by Piers Steel
Ziglar, Zig, 76
Zinsser, William, 34
Acknowledgments
This book all started with a phone call from an immensely talented and likable literary agent, Sally Harding. After seeing my research covered in the press, she insisted long before anyone else that I was the person to write the book on procrastination. Who was I to argue? The Cooke Agency was wise to merge their agency with hers, and she equally so to form a partnership with them. With Dean Cooke, Suzanne Brandreth, and Mary Hu, they make a fine crew that can steer a book through any waters, foreign or domestic.
My thanks also go to Louise Dennys at the Knopf Random House Canada Group, who saw the potential of this book, and to the extraordinarily erudite Anne Collins, who wields a golden pen. She is an editor’s editor, and becoming publisher at Knopf Random Canada was inevitable. Anne improved every page here. I am indebted to Nancy Miller, who championed the book early on and then to Jonathan Burnham at HarperCollins US, who ensured that it had a home. Also, I am grateful to my editor there, Sally Kim, for stubbornly insisting that what I thought was good enough should be better. Talented and thoughtful, she even gave me her own umbrella when I got caught in a New York rainstorm. Special thanks to Jane Isay for bringing the manuscript home by providing finishing editorial touches and making sure the narrative flowed. With her extensive experience and her familiarity with psychodynamics, psychology, and neurobiology, we made a good team. Lastly, the lovely Jane McWhinney gave the final polish, making sure each sentence gleamed. Like raising a child, writing a book takes a village, and I am thankful to have had so many gifted people in my corner.
Early in my academic career at the University of Minnesota, I was lucky to have Dr. Deniz Ones teach me meta-analysis and Dr. Thomas Brothen initiate my lifelong fascination with procrastination. At the University of Calgary, where I currently reside, much appreciation goes to my colleague and friend Dr. Daphne Taras, who fought to make sure I received my sabbatical to write this book and who provided, or credibly feigned, interest in the manuscript development. Though I wished the sabbatical had been longer, those uninterrupted months proved invaluable. I also appreciate the efforts of her son, Matthew Taras, for confirming historical facts. Further appreciation goes to my sisters, Anita and Marion, for reading earlier drafts and to my father-in-law, John Horne, a consulting economist, for his critical eye.
For everything else, and everything in general, I thank my wife, Julie. The conditions for writing this book, like so much of life, were not ideal and yet here it is. Teaching, researching, and running a department aren’t easy for a parent of a toddler and a newborn. With both of our families in other cities, it seemed ridiculous to think I could also take on writing a book, but we did it anyway. My wife and I traded off sleeping on different nights, tag-teamed the children, and I absolutely relied on her support and faith. Though the motivational principles contained within this book proved invaluable, her reserves of strength are the platform on which this book was built. And, through all of it, I learned that she is a very gifted copy editor with a most discerning eye. The reader, as am I, should be very happy we are married.
About the Author
PIERS STEEL, PhD, is the world’s leading researcher and speaker on the science of motivation and procrastination. He studied and taught at the business and psychology schools of the University of Minnesota before moving to the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business, where he is a professor of human resources and organizational dynamics. He has been studying procrastination and its effects for more than ten years, and has spent the decades before that practicing it. Dr. Steel’s award-winning research has appeared in magazines ranging from Psychology Today and New Scientist to Good Housekeeping and Profit. His work has been reported in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and USA Today. Winner of the Killam Emerging Research Leader Award, he lives in Calgary, Alberta, with his wife and two sons.
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Author’s Note
Procrastination has been my life’s work—both as a researcher and as a practitioner. With research so often being “me-search,” this isn’t accidental. Scientists often intimately know the subjects they study—they are problems they themselves face. It’s true that I have sympathy for the procrastinator’s plight because it is one I shared for many years.1 Nowadays my work has received international acclaim, I have coached national college champions in business school competitions, and awards for teaching and research hang on my office wall. But for most of my life, I felt potential languishing inside me mingled with frustration because I couldn’t sustain any of my many attempts to improve. Encountering people who were naturally more capable of getting things done simply reminded me of my own deficiencies, curdled my spirit, and raised considerable misplaced resentment. Luckily, I was attracted to a profession whose very purpose was to identify the key enablers of change, which I then systematically put into practice in my own life one by one.
My PhD is in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, the scientific study of our actions and minds in the workplace. Psychology applied to work focuses on how to improve people’s performance, well-being, and, quite appropriately, motivation or lack thereof. Unfortunately, many of the techniques of this discipline aren’t well known, buried in the depths of obscure journals and written in scholarly language comprehensible only to the initiated. For procrastination, the problem gets even more complex. This subject has attracted the attention of all the social sciences and inspired research around the world. With over eight hundred scientific articles on the topic from fields spanning economics to neuroscience, in languages ranging from German to Chinese, the challenge is to find and make sense of them all.2 And this is where I come in. I found two ways to study procrastination. The first was by doing my own research, which you will read about presently. That gave me the basis for a theory of how and why we put things off. But then I needed to deal with the panoply of disciplines that have studied procrastination and published results in so many different journals and books. I was lucky enough to stumble upon meta-analysis, a recently developed scientific technique, and adapt it for my research.
Meta-analysis mathematically distills the results from thousands of studies to their core consensus. At a basic level, meta-analysis is what lets science progress. By enabling a synthesis of knowledge, it reveals the underlying truths we seek. It is very powerful, it has applications in every field, and it increasingly provides the information we need to run the world. The medical treatment you get from your doctor, for example, is likely based on the results of meta-analyses, from asthma to Alzheimer’s.3 It is a discipline I have mastered: I have created some of its basic techniques, I teach it to others, and I have developed software for it. I like to think of it as something I am good at.4 It was natural, then, to meta-analyze the body of research on procrastination, given that there was no other way to put together all the findings. I have to say that the field of procrastination proved to be daunting, as almost every possible scientific methodology and technique has been thrown at it. Researchers have run laboratory experiments, read through personal diaries, twiddled with neurotransmitters, and dissected DNA. They have monitored every setting, from airports to shopping malls; they have wired entire classrooms to track every student’s twitch and shudder; and they have studied procrastinators from every background, including pigeons, vermin, and members of the U.S. Congress. Making them all fit coherently together was like being a conductor of a madhouse orchestra. The strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion are all playing the same tune but not in the same room, in the same rhythm, or in the same key. Turning that noise into music is what this book is about.
What I found will surprise you and challenge the status quo. Some of my work has already been published, such as my article “The Nature of Procrastination,” which appeared in Psychological Bulletin, the social sciences' most respected journal. Some o
f it has already been reported in hundreds of media venues around the world, from India to Ireland and from Scientific American to Good Housekeeping and The Wall Street Journal. But most of what I found is presented here for the first time. Within these pages, you will find out that we've been misdiagnosing procrastination for decades, attributing it to a trait associated with less procrastination, not more. The real reasons for procrastination are partly genetic and can be traced to the fundamental structure of our brains, which is why procrastination is seen in every culture and throughout history. The environment, however, isn’t blameless; it may not be responsible for procrastination’s existence, but it is responsible for its intensity—modern life has elevated procrastination into a pandemic. And guess what? All these findings follow from the application of a simple mathematical formula I devised—the Procrastination Equation.
Because I was able to tease out the fundamentals of the dynamic that makes us procrastinate, I have also been able to figure out strategies that we can use throughout our lives—school, work, or personal—to combat our innate tendency to put things off. A tall order? You bet. That’s why it has taken me so many years to write this book. I hope the hours you spend reading it will reward you with a new way of thinking about how to spend—and waste—your time.
Copyright
THE PROCRASTINATION EQUATION. Copyright © 2011 by Piers Steel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-0-06-170361-4
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062035257
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