options we as viewers want to activate, if any, the choice—the intention—is ultimately ours.

  For Internet procrastination, similar solutions are already on the market. Attentional control programs like RescueTime, which let you see exactly what you have been doing with your day, are freely available. As an added feature, RescueTime also assists in goal setting and permits the creation of comparison work groups, thereby activating the Vicarious Victory principle. Cyberly seeing others hard at work should inspire, or at least spark, your competitive spirit. Furthermore, RescueTime allows you to voluntarily block your own access to the Internet for chosen periods of time, permitting a precommitment strategy that eliminates distractions. If this could be complemented with a sophisticated and difficult-to-subvert nannyware program—like Chronager, except self-administered—it is hard to imagine a more effective self-control platform. Right now, the pieces are all there; we just have to bundle them together.