The Procrastination Equation Page 4
The first system is the essay. The more unpleasant you make a task—the lower its value—the less likely people will be to pursue it. Unfortunately, writing causes dread, even revulsion for almost everyone. But welcome to the club. Writing is hard. George Orwell, author of the classics Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, had this to say: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one was not driven by some demon that one can neither resist nor understand.” Gene Fowler, who wrote about twenty books or screenplays, was equally despairing: “Writing is easy, all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” To write this very book, I have been leaning on William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. Sure enough, on page 87, Zinsser confesses, “I don’t like to write.”
Added to the cruelty of assigned writing is the capriciousness of grading—low expectancy. Any essay that is re-marked by another professor may shift remarkably in grade—a B+ could become an A+ if you are lucky, or a C+ if you are not.15 This is not because the marker is sloppy; it is because measuring performance is inherently hard. Just look at the variation in judges' scores at Olympic events or among reviewers critiquing films. From the students' perspective, such discrepancies mean there is no guarantee that their hard work will be recognized. Quite possibly, it won’t be.
The final aspect of the essay system that contributes to student procrastination is the distant due date—high delay. There are often no intermediary steps—you just hand the paper in when you are finished. At first the due date seems months and months away, but that is just the start of a slippery slope. You blink and it has become weeks and weeks, then days and days, and then hours and hours, until suddenly you are considering Plan B. Approximately 70 percent of all reasons given for missing a deadline or bombing an exam are excuses, because the real reason—procrastination—is unacceptable.2e As students themselves report, their top strategy is to pore over the instructions with a lawyer’s eye for any detail that could possibly be misinterpreted, later claiming, “I didn’t understand the instructions.”16
There it is; university essays hit each key variable of the equation. Essays are grueling (low value), their results are very uncertain (low expectancy), and they have a single distant deadline (high delay). And if essays are hard in and of themselves, there are few harder places to do them than a college dorm. This leads us to the second system in that perfect storm: the place where this essay is supposed to be written.
College dorms are infernos of procrastination because the enticements—the alternatives to studying—are white hot. Superior in every aspect to essay writing, these pleasures are reliable, immediate, and intense. Consider campus clubs alone. At the university where I earned my PhD, there are about a thousand of them, catering to every recreational, political, athletic, or spiritual need, ranging from Knitting for Peace to the Infectious Disease Interest Group. These clubs will give you a new set of friends, with whom you will want to socialize—likely in one of the dozens of coffee shops and pubs a short walk from any place on campus. They'll also entice you to go to one of a dozen events occurring every week, from poetry readings to tailgate parties. With all the camaraderie, alcohol, sex, and—headiest of all temptations—the freedom to enjoy them all, university can lure us into the unregulated state of bliss where the liberties of adulthood are combined with only a minority of the responsibilities. From the moment students step into the classroom, inevitable conflicts are set in motion. Even Tenzin Gyatso, better known as the 14th Dalai Lama, reported of his student days, “Only in the face of a difficult challenge or an urgent deadline would I study and work without laziness.”
We can graph this dilemma using Eddie, Valerie, and Tom when they were back in their university days. They hang together, as they have a lot in common and all of them like to socialize rather than work. Still, there are differences among them. Valerie knows she isn’t especially bright but she has two cardinal virtues—she is levelheaded and responsible. Though she isn’t competitive, she sees the future pretty clearly, and can imagine one day graduating from college and getting her dream job. Tom is more ambitious and more confident of his abilities than either of his classmates but he is also the most impulsive. His cockiness and spontaneity arouse mixed feelings of envy and hate in many people who know him. Eddie, on the other hand, lacks desire as well as self-confidence. He was pressured by his family to go to college and he is unsure whether he can survive much less thrive academically. In fact, he doesn’t really care. At least he is comfortable being a slacker.
One mid-September morning, Eddie, Valerie, and Tom walk into my Introduction to Motivation class, where they find that a final essay is due three months later, on December 15. The graph on the facing page charts their likely levels of motivation and when each of them will start working. Their common motivation to socialize, represented by the dotted line, starts off strong in the semester and tapers off toward the end, partly in response to a lack of opportunity and ever-increasing guilt. Valerie, being the least impulsive, is the first to start working, on November 29 (the smooth, unadorned graph line). It takes another week before Eddie or Tom bears down—a significant gap.
In terms of the Procrastination Equation, although Tom is more confident (high expectancy) and competitive (high value) than Eddie, his impulsiveness means that most of his motivation is reserved until the end (the graph line with squares). Valerie’s motivation flows more steadily, like water from a tap, while Tom’s gushes like a fire hose when eventually turned on. Even though Tom starts working the same day as Eddie the slacker (the graph line with triangles), Tom’s motivation in the final moments should enable him to outstrip the others' best efforts.
MY OWN RESEARCH
Although Eddie, Valerie, and Tom are fictional, they are composite characters based on the thousands of students I have taught. As I stressed, there is no better venue for finding procrastinators than universities. Harnessing all this wasted motivation for science is the trick. It was great luck that as a graduate student I worked with Dr. Thomas Brothen. Thomas taught an introductory psychology course at the University of Minnesota’s General College, an institution designed specifically to increase the diversity of the university. Significantly, the class was administered through a Computerized Personalized System of Instruction, a nifty arrangement that allows students to pro-gress through a course at their own pace but is well known for creating high levels of procrastination. In fact, procrastination is such a problem that students are repeatedly warned throughout the course about the dangers of delay. And here is the beautiful part. Its being computerized meant that every stitch of work that the students completed for the course had a time-date stamp exact to the second. You truly can’t find a superior setting for studying procrastination.
Before the General College was closed, Thomas and I managed to follow and assess a few hundred students with his wired classroom. We even got around to publishing some of the results. Here are the basics of what we found. Observed procrastination and confessions of procrastination were closely linked, confirming that we were using the right venue. Also, procrastinators tended to be the lowest performers in the course and were more likely to drop out, confirming that they were worse off for putting off. Now these problems didn’t occur because procrastinators are intrinsically lazy; they were making the same intentions to work as everybody else. They just had trouble following through with their intentions at the beginning of the course. Toward the end, a different story emerged. Procrastinators actually started logging more hours than they had intended, with one student completing 75 percent of the course in the final week alone. They also weren’t procrastinating because of anxiety. The real reasons for inaction were the following: impulsiveness, hating the work, proximity to temptation, and failing to plan. And most significantly, each of these findings directly follows from the Procrastination Equation.
&nb
sp; The ability of the Procrastination Equation to formulate these and other results forms the backbone of this book. I have already talked in depth about the connection between the intention-action gap and impulsiveness. Similarly, putting off work because it is unpleasant simply illustrates the effect of value on procrastination. Proximity to temptation highlights the effect of time. Students who said that if they chose not to study “they could immediately be doing more enjoyable activities” or that in their study location there were “a lot of opportunities to socialize, to play, or to watch TV” procrastinated more, a lot more. Remember that Eddie, Valerie, and Tom needed their motivation to write to exceed their motivation to socialize before they could get down to work. But the more readily available temptations become, the stronger they become and the longer they will dominate choices, necessarily creating procrastination. The findings from our study, such as procrastinators' failure to properly plan or to create efficient study schedules, also pointed to ways of combating procrastination. Proper planning allows you to transform distant deadlines into daily ones, letting your impulsiveness work for instead of against you. We will talk more about how to plan properly and the rest of these issues as you go through the book. But one last thing about this study.
There is an epiphany I want to share that occurred to me when I graphed the work pace of the class. Would their work pace replicate the curve that the Procrastination Equation predicted, starting off slow and then spiking toward the end like a shark’s fin? Would it follow the pattern that Eddie, Valerie, and Tom’s experience suggested? I couldn’t expect an exact match, as the equation couldn’t take into account weekends or the midterm-break lull, but I was hoping for something close. My findings are what you see on the next page. The dotted line is a hypothetical steady work pace, the dark line is what we observed, and the gray line is what the Procrastination Equation predicts. Notice which lines match together almost perfectly.17
LOOKING FORWARD
To some, a mathematical model of procrastination is threatening; it reduces humankind to a robotic formula. I am sympathetic. We are all more complicated and nuanced than any equation could capture, and the subtle details of each person’s procrastination are personal. Exactly when your self-confidence peaks, what you find deathly dull, and where your vices lie all combine to determine your individual procrastination profile. The Procrastination Equation isn’t seeking to form a comprehensive depiction of who you are but to create a succinct snapshot that can explain a lot with a little.
The Procrastination Equation attempts economically to describe the underlying neurobiology that creates procrastination. I will tell you right now: the biology and the math won’t match exactly. A road map of a city, for example, no matter how recent or detailed, can’t represent every corner and crevasse of reality; it skips over details like architectural styles or fire hydrant placement. Judiciously focusing on streets and highways allows the map to emphasize navigation. If this big picture doesn’t satisfy you and you want all the details, don’t fret. The next chapter will give you what you are looking for.
Chapter Three
Wired for Procrastination
PUTTING OFF IS HUMAN NATURE
Think of all the years passed by in which you said to yourself “I'll do it tomorrow,” and how the gods have again and again granted you periods of grace of which you have not availed yourself. It is time to realize that you are a member of the Universe, that you are born of Nature itself, and to know that a limit has been set to your time.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Every day, we experience our souls as being split.1 Who hasn’t struggled between a reasonable intention and an opposing pleasurable impulse? As the dessert cart pulls into view, commitment starts to crumble in the heat of the internal battle of “I want to eat that cake, but I don’t want to want to eat cake.” Have you ever skipped exercising, knowing that you would later regret it? Have you ever scratched an itch, knowing that you just made it worse? You are not alone; it’s a permanent part of the human condition. Thousands of years ago, Plato described this internal clash as a chariot being pulled by two horses, one of reason, well-bred and behaved, and the other of brute passion, ill-bred and reckless. At times, the horses pull together and at other times they pull apart. Thousands of years later, Sigmund Freud continued Plato’s equestrian analogy by comparing us to a horse and rider. The horse is desire and drive personified; the rider represents reason and common sense. This division has been rediscovered by dozens of other investigators, each with their own angle, emphasis, and terminology for the same divided self: emotions versus reason, automatic versus controlled, doer versus planner, experiential versus rational, hot versus cold, impulsive versus reflective, intuitive versus reasoned, or visceral versus cognitive.2 Understanding how the architecture of the brain enables this division is the secret to understanding the biological basis of procrastination.
The brain has been considered the last frontier of human science because its workings have been so difficult to investigate. Emerson Pugh, a Carnegie Mellon University physics professor, concluded that, “If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.” He is right. And the Procrastination Equation is only a model of how you might behave. Though I like to think of it as a supermodel, it is still merely an approximation of how motivation works. Our brains aren’t actually doing these calculations any more than a falling stone is calculating its mass times its acceleration to determine with what force it will hit the ground.3 Rather, the equation summarizes a more complex underlying process, the interplay between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. This is where we must turn for a more fundamental understanding of procrastination.
Recent advances in brain science have allowed us to pull the curtain aside and see our own minds in operation. The basic methodology isn’t that hard to describe. You place participants in your choice of brain scanner, likely a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI), which detects subtle changes in magnetic signals associated with blood flow and neural processing (i.e., thinking). Once the participant is strapped in, you then ask questions carefully designed to engage aspects of decision making and observe which parts of the brain light up. For example, if we had J. Wellington Wimpy as a subject, we could ask him, “If I gave you a hamburger today, how much would you pay me on Tuesday?” Sure enough, what then comes up on the electronic monitors are not one but two internal messages, which science has blandly come to call System 1 and System 2.4
Asking a thirsty person a question such as what drink she would like now primarily activates System 1, the limbic system. This is the beast of the brain (“the horse”), the origin of pleasure and of fear, of reward and of arousal. Questions about future benefits, however, activate System 2, the prefrontal cortex (“the rider”). Though studies are still refining the exact subsection of the prefrontal cortex that is involved, the consensus is that this is willpower’s throne. The prefrontal cortex is often described as the executive function, appropriately evocative of CEOs making strategic company plans. Without it, long-term pursuits or considerations become almost impossible, as it is—literally—what keeps our goals in mind.5 This prefrontal cortex is the place from which planning arises. The more active it becomes, the more patient we can be. It allows us to imagine different outcomes and, with help from our speedy and definitive limbic system, helps us to choose what to do. This interplay of instinct and reason has enabled the human race to create the world in which we live. But it also has created procrastination.6
You see, this decision-making arrangement is not the most elegant. It’s often described as a haphazard kluge, the clumsy outcome of an evolutionary process.7 Because the limbic system evolved first, it is very similar across species. It makes decisions effortlessly, spurring action through instinct. Its purview is the here and now, the immediate and the concrete. Our more recently evolved prefrontal cortex is more flexible in its decision making, but also slower and more effortful. It is best at big-picture t
hinking, abstract concepts, and distant goals. When the limbic system is aroused by immediate sensations of sight, smell, sound, or touch, an increase in impulsive behavior results, and the “now” dominates. Future goals espoused by the prefrontal cortex are cast aside and we find ourselves seduced into diversions—despite knowing what we should be doing, we simply don’t want to do it. Also, because the limbic system runs automatically at an incredibly fast rate and is thus less accessible to consciousness, desires can often come over us inexplicably and unexpectedly.8 People feel helpless to stop intense cravings and they display little insight into their ensuing actions other than, “I felt like it.”
In essence, procrastination occurs when the limbic system vetoes the long-term plans of the prefrontal cortex in favor of the more immediately realizable; and the limbic system, aside from being the quicker of the two and in charge of our first impulse, is often the stronger. When near events get this evaluative boost from our limbic system, their vividness increases and our attention shifts to their immediate and highly valued consumable aspects (what we can see, smell, hear, touch, and taste). Deadlines are often put off until they are close or concrete enough to get a hint of that limbic system zing, whereupon both parts of our brain are finally shouting in agreement, “Get to work! Time is running out!”