How to avoid the cost of procrastination

Until I started looking into this, I did not realise that procrastination was such a fertile field of study for so many people and that there were so many types of procrastinators procrastinating in so many ways.

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So we are still in January (just barely) and most of us, if we bothered to make, new year’s resolutions at all, have already broken them. Or maybe we have just delayed starting them. Maybe we are, yes, procrastinating.

Until I started looking into this, I did not realise that procrastination was such a fertile field of study for so many people and that there were so many types of procrastinators procrastinating in so many ways.
Nor did I realise how much money it can cost us.

How? By not putting away money for retirement, delaying attending to medical needs until they become much more serious, going on last-minute holiday shopping jaunts that run up credit cards because we don’t have time to hunt for bargains and, as many of us have discovered, waiting too long to sell stock. The average American taxprocrastinator, for example, paid an extra $400 because of mistakes made by rushing, resulting in $473 million in overpayments in 2002, said Piers Steel, an associate professor of human resources and organizational dynamics at the University of Calgary. He is writing a book on the subject, “The Procrastination Equation,” (Collins) to be published next year.

Updating
Hold on. Isn’t there a little of the procrastinator in all of us? For instance, even though I know very well the importance of updating a will, my husband and I have put off doing it for years. But when I took the “Measure My Procrastination” survey on Professor Steel’s Web site (procrastinus.com), I scored below average — 30 out of 100, with the note that I “only occasionally procrastinate.” The survey also found that while I “have a few irrational or distracting impulses,” I know how to control them.

Yes, said Timothy A. Pychyl, associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, we do all dawdle or drag our feet at times. And sometimes taking a break and staring out the window or taking a walk is just what we need.

That is why, he says, “all procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination.” “It is the difference between sadness and depression,” he said. “Procrastination is a complex issue of self-regulation,” with the emphasis not just on postponing something, but on irrational self-defeating delay - and it occurs in some, if not all, areas of one’s life.

And procrastination not only wastes time and money; it can seriously affect relationships with colleagues and relatives. “The emotion most closely associated with procrastination is guilt, and it is clearly related to reduced well-being,” Professor Pychyl said.

Procrastination is nothing new. Academics cite references to it in early Roman and Greek military documents and 15th-century religious texts denouncing it as a sin. But with the advent of all our new distracting technology, including e-mail, cellphones and social networking sites, it has become easier and easier to spend countless hours avoiding doing what we should be doing.

“How often have we said, ‘We’ll check e-mail, it’ll only take a minute,’ and three hours later we’re still on it?” Professor Pychyl asked. “Technology provides us with immediate rewards without moving from our seats. We know that 50 per cent of the time people are online, they are procrastinating.” Self-regulation The rise of procrastination, Professor Steel wrote in an analysis of hundreds of studies on the subject entitled “The Nature of Procrastination,” mirrors the increase of other failures in self-regulation, like obesity, gambling and excessive debt, over the last 25 years.

So it’s a big problem, and there is no single answer as to why someone is a chronic procrastinator. Professor Steel, using research from studies of identical and fraternal twins, points to a genetic or biological component. In addition, chronic procrastinators tend to be people who are distracted, more impulsive and less motivated. “People procrastinate when they’re not confident that they can complete a project, when they find it boring or distasteful and when they’re impulsive,” said Professor Steel, who calls himself a “reformed procrastinator.”

Procrastination is not choosing to do one task before another, he noted. Rather it is delaying doing something in favour of more immediate gratification even though inaction will probably have negative consequences.

Joseph R. Ferrari, professor of psychology at DePaul University, has divided procrastinators into three general and overlapping categories - arousal, avoidance and decisional. The arousal types are thrill seekers who say they need the adrenaline rush that comes from waiting until the last minute. Avoidance procrastinators put off hard or boring tasks to avoid being seen as failures. Then they can say that they didn’t have enough time rather than that they didn’t have the ability.

And decisional procrastinators are chronically indecisive in every part of their lives, he said. But the common perception that perfectionists tend to procrastinate because they want things to be, well, perfect, is not true, Professor Steel said. There actually is almost no correlation between perfectionism and procrastination.

And about those last-minute types — the ones we knew in college who waited until the night before the final to study and pulled all-nighters? Do they really do better because they’re all pumped up? “My research showed that they do not perform better,” Professor Ferrari said. “They just think they do.” The question of how to overcome habitual procrastination also has no one or easy answer.

Dealing in concrete facts rather than abstractions may help. Sean McCrea, an assistant professor of motivational and social psychology at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and an international group of psychologists, examined how we think about our tasks and our tendency to postpone them.