Procrastination

by Jane B. Burka

  We think this research about the nature of the task may have more to do with the nature of people. A task is not inherently and universally boring or anxiety producing. One person’s aversion is another person’s delight. Furthermore, it is true that many people complete tasks even though the tasks are aversive to them. Thus, while it makes common sense that people put off doing things they find unpleasant, the more interesting question to us is: Why is this particular task unpleasant for this particular person, leading to avoidance, even when the task is important and the consequences are significant? For procrastinators, an aversive task becomes an avoided task. Why this is the case has not been addressed by the research to date.

  Another concern we have about the research on task aversiveness and procrastination is that most of the studies have relied on college students answering questionnaires about why they procrastinate. There are two limitations to data generated in this way. First, the data are limited to a particular population, college students, who may or may not be similar to a more general population of procrastinators. One must be careful about generalizing from these data to a broader population. Second, answers on questionnaires are of limited help in understanding complex and often unconscious motivations. For example, one of Steel’s findings was that 45 percent of procrastinating college students said that they “really dislike” writing term papers.31 Yet many students who don’t like writing term papers do write them and turn them in on time. So we’re back to the question of why. Is this student someone who lacks writing skills or who is writing in a language other than his native tongue, so he dreads getting back yet another paper with a lot of criticism and a poor grade? Or is the student a gifted writer who feels pressure to get an A+ on every paper, seeing anything less than a top grade as a failure? Or does the student struggle with getting organized, finding the right materials, and developing an idea for the paper and therefore feel completely overwhelmed? Thus, the finding that “task aversiveness” correlates with procrastination leaves a lot to be explained and is not particularly useful in helping people overcome their aversion to unpleasant tasks.

  The issue of unconscious motivation is also significant when we consider task aversiveness. Maybe students know why they “really dislike” writing term papers and maybe they don’t. We have found over and over again that even when students have clear, conscious ideas about why they delay, there are almost always other issues below the surface that play a major role in their procrastination. As we noted in our chapter on neuroscience and procrastination, it is now widely accepted that much of mental life occurs outside of conscious awareness. People often don’t know what is going on in their minds; some psychological issues are unremembered, subtle, and not readily apparent; some issues are uncomfortable to acknowledge, leading people to disavow them. Therefore we suggest that it is a mistake to rely exclusively on conscious reporting of likes and dislikes as full explanations for why people procrastinate. Contrary to Steel’s suggestion that procrastinators may “simply” find many of life’s demands aversive, we believe that it’s not simple at all. We think it’s unrealistic to expect that students would necessarily be able to identify the fears that interfere with success and happiness in response to a simple questionnaire. Like the woman who avoided shaking hands after being pricked by a pin (see Chapter 7), students (and others) may have no conscious recollection of painful experiences in the past that make a particular task aversive to them today.

  PROCRASTINATION AND HEALTH

  Because procrastinators compromise their well-being in many ways, procrastination has serious consequences for health. Students who put things off are more likely to eat poorly, sleep less, and drink more alcohol than students who do not.32 At the end of the academic term, student procrastinators are more likely to go to the health service with complaints of colds, flu, and stomach problems.33 In the general population, procrastinators report higher levels of stress, suffer more acute health problems, and practice fewer wellness behaviors than nonprocrastinators. 34 People who are less “conscientious” are more likely to engage in all of the major behaviors that lead to premature mortality—less physical activity, poor diet, consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs, risky driving and sexual activity, violence and suicide.35 People who think procrastination is nothing but a joke are so wrong: procrastination can kill.

  THE CONTRIBUTION OF BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

  Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for demonstrating that people do not always make rational economic decisions. His theories about irrational economic choices have become the basis for the field of behavioral economics, a marriage of psychology and economics. Psychological motives, Kahneman suggests, determine people’s economic behavior and “more often than not, individual decisions are based on context, faulty reasoning and perception, rather than on [rational] cost-benefit analysis.”36 How choices are framed, rather than the actual or relative value of the choice, is a major influence on the decisions people ultimately make37 and therefore is a significant factor in the decision to procrastinate.

  Future Discounting. A factor that has been strongly linked to procrastination is the time interval to task completion (or reward). If the end point of the task you are facing is far off in time, you are more likely to delay getting started on it; the closer the end is, the more likely you are to be productive. In psychological research, this finding holds true for pigeons38 and monkeys,39 as well as students.40 This behavior has also been researched by economists, as they seek to understand why people put off important financial tasks, such as saving money for retirement. Economist George Akerlof suggests that people are likely to overemphasize the importance of present events and to underrate the importance of future events. He calls this tendency “future discounting.”41 Even if the present event (checking e-mail) is clearly less important to your well-being than the future event (meeting next month’s work deadline), you decide to do the more immediate thing and put off the future task. The reason that present events take on more apparent value is that they seem more “salient”42 or vivid, especially in contrast to less immediate, pallid events in the far-off future. Procrastination occurs when the future pales in comparison to the present. You want to save money for a future down payment on a house, but the immediate saliency of having a big-screen TV for the playoffs wins out. You want to impress your manager with your quarterly numbers, but the immediate pleasure of winning at Internet poker entices you to leave the report for a later date.

  Certainly, it is a “human tendency to grab immediate rewards,”43 even when those immediate rewards may have delayed costs. If you choose to play video games, for example, the reward is immediate and the cost of not doing your work is delayed. Other actions may have immediate costs and delayed rewards, such as when you struggle at first to learn a foreign language, but later feel delighted when you are able to converse with people in another country. The experience of immediate pain or pleasure will have more salience than any pain or pleasure associated with future outcomes. If an action involves an immediate cost, people tend to procrastinate. If there is an immediate reward, they go for it.

  Choices Based on Timing, Not Reason. Another variable affecting decision making is that the procrastinator’s evaluation of the significance of a task varies greatly over time and changes dramatically as the task deadline approaches, even though the actual importance of a task does not really change. In other words, preferences are influenced by timing rather than by reason.44 If you have a project due next Monday, you may not view it as important on Thursday, but come Sunday night, it will probably seem very important indeed. Thus, procrastinators tend to be very inconsistent in their assessment of the importance of tasks, and this inconsistency makes it difficult to work steadily toward future goals.

  Irrational Optimism. Finally, some people are more realistic about what they will do next time than others. Those who are “correctly pessimistic” about their future behavior recognize that they are going to have “self-control
problems in the future.”45 They anticipate that they may not have more time later and know that the task will be just as difficult then as now, so they’d better get started. People who are “irrationally optimistic,”46 however, do not anticipate that it’s going to be just as difficult to get started in the future. They fail to realize that they’re going to have just as much trouble working later and incorrectly assume that they have plenty of time or that it will be easier later. We think irrational optimism is related to a person’s sense of the continuity of self across time (see Chapter 6) and to the need to maintain a grandiose self-image (see Chapter 2). And, of course, we come up against the problem of accepting reality—the reality that you’re not going to be magically different two weeks from now, the reality that projects take time to complete, the reality that pleasure in the present may cost you pain in the future.

  What behavioral economists are telling us is that these ways of looking at present versus future events, and of assessing ourselves in this time frame, are natural human inclinations. Everyone tends to discount the future. Everyone is more engaged by immediate reward. Everyone makes decisions that are not rational.47 And yet, there are ways to fight the natural tendency to procrastinate. You can recognize that you’re likely to discount the value of something that seems far off in the future and remind yourself about its value to you in the long-term. You can make a goal more real and vivid by knowing exactly what is involved in the task, when it is due and by setting short-term interim goals to get you there. You can admit that you’re just as likely to want to procrastinate later as you are now, that the task is not going to be done by a different, nonprocrastinating version of yourself. And you can make your goal less vague and more immediate by taking action—any action—toward the goal now.

  RESEARCH ON WHAT TO DO ABOUT PROCRASTINATION

  With these findings in mind, researchers have delineated a number of important strategies for reducing procrastination.48 Since task aversiveness is a major component of procrastinating, looking for ways to mitigate it might help reduce procrastination.49 Perhaps boring tasks could be made more challenging or difficult. Or, a task with a long-term reward might be “piggy-backed” or “fused” with one that has immediate satisfactions, such as participating in a study group (social fun) to prepare for a final exam (long-term goal).50 The Tax Torture group we describe in Chapter 14 is an example of this fusion of the aversive and the pleasurable.

  Increasing one’s expectancy of success is another way to decrease procrastination on a given task. Watching other people complete the task successfully can help, as can experiencing “actual performance accomplishments.” 51 Thus, improving skills needed for a particular task may increase the feeling of self-efficacy and thereby help decrease procrastination. 52 The technique we and so many others recommend of breaking down a large goal into small steps may help increase the frequency of actual performance accomplishments, because the achievement of small goals along the way can be experienced as successes. Having small, interim goals with interim deadlines also makes the task more salient.

  Steel also describes “learned industriousness,”53 which is the process of changing the value of a task, so that effort toward a goal becomes reinforcing in and of itself. This is consistent with the work of Carol Dweck (see Chapter 2), who emphasizes the importance of intrinsic motivation as part of a “Growth Mindset” and the experience of reward and pleasure in the process of working rather than in the performance outcome.54 To our minds, this is a crucial aspect of de-linking self-worth from performance, which we believe is central to freeing people from the mire of procrastination.

  Given the distractibility, impulsiveness, and self-control struggles of so many procrastinators, Steel suggests the technique of stimulus control to reduce the availability of distractions that tempt people to stray from their tasks.55 This refers to changing environmental cues to support important goals and banish temptations. Turning off or delaying access to e-mail might be one way to banish a very common and compelling temptation. Studying in a quiet library corner rather than in a popular café is another example of stimulus control. We offer suggestions that use stimulus control in Chapter 14, “Learning to Say Yes and No.”

  Another suggestion is to create routines that serve to reduce the number of decisions one must make to get tasks done (see Chapter 16). This strategy is based on the observation that the greater the number of choice points a task requires, the greater the likelihood of procrastination.56 Eliminating choice allows people to follow a course of action with little or no thought,57 and so prevents them from becoming bogged down in decision making. Keeping strict time schedules is one example of such “automaticity.”58

  Finally, Steel notes that the research indicates that goal-setting does reduce procrastination.59 Setting daily goals and making contracts for periodic work completion are useful antiprocrastination devices. These are examples of creating short-term, incremental, behavioral goals to help with the achievement of a larger, long-term goal, a process we have stressed for over twenty-five years in our clinical practice.

  CONCLUSION

  We are pleased that virtually all of our clinical ideas have been validated by social science research. Our central idea that procrastination is linked to lack of confidence and vulnerable self-esteem has been supported, and our assertions about the relationship between fear of failure and procrastination have also been corroborated. Many of our suggestions for overcoming procrastination are now supported by scientific evidence, especially the suggestion that procrastinators approach a task by breaking it down into small, manageable steps. (Everyone agrees on this strategy!) Our observation that procrastinators underestimate how long it will take to accomplish a task has been demonstrated by research, and our suggestion to enjoy rewards along the way, rather than wait until the elusive, far-off end of a project, is now backed up by both psychologists and economists.

  Much has been learned about the complex behavior of procrastination over the past twenty-five years, and we look forward to the research yet to come. However, we once again stress that the most important research is that which you do yourself. Looking honestly at your own personal motivations for procrastinating, making an effort to use our suggested techniques, and seeing what works for you is, in the end, the only research that really matters.

  APPENDIX B

  A Short List of Techniques for Managing Procrastination

  1. Identify a behavioral goal (observable, specific, and concrete), rather than setting a vague, global one.NOT: “I want to stop procrastinating.”

  INSTEAD: “I want to clean out and organize my garage by September 1.”

  2. Set a realistic goal. Think small, rather than large, and choose a minimally acceptable goal rather than an ideal goal. Focus on one (and only one!) goal at a time.NOT: “I’ll never procrastinate again!”

  INSTEAD: “I’ll spend an hour a day studying for my Math class.”

  3. Break your goal down into small, specific minigoals. Each minigoal is more easily reached than the big goal, and small goals add up to a big goal.NOT: “I’m going to write the report.”

  INSTEAD: “I’ll spend thirty minutes working on a plan for my spreadsheet tonight. Tomorrow I’ll spend another thirty minutes filling in the data, and then the next day, I’ll spend an hour writing a report based on the data.”

  4. Be realistic (rather than wishful) about time. Ask yourself: How much time will the task actually take? How much time do I actually have available? NOT: “I have plenty of time to do this tomorrow.”

  INSTEAD: “I’d better look at my calendar to see when I can start. Last time, it took longer than I thought.”

  5. Just get started! Instead of trying to do the whole project at once, just take one small step.Remember: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

  NOT: “I’ve got to do it all in one sitting.”

  INSTEAD: “What is the one first step I can take?”

  6. Use the next fifteen min
utes. You can stand anything for fifteen minutes. You can only accomplish a task by working at it fifteen minutes at a time. So, what you can do in fifteen minutes is of value.NOT: “I only have fifteen minutes, so why bother?”

  INSTEAD: “What part of this task can I do in the next fifteen minutes?”

  7. Expect obstacles and setbacks. Don’t give up as soon as you hit the first (or second or third) obstacle. An obstacle is just a problem to be solved, not a reflection of your value or competence.NOT: “The professor isn’t in his office, so I can’t work on my paper. Think I’ll go to a movie.”

  INSTEAD: “Even though the professor isn’t in, I can work on my outline until he gets back.”

  8. When possible, delegate (or even dump!) the task. Are you really the only person who can do this? Does this task really have to be done at all?Remember, no one can do everything—not even you.

  NOT: “I am the only one who can do this correctly.”

  INSTEAD: “I’ll find the right person for this task so that I can work on a more important project.”

  9. Protect your time. Learn how to say no. Don’t take on extra or unnecessary projects.You can choose not to respond to what’s “urgent” in order to attend to what’s important.

  NOT: “I have to make myself available to anyone who needs me.”