Piers Steel: The Procrastination Equation

• Whatever your rhythm, schedule that report writing to start a few hours after you wake up; it’s when your mind operates at maximum efficiency, a period that lasts about four hours. If you woke at seven in the morning, for instance, your peak performance likely occurs between ten and two, not really that wide a window. But if you clear your desk, turn off your e-mail, and shut your door for those hours, you can get an amazing amount of work done. You can extend this efficiency phase with a brief nap, twenty minutes or so, but if you’re in an office environment, that’s usually not possible. Still, a quick walk around the block can also refresh you around lunchtime.
• Procrastination is a universal theme in all these religions because we cannot predict when we will die; thus, the best time to repent, to act morally, to commit ourselves to doing good is now. A parable from The Mahabharata, Hinduism’s epic narrative, demonstrates this reasoning. The hero, Yudhisthira, promises to donate some money to a beggar tomorrow. His younger brother Bhima hears of this and runs out to ring the court’s victory bells. “Why,” asked Yudhisthira, “did you ring the bells?” Bhima replies, “To have made such as promise, you must have victory over life. Otherwise, who knows what tomorrow will bring?”
• It is largely because we view the present in concrete terms and the future abstractly that we procrastinate.
• 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.
• The universal holy war, then, isn’t against forces of darkness but against forces of nature, our own human nature. Religions are all battling procrastination among their believers and converts because whatever promised lands or promised rewards they offer will most likely be granted in the distant future. Inevitably, everlasting salvation is being deeply discounted against a backdrop of sins that provide pleasures immediately.
• Popping this into our equation, we have: $\frac{\text{expectancy} \times \text{value}}{\text{impulsiveness} \times \text{delay}}$
• 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.
• 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).
• With the ubiquitous overemphasis on the immediate and the material, on the instant and the consumable, people are seduced into putting off long-term but ultimately more satisfying goals involving career achievement, volunteering in the community, raising a family or following a spiritual path. Materialism and consumerism are merely emergent properties of our neurobiology given free rein in a free market.
• twelve hours after waking is when your liver best metabolizes alcohol
• 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
• The exploitation of the limbic system is baked into capitalism and you can’t stop it without making the entire wonderful wealth-generating machinery grind to a halt.