麻豆传媒

DOUGLAS ADAMS did everything humanly possible to avoid the daily drudgery of plonking down at his desk and pounding out his novel The Salmon of Doubt. The eccentric British writer soaked for hours in the bathtub, lollygagged away entire days in bed and dreamed up ever more fanciful excuses for his exasperated editor. When he died in 2001, he had spent a decade on the book without even a complete first draft to show for it. Adams, whose works include The Hitchhiker鈥檚 Guide to the Galaxy, was a poster boy for procrastinators everywhere. 鈥淚 love deadlines,鈥� he once quipped. 鈥淚 like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.鈥�

We all struggle occasionally with the desire to postpone an unpleasant job, be it drawing up a will, studying for an exam or clearing the clutter from the basement. 鈥淓veryone has times when at the end of the day they don鈥檛 know what they have done with it,鈥� says psychologist Robert Topman at Leiden University in the Netherlands. 鈥淏ut procrastinators have these big black holes.鈥� For some 15 to 20 per cent of us, the problem is serious. Regularly delaying tasks you know you should start working on immediately doesn鈥檛 just prevent you achieving your goals and full potential; it can also be expensive, bad for your health, and may even endanger your life and those of the people around you.

There have been numerous attempts to identify what makes a procrastinator. Perfectionism, a fear of failure and having a hostile or rebellious personality have all been blamed. Now one researcher has taken a broader view of the problem, looking not just at the ditherers themselves but also at the sorts of tasks and situations most likely to suffer delays. Using all the available information from previous studies, psychologist Piers Steel at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, has identified the four key factors behind procrastination and used them to draw up a formula that predicts when it is likely to occur. Steel claims his analysis could not only help unhappy procrastinators minimise their delaying tactics, but also shed new light on motivation in general.

So does leaving things till the last minute ever pay off, or do procrastinators inevitably pay a price for their delay? One recent North American survey found that individuals who leave the preparation of tax returns to the last moment make errors costing them $400 per return on average 鈥� so no pay-off there.

Then there are the students, journalists and others who spend their evenings in the pub and watching TV, leaving assignments and term papers to the eleventh hour, confident that they do their best work under pressure. Are they deluding themselves? Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist at Ohio State University in Columbus, decided to in one of his study-skills classes.

First he gave 116 students a questionnaire to measure how prone they were to procrastination. Then he tracked each student鈥檚 progress on a series of 216 course activities and assignments, most of which had to be done online by a specified time and submitted electronically. Students who scored low on the procrastination questionnaire and who worked at a steady pace tended to fare well academically, with an average grade of 3.6 out of 4. Not so those who scored high on the questionnaire, whose grade average was just 2.9. It is possible that they were simply not as bright as their peers, but previous studies have shown virtually no correlation between general mental ability and procrastination. Instead, Tuckman believes that students are merely indulging in wishful thinking when they claim that deadline pressure hones their performance. 鈥淭hey really don鈥檛 know how well they would actually do if they didn鈥檛 procrastinate,鈥� he says.

The pitfalls of delay don鈥檛 end there, however. Earlier this year, Fuschia Sirois, a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, revealed that procrastination also poses health risks. Using an online survey of 254 adults from Europe, the US, Canada and Australia, Sirois discovered that those who continually postponed things were less likely than others to get annual medical and dental check-ups and to practise basic healthy behaviours, such as exercising regularly. The survey also revealed that procrastinators suffered more from stress and illnesses such as flu and digestive problems. 鈥淧rocrastination is bad for your health in more ways than one,鈥� she notes.

Sirois also asked whether subjects had accident-proofed their homes in standard ways, such as clearing stairways of trip hazards and regularly testing their smoke alarms. The more serious the procrastinator, she discovered, the less likely they were to take steps to prevent home accidents. 鈥淭hey weren鈥檛 looking after basic household safety issues, from owning a fire extinguisher and making sure that the batteries in the smoke detector worked, to seeing that faulty electrical appliances were dealt with,鈥� she says. Even in households with a history of accidents, procrastinators still put off addressing problems or asking others, such as building managers, to do so ().

鈥淧rocrastination is a style of dealing with problems that鈥檚 not only maladaptive and potentially dangerous for the individual, but also for the people around them,鈥� she says. 鈥淲e tend to think that procrastinators make their own hell and then have to deal with it. But it does seem to be having a wider impact.鈥�

鈥淧rocrastinators make their own hell and then have to deal with it鈥�

Someone who knows this all too well is Steel. Sitting in his university office, he recalls some of his own experiences with procrastination. As a college student he once fell asleep during an exam, after a long night of last-minute cramming. Later, while working as an industrial psychologist, he decided to take a fresh look at the causes of his desire to defer. That was almost a decade ago. Since then he has been planning 鈥� and postponing 鈥� writing a book on the subject.

When Steel began his quest, however, he quickly discovered a wealth of data. Other researchers had conducted hundreds of studies looking for connections between procrastination and a variety of factors including age, sex, the nature of the task, the timing of rewards, and a host of personality traits. Each seemed to Steel like a separate piece of a bigger puzzle which nobody had attempted to piece together. This, he decided, would be his task.

Why the delay?

Since the late 1990s Steel has spent countless hours poring over the results of 553 studies 鈥� including published articles, dissertations and papers that researchers had stashed in their filing cabinets 鈥� translating their diverse statistical findings and research designs into common mathematical currency. In the case of just one suspected cause of procrastination 鈥� perfectionism 鈥� researchers had published nearly 70 studies, some reporting a strong link, others discerning no link at all. To reconcile these conflicts, Steel examined and evaluated each study, giving greater weight to those with the most subjects and the strongest research designs. He gradually built up a mega-database. 鈥淚t was a very mathematically intensive endeavour,鈥� he says. His labours culminated this year in the publication of his analysis ().

So what did he find? First, some people are more at risk of procrastination than others. Men postpone things slightly more than women, and the young tend to loiter over tasks considerably more than seniors do. 鈥淚 joke that this is because older people are coming closer to the final deadline, so they can鈥檛 afford to put things off,鈥� says Steel. Surprisingly, there was no evidence that rebelliousness, neuroticism or perfectionism caused people to put things off. 鈥淎ctually, perfectionists procrastinate less than other people,鈥� he says, 鈥渂ut worry about it more.鈥�

There were, however, four factors that stood out as the most strongly linked with procrastination: how confident a person is of completing a particular task successfully; how easily distracted an individual is; how boring or unpleasant the task is; and how immediate the reward for completion will be. The more uncertain of success or easily sidetracked you are, the more likely it is that you will put off an assignment or chore. Conversely, the more pleasant the task and the more immediate its payback, the greater the chance you will get on with it quickly. 鈥淲e prize the now so much more than the later,鈥� says Steel. 鈥淪o if a task can be realised now and we can have the pleasure now, we value that a lot more than something that will have a larger reward with greater certainty later.鈥�

Such findings, says Steel, reveal that procrastination cannot be chalked up to just one factor. It arises both from individual differences in personality and from the particular situations we find ourselves in. Moreover, he even suggests that he can predict when dallying is likely to occur. 鈥淧rocrastination can be understood, or summarised at least, by a mathematical equation,鈥� he says. This calculates how likely you are to do something immediately 鈥� the task鈥檚 utility 鈥� by taking into account the four key variables, each of which can be quantified or measured by questionnaire: how confident you are of succeeding in the task (E); how pleasant you perceive the task to be (V); how easily distracted you are (gamma, 鈥�); and how much time will elapse before the reward for completing the task arrives (D). It reads as follows:

Intriguing as Steel鈥檚 conclusions are, they have garnered a mixed reception. Tim Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, says his work with extreme procrastinators reveals a different story that has nothing to do with balancing these competing factors. 鈥淭hey don鈥檛 talk about this mental calculus,鈥� he says. 鈥淧eople say that they put things off because they are debilitated by guilt or shame, or because they love the rush of the last-minute effort.鈥�

惭补帽补苍补!

Others, however, think that Steel is onto something. 鈥淧eople have a perpetual competition between satisfying their present selves or their future selves,鈥� says management expert John Kammeyer-Mueller at the University of Florida. Steel鈥檚 formula illuminates many puzzles of human nature, he says, from why teenagers drop out of school and why people are unfaithful to their marriage partners, to why those who are overweight fail to stick to their diets. 鈥淪teel provides a good set of tools for understanding how the internal conflict between desires plays out.鈥�

Steel believes it also explains why some drug addicts refuse to enter rehab or why some farmers drag their heels on conservation, for example. In short, they live in the moment, rather than preparing for an uncertain future. Governments could be seen as especially prone to this kind of failure of will. 鈥淪ome people would characterise the climate debate in these terms,鈥� Steel says. 鈥淪hould we suffer a little bit now in order to avoid the chance of huge devastation later on down the road? We have the technology to deal with climate change now, but wanting to deal with it is another matter entirely. The cure is in the long term, but the medicine is in the short term.鈥�

So what is to be done to limit this damaging delay? Some individuals can take a disciplined approach to tackling the tasks before them, but with others a lack of confidence and a tendency to become sidetracked make procrastination the norm. If the job at hand is seen as unpleasant, procrastination is even more likely. However, Steel says that we can all find ways to increase our motivation 鈥� from making a task appear less unpleasant or more immediately rewarding, to minimising the distractions we face (see 鈥淟aggards, take heart鈥�).

If the worst comes to worst, diehard procrastinators can always follow the example of Douglas Adams and surround themselves with friends and colleagues who will hold their feet to the fire. Steel describes how on one occasion, Adams鈥檚 editor booked him into a hotel room and stood guard over him until he finished a promised manuscript. 鈥淎dams tried to outsource his motivation,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat was his way around the problem.鈥�

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