The Procrastination Equation Read online

  Learned helplessness is connected to quickly giving up, whether in a complacent acceptance of a prolonged sickness or in a lackluster school performance. Learned helplessness also helps explain why putting off decisions more than usual is one of the symptoms of depression.3 The underlying cause is reduced self-confidence, which makes it difficult to invest in any demanding work.4 On balance, a degree of learned helplessness is common. Many of us have been in situations where our world was seemingly not set up for our success. For low-expectancy Eddie, it was his sales job; for someone else it may have been a harsh upbringing in which family or classmates enforced rigid roles. Restraining beliefs can become internalized and be carried within us long after we leave the home or schoolyard where they started. Our learned self-perception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—by expecting to fail, we make failure a certainty. We never dig in and really try, and the end result is more procrastination.

  VALERIE WITHOUT VALUE

  How do you feel about what you are putting off right now? As you reflect on the question, you will be channeling Valerie. Like her, with her sluggish attempts at writing on municipal politics, we all tend to put off whatever we dislike. Consequently, that chore you are currently deferring is probably something you don’t especially enjoy. The technical term for this measure of enjoyment is Value and the less of it a task has for you, the harder it is for you to get started on it. We have no problem initiating lengthy conversations with friends over a few drinks and a decadent dessert, but most of us delay starting on our taxes or cleaning out our basement. Similarly, the top reason that students give for essay procrastination is that they “really dislike writing term papers.”2b Although the fact that we are less likely to promptly pursue an unpleasant task may seem pretty obvious, the scientific field lacks your insight. Scientists have committed over a dozen studies involving a good two thousand respondents to reach the same conclusion. Well, at least now we are sure.

  To the degree that some tasks are universally burdensome, they reveal some touchstones of procrastination.5 Since everyone wants to put off whatever they detest, it is no surprise that we commonly avoid cleaning up, or organizing, or seeing our doctor or dentist.6 Since many find exercising an imposition, 70 percent of us rarely use our long-term gym memberships.7 Similarly, many find Christmas shopping stressful, thus helping to keep Christmas Eve the busiest shopping day of the year.8 On the other hand, to the degree that individuals consider certain chores uniquely unpleasant, the exact bundle of procrastinating tasks will differ from person to person. Depending on the nature of their dillydallying owners, some households contain kitchen counters cluttered with dishes, while others have medicine cabinets stuffed with long-defunct prescriptions. Some have fridges needing to be filled with food, while others have dining room tables needing to be filled with friends.

  Given the connection between what is pleasurable and what is promptly pursued, it makes sense, then, that chronic procrastinators tend to detest life’s allotment of responsibilities. Their jobs, their chores, their duties are all irksome, and they avoid tackling these tasks as long as possible. If you agreed with statements like “Work bores me” or “I lack enthusiasm to follow through with my responsibilities,” the absence of pleasurable value is likely a source of your procrastination. Laundry makes you listless, cooking makes you crabby, and washing dishes and paying the bills are hardships rather than innocuous incidentals. You have tremendous difficulty keeping your attention on the mundane. For you, boredom signals irrelevance and your mind slides off to something else.9 This very characteristic has provided me with quite a challenge in writing this book. I am painfully aware of your fickle nature and your unforgiving attention span—meaning that I'd better keep a lively pace at all times. In other words, ever onward.

  TIME-SENSITIVE TOM

  While Eddie’s Expectancy and Valerie’s Value are contributing factors to procrastination, Tom’s reason is at its core. Tom had to book a hotel room but couldn’t find the motivation until just before the deadline, letting himself get distracted every time he made an intention to act. When he finally did do something, he knew he should have acted earlier and he suffered for his tardiness. In all likelihood, if you procrastinate, you feel some kinship with Tom and have admitted that you too “get into jams” because you are “entranced by some temporarily delightful activity” or that you “choose smaller but more immediate pleasures over those larger but more delayed.” The biggest factor in determining what you pursue is not the associated rewards or the certainty of receiving them, but their timing. You value rewards that can be realized quickly far more highly than rewards that require you to wait; simply, you are impulsive.

  As I mentioned in the last chapter, scientific evidence of the connection between impulsiveness and procrastination is unequivocal. Scores of studies based on many thousands of people have established that impulsiveness and the related personality traits of low conscientiousness, low self-control, and high distractibility are at the core of procrastination. I myself have collected personality profiles from more than twenty thousand people to take a closer look. And I found confirmation that of these traits, impulsiveness shares the strongest bond with procrastination. This isn’t surprising if you look at specific aspects of impulsiveness: intense cravings, a lack of caution and reserve, and an inability to see tasks through.10 Though all have their role in why we put things off, the last of these is almost equivalent to procrastination in itself: not seeing tasks through means agreeing to statements like “I'm not good about pacing myself so as to get things done on time.” People who act without thinking, who are unable to keep their feelings under control, who act on impulse, are also people who procrastinate.

  The influence of time itself also contributes to the connection between impulsiveness and procrastination. We tend to see tomorrow’s goals and concerns abstractly—that is, in broad and indistinct terms—but to see today’s immediate goals and concerns concretely—that is, with lots of detail on the particulars of who, what, where, and when. Actions or goals framed in abstract terms, like “engaging in self-development,” are less likely to be immediately pursued than goals framed in concrete terms, like “reading this book.”11 Similarly, the broad goal of “exercising” is less motivating than “running for an hour,” and “getting a promotion” is harder to act on than the more immediate goal of “writing this report.” Since we consistently frame long-term goals abstractly, the result is that we are more likely to postpone them, at least until they become short-term goals and we start thinking about them concretely. Psychologists Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope have recently specialized in the scientific study of this phenomenon, but the basics aren’t that new. David Hume wrote about the same thing over 250 years ago in his book A Treatise of Human Nature.12

  Right now, if you like, you can experience the influence of time on whether you view events concretely or abstractly. Let’s plan a shopping trip for the distant future, say next year. Take a moment and imagine yourself twelve months from now. What would you buy? Do you have a clear picture or is the vision cloudy and smudged? Now imagine the money currently warming your pocket. If you had to spend it today, this very moment, where exactly would that money go? Likely, what you plan to buy a year from now seems generic, as vanilla as “nice shoes” or “good sports equipment.” Such goals are ghosts, ethereal and with no handles to grab onto. Today’s spending plans, however, are likely concrete and meaty, something you can sink your teeth into. Instead of “shoes,” they are Manolo Blahnik’s “Sizzle,” the python sandal that will make you the envy of every shoe fetishist. Rather than just “sporting goods,” you are obsessing over a TaylorMade Quad r7 425 TP Driver, the one with the oversized titanium sweet spot, used by the pros on the PGA tour. As you contrast these concrete and abstract options, the differences in their ability to excite you should be palpable. This is procrastination’s dark heart. It is largely because we view the present in concrete terms and the future abstractly that we procrastinate. />
  PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

  Eddie’s, Valerie’s, and Tom’s situations—that is Expectancy, Value, and Time—are the basic components of procrastination. Decrease the certainty or the size of a task’s reward—its expectancy or its value—and you are unlikely to pursue its completion with any vigor. Increase the delay for the task’s reward and our susceptibility to delay—impulsiveness—and motivation also dips. Understanding procrastination at this component level isn’t bad, but we can do better.2c

  The first step is to figure out how Expectancy and Value fit together. To this end, we can tap into an entire family of formulations called Expectancy Theories, the most famous being Expected Utility Theory. You might not have heard of it by that name but you are more familiar with it than you know. Expected Utility Theory forms the basis of mainstream economics; every successful gambler adheres to its rule. It proposes that people make their decisions by multiplying expectancy and value together. That is:

  EXPECTANCY × VALUE

  Here is how it works. Imagine there are two piles of money in front of you. The one on the right I will definitely give you—very nice of me—but the one on the left I probably won’t. If you could ask for only one pile, which would it be? My bet is that you would take the sure thing, revealing how expectancy affects your decisions. Expectancy, as you might expect, refers to probability or chance. We prefer more likely to less likely rewards. However, what if I told you the sure thing on the right was a much smaller pile of money than the riskier one on the left? This is actually a pretty common situation, like choosing whether to put your money into riskless but low rate government bonds or to speculate on the stock market. To make sense of your options, now you have to incorporate value into your decision making in order to judge how much bigger the pile needs to be to inspire you to take more risk. As I vary the size of a pile and the probability of you receiving it, your preferences will flip from right to left and vice versa. The formula “Expectancy × Value” does a fair job of predicting which pile you would end up choosing. Multiplying the two together, you go with whatever pile has the highest outcome. Economists try to understand all of human behavior using just this equation. From their viewpoint, every choice you make—from pouring milk on your cereal to wiping your child’s nose—is based on how much pleasure you will receive and the degree of certainty that you will receive it. Unfortunately, they are wrong.

  You can’t rely on “Expectancy × Value” alone to describe human nature. For starters, the theory is considered an expression of rational decision making, meaning that it doesn’t leave room for any form of irrational behavior. No matter what you do, from eating an ice cream cone to getting hooked on heroin, it is all reasonable from an economist’s perspective. Consequently, their theory also excludes the possibility of procrastination—irrational delays—and since I am currently writing a book on the topic and you are currently reading one, let’s consider this a weakness.13 The economic model of human nature isn’t so much incorrect as just incomplete. Consistently, we do respond to incentives (i.e., value) to the extent we believe (i.e., expect) that they are obtainable, but that isn’t the entire picture. There is a third factor—time.

  Economists need to update how their model of human nature deals with time, and I'm not the only one saying so. Back in 1991, in a lecture aptly titled “Procrastination and Obedience,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof spoke to the American Economic Association about how his field would be better off if it considered how we irrationally find present costs more salient than future costs. In the following year, George Loewenstein, an economics professor from Yale, co-authored Choice Over Time, which reviews how economics can best include time. Since then, behavioral economics, a sub-speciality of economics that integrates time, has opened up, with researchers such as Ted O'Donoghue and Matthew Rabin studying procrastination specifically. These behavioral economists are simply using observations of the world to refine their model, which is like using feedback from your eyes to keep the car on the road. Sounds very, you know . . . rational.

  The theory of time that these behavioral economists are most attracted to is from the psychological field of behaviorism. Behaviorists developed a little equation called the Matching Law, which proved pretty good at predicting the average behavior of mice and men. Here it is in one of its simplest forms:

  Since the product of Expectancy × Value is divided by Delay, the greater the delay, the less your motivation.

  How important is the inclusion of time? Let me invent my own game show called Now Deal or Then Deal. You are a contestant and have won $1,000. It is put into your hands in ten crisp $100 bills, a short stack you stuff into your pocket. However, I also have a certified check—guaranteed money—postdated to one year from now. Here is the dilemma. What is the minimum amount that I have to put on that check to get you to dig into your pocket, hand back all those hundreds, trade me for the check, and wait 365 days to cash it? I have run this little thought experiment with hundreds of people in my classes, and most say that they would wait a year for between $2,000 and $3,000, especially if I ask for an immediate, gut decision. Unless you have been taught a reasonable rate of return and given time to mentally calculate it, thereby preventing yourself from reacting emotionally, it is likely that these responses are not so far off from your own. The more money you require to make the swap, the more sensitive you are to delay; that is, the more impulsive you are. Unfortunately, this sensitivity to delay is still missing from the equation.

  Impulsiveness provides the last missing piece of the puzzle, updating the basic Matching Law. Impulsiveness provides a more sophisticated understanding of time by letting the effects of delay grow and shrink. The more impulsive you are, the more sensitive you will be to delay and the more you will discount the future—and, in the game of Now Deal or Then Deal, the more cash you'll require to endure waiting. Without impulsiveness, there wouldn’t be such a thing as chronic procrastination. Popping this into our equation, we have:

  And there it is: the Procrastination Equation—inspired by the common elements that determine when we procrastinate, and crafted together from the most deeply researched elements of social sciences' strongest motivational theories.2d The Procrastination Equation accounts for every major finding for procrastination. As the deadline for any task gets pushed further into the future, Delay increases and our motivation to tackle the task decreases. Impulsiveness multiplies the effects of Delay, and so impulsive people feel the effects of time far less acutely, at least at first. Consequences have to be on their doorstep before they start paying attention to them—unless they are particularly large. And what makes consequences large? Expectancy and Value. The bigger the payoff and the greater the likelihood of receiving it, the sooner it will capture your attention. The Procrastination Equation also explains one of the most pernicious aspects of procrastination: the intention-action gap.

  Studies show that procrastinators usually make the same plans to get to work as their more diligent counterparts. Where they differ is in acting upon their plans. Unfortunately, what was a heartfelt intention to work next week or next weekend seems a lot less important when the moment of truth actually comes around. Instead of buckling down to work, the procrastinator’s intentions buckle. Unsurprisingly, one of the most common laments of procrastinators is, “No matter how much I try, I still put things off!” This complaint illustrates an intention-action gap: you truly don’t want to slack off tomorrow but you constantly find yourself slacking off when tomorrow comes. This is exactly what the Procrastination Equation predicts and here’s why.

  Let’s create an intention. Two weeks from now, you will have a choice between staying up late and honing a budget proposal for work, due the next day, or meeting your friends for drinks at the bar. At the moment, you value polishing your proposal far more than seeing your friends, as the former could lead to a sizable pay raise while the latter will only be a fun get-together. You wisely intend to work on the proposal that
night, but will you stand fast? Flash forward two weeks to the very night the choice must be enacted, and life suddenly switches from the abstract to the concrete. It isn’t just friends, it is Eddie, Valerie, and Tom. These are your best friends; they are texting you to come down to the bar; Eddie is so funny; Tom owes you a drink and you owe Valerie a drink; and maybe you can bounce some ideas off them. Besides, you deserve a break because you've worked so hard. So you give in, and once you are there, you forget about going back to work. Instead, you pledge to get up early tomorrow morning because “your mind will be fresher then.” The culprit for your intention-action gap is time. When you headed down to the bar, it probably took you just 15 minutes to get there, a minuscule delay compared to the deadline for tomorrow’s task, which is orders of magnitude off into the future—specifically 96 times greater (i.e., 24 hours divided by 15 minutes). As per the Procrastination Equation, that difference causes an almost hundredfold increase in the relative effects of delay. Indeed, there’s no time like the present, and it’s no wonder your intentions fell through.

  THE PROCRASTINATION EQUATION IN ACTION

  To see all the pieces of the Procrastination Equation in action at once, it would be tempting to try swapping in your own scores on impulsiveness, expectancy, and value and checking out the results. Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. To accurately apply the equation to a specific individual we would need a controlled laboratory experiment. In the lab we can put everything into an exact and measurable metric by artificially simplifying your choices, having you push a bar, or run a maze to receive a food pellet, for example.

  To demonstrate how the Procrastination Equation operates in a realistic setting, a better way is to apply it to the prototypical procrastinator. And nobody—nobody at all—procrastinates like college students, who spend, on average, a third of their days putting work off. Procrastination is by far students' top problem, with over 70 percent reporting that it causes frequent disruption and fewer than 4 percent indicating that it is rarely a problem.14 Part of the reason that colleges are filled with procrastinators is that their inhabitants are young and therefore more impulsive. However, the campus environment must shoulder most of the blame. Colleges have created a perfect storm of delay by merging two separate systems that contribute to procrastination, each devastating in its own right.