The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel Read Free Book Online

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.
    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