Chapter One
Portrait of a Procrastinator
Never put off till tomorrow,
what you can do the day after tomorrow.
MARK TWAIN
This book is about every promise you made to yourself but broke. It is about
every goal you set but let slide, never finding the motivation. It is about diets
postponed, late-night scrambles to finish projects, and disappointed looks from
the people who depend on you—or from the one you see in the mirror. It is about
being the slacker in your family and the straggler in your circle of friends. It is
about that menacing cloud of uncompleted chores, from the late bill payments to
the clutter that fills your home. It is about that doctor’s appointment you have
been putting off and the finances still in disarray. It is about dawdling, delay,
opportunity lost, and more. Much more. This book is also about the other side,
the moments of action when procrastination gives way to crystal clarity and
attention, work is devoured without hesitation, and giving up never even occurs
to you. It is about personal transformation, about unencumbered desire free of
internal competition, and the guiltless leisure you can enjoy when your daily
tasks are done. This book is about potential, wasted and fulfilled; about dreams
that fade into obscurity and dreams we can make come true. Best of all, this
book is about shifting the rest of your life away from putting it off to getting it
done.
The pivot point that tips us away from accomplishing what we want and need
to do is procrastination. It isn’t a question of laziness, although the two are easily
confused. Unlike the truly slothful, procrastinators want to do what they need to
do—and usually do get around to it, but not without a lot of struggle. I will show
that this dillydallying is in part hereditary, and that we are hardwired to delay.
Our tendency to put things off took a hundred million years to form and is now
almost etched into our being. But research shows that, despite its ingrained
nature, we can modify our habits and change this behavior. Procrastinators who
understand the processes behind their inaction can master them and become less
stressed about their deadlines and more able to meet them.
This book tells procrastination’s story. It stretches from Memphis of ancient
Egypt to modern New York City, from the cancer ward to the stock market floor.
I hope to enlighten you about why we procrastinate, what comes of
procrastination, and what strategies we can employ to do something about it. We
will start off simply, establishing what procrastination is, helping you decide
whether you are a procrastinator, and if so, how you likely experience a bout of
procrastination. If you are a procrastinator—and the odds are good that you are
—you are part of a very large community indeed. It is time we all got to know
each other a little bit better.
WHAT PROCRASTINATION IS AND ISN’T
There is so much confusion about procrastination that it is best to lay our subject
bare on the dissecting table and start immediately separating the dilly from the
dally. By procrastinating you are not just delaying, though delay is an integral
part of what you are doing. Procrastination comes from the Latin pro, which
means “forward, forth, or in favor of,” and crastinus, which means “of
tomorrow.” But procrastination means so much more than its literal meaning.
Prudence, patience, and prioritizing all have elements of delay, yet none means
the same as procrastination. Since its first appearance in the English language in
the sixteenth century, procrastination has identified not just any delay but an
irrational one—that is, when we voluntarily put off tasks despite believing
ourselves to be worse off for doing so. When we procrastinate, we know we are
acting against our own best interests.
Still, you will find people mischaracterizing wise delays as procrastination.
Seeing a co-worker stretched out in his office chair, arms crossed behind his
head, relaxed, you ask what he is up to and get a cheerful response of “Me? I’m
procrastinating!” But he isn’t. He is happily putting off a report because he
knows there is a good chance that the project is going to be cancelled later this
week, and if it isn’t, well, he can still definitely write it at the last minute
anyway. This is smart. In this scenario, it is the person who compulsively has to
finish everything as soon as possible who is irrational, tackling work even when
it is destined to become irrelevant. The obsessive who completes every task at
the first opportunity can be just as dysfunctional as the procrastinator who leaves
everything to the last moment. Neither one is scheduling time intelligently.
Consequently, it isn’t procrastination if you fail to arrive at a party far earlier
than everyone else or if you don’t get to the airport for your flight three hours in
advance. By delaying a little bit, you save awkward moments with your host,
who is likely still getting things ready, and you will be spared uncomfortable
hours at your gate waiting for your plane to take off. Neither is it procrastination
to respond to emergencies by dropping (and putting off) everything else.
Insisting that you should finish mowing the front lawn before attending to your
house, which has just caught fire, isn’t smart. Sure, you didn’t put off trimming
the grass, but the charred ruin of your home is too high a price to pay.
Alternatively, flexibly adapting your schedule to respond to the pressing needs of
a spouse or a child will likely save you from ruining your family. Not everything
can happen at once; it is in your choice of what to do now and what to delay that
procrastination happens, not in delay itself.
YOU THE PROCRASTINATOR
Now that we understand what procrastination is, do you practice it? Where do
you land in the ranks of procrastination? Are you a garden-variety dillydallier or
are you hardcore with “tomorrow” tattooed across your back? There are some
entertaining methods that may reveal your propensity to procrastinate. To begin,
check your handwriting. If it is sluggish and disjointed, it may indicate you are
likewise. Alternatively, look to the stars . . . well, really the planets. Astrologers
note that when Mercury is in retrograde or in opposition to Jupiter,
procrastination tends to be on the uptick.1 Or try a tarot card reading. The “Two
of Swords” often indicates you are split with a dilemma and procrastinating on
your decision. Personally, I prefer a more scientific approach.
You can go to my website, www.procrastinus.com, for a comprehensive test
that I’ve administered to tens of thousands of subjects, and compare your level
of irrational delay with those of individuals around the world. However, if time
is pressing and you wish not to delay, you might try the shorter quiz provided
below. Complete the mini-version here by circling your response to each of these
nine items and then calculating the total. Note that questions 2, 5, and 8 are
scored in the opposite direction from the other items:
Stands For:
- VERY SELDOM OR NOT TRUE OF ME
- SELDOM TRUE OF ME
- SOMETIMES TRUE OF ME
- OFTEN TRUE OF ME
- VERY OFTEN TRUE OR TRUE OF ME
- I delay tasks beyond what is reasonable.
1 2 3 4 5 - I do everything when I believe it needs to be done.
5 4 3 2 1 - I often regret not getting to tasks sooner.
1 2 3 4 5 - There are aspects of my life that I put off, though I know I shouldn’t.
1 2 3 4 5 - If there is something I should do, I get to it before attending to lesser
tasks.
5 4 3 2 1 - I put things off so long that my well-being or efficiency
unnecessarily suffers.
1 2 3 4 5 - At the end of the day, I know I could have spent the time better.
1 2 3 4 5 - I spend my time wisely.
5 4 3 2 1 - When I should be doing one thing, I will do another.
1 2 3 4 5
TOTAL SCORE _
SCORE
19 or less
COMPARED TO EVERYONE ELSE
You are in the bottom 10%
Your mantra is “first-things-first”
SCORE
20-23
COMPARED TO EVERYONE ELSE
You are in the bottom 10-25%
SCORE
24-31
COMPARED TO EVERYONE ELSE
You are in the middle 50%
Average procrastinator
SCORE
32-36
COMPARED TO EVERYONE ELSE
You are in the top 10-25%
SCORE
37 or more
COMPARED TO EVERYONE ELSE
You are in the top 10%
Tomorrow is your middle name
Where did you end up? Are you legendary for leaving things to the last minute
or do you only put off exercising and taxes, like almost everyone else?
PROCRASTINATION POLKA
The higher you scored on that procrastination test, the greater the chance that
you are procrastinating right now. Certain other tasks should be occupying your
attention—which sadly means you have better things to do than reading this
book. These tasks are likely unpleasant, possibly administrative and boring, and
perhaps difficult to visualize as being successfully accomplished. Let me make a
few guesses about what is on your plate:
- Is your laundry basket overflowing?
- Are there dirty dishes in the sink?
- Do your smoke detectors need new batteries?
- How about your car battery? What is the air pressure in your tires
and how long has it been since the last oil change? - Isn’t there a ticket to book, a room to reserve, a bag to pack, a
passport to renew? - Have you informed your boss about your vacation plans?
- Have you bought a gift for that upcoming birthday?
- Have you filled out your time sheets, performance reviews, and
expense reports? - Did you hold that difficult conversation with the employee whose
work is not up to par? - Have you scheduled the meeting you are dreading?
- What about the big project your boss gave you? Are you making
progress? - Did you make it to the gym this week?
- Have you called your mom?
How does that list strike you? You can add to it, of course. Even if I didn’t
score a direct hit, you were likely procrastinating somewhere else, pushing a task
into the future. On its own, each of these postponed tasks has few repercussions.
Together, they can culminate in misery by nibbling away at your life. The major
project, the one with the hard deadline, is the mother of all such concerns; it can
keep you awake at night and make it difficult to accomplish any of the other
tasks on your list. At one time or another, we have all felt motivationally
marooned and unable to get around to the report, the research, the writing, the
presentation to prep, or the exam to ace.
There is a common pattern to all procrastination and it goes something like
this. At the start of a big project, time is abundant. You wallow in its elastic
embrace. You make a few passes at getting down to it, but nothing makes you
feel wholeheartedly engaged. If the job can be forgotten, you’ll forget it. Then
the day arrives when you really intend to get down to work; but suddenly it’s just
something you don’t feel like doing. You can’t get traction. Every time you try to
wrap your mind around it, something distracts you, defeating your attempts at
progress. So you forward your task to a date with more hours, only to find that
every tomorrow seems to have the same twenty-four. At the end of each of these
days, you face the disquieting mystery of where it went. This goes on for a
while.
Eventually, time’s limited nature reveals itself. Hours, once tossed carelessly
away, become increasingly limited and precious. That very pressure makes it
hard to get started. You want to get going on the big project but instead you take
on peripheral chores. You clean your office or clean up your e-mail; you
exercise; you shop and cook. Part of you knows this isn’t what you should be
doing, and so you say to yourself, “I am doing this; at least I am preparing by
doing something.” Eventually, it is too late in the day to really get started, so you
may as well go to bed. And the cycle of avoidance starts again with the dawn.
Sometimes, to quell your anxiety, you give in to total diversion. You take a
moment to check your e-mail or the sports scores. From there, why not respond
to a few messages or watch a few minutes of TV? Soon these temptations have
seduced you. The task still waggles itself in the periphery of your vision, but you
don’t want to look it in the eye—it will have you if you look—so you burrow
deeper into your distractions. You write long passionate comments on online
forums, troll for news tidbits, or manically switch TV channels at the first ebb of
interest. Pleasure turns to powerlessness as you become unable to extract
yourself.
As the deadline approaches, you make the diversions more intense so that they
will sufficiently distract you. Banishing anything that reminds you of the
dreaded thing, you shun calendars and timepieces. In a willful distortion of
reality, you shift your plans from what you once could solidly accomplish to
what is minimally possible. When you should be working harder than ever, you
are sleeping in, daydreaming of alternative worlds, of winning the lottery, of
being anywhere but here. As anxiety mounts, you want immediate relief, escape,
rewards—anything that gives you the illusion of safe harbor. If friends or
relatives or co-workers try to separate you from your diversions, you meet them
with an annoyed: “Just a minute! I’LL DO IT AFTER THIS!” Unfortunately,
“this” never ends. Secretly, you are full of self-recrimination and self-doubt,
envious of those who simply get things done.
Energy builds until finally a threshold is crossed and something clicks. You
start working. Some inner mind has quietly boiled the task down to its essence,
as there are no more moments to spare. You wade into the work, making ruthless
decisions and astonishing progress. In place of that menacing cloudiness, a
glittering clarity comes over you. There is purity to your work, fueled by the real
urgency of now or never. For a lucky few, this surge of efficiency will enable
them to get the project done. For others, this initial rush wanes before the cursed
thing is completed. After too many hours of sleepless concentration, brains shut
down. Caffeine and sugar only offer an unsatisfying buzz. Tick, tock . . . the time
has run out. You limp across the finish line with insufficient preparation, giving
the world your second best.
This is so common as to be unremarkable—except to the person who has
suffered through the experience and knows the performance was not up to par.
The relief at getting a job done doesn’t always make up for doing a sloppy job.
Even if you managed to perform brilliantly, the achievement is tainted with a
whiff of what might have been. And this kind of procrastination has likely cast a
cloud on an evening out, a party, or a vacation, which you couldn’t fully enjoy
because half of your mind was elsewhere, obsessing about what you were
avoiding. You resolve that this will never happen again; the cost of
procrastination is too great.
The trouble with such resolutions is that procrastination is a habit that tends to
endure. Instead of dealing with our delays, we excuse ourselves from them—
self-deception and procrastination often go hand-in-hand.2 Exploiting the thin
line between couldn’t and wouldn’t, we exaggerate the difficulties we faced and
come up with justifications: a bad chest cold, an allergic reaction that caused
sleepiness, a friend’s crisis that demanded our attention. Or we deflect
responsibility entirely by saying, “Gee whiz, who knew?” If you couldn’t have
anticipated the situation, then you can’t be blamed. For example, how would you
respond to the following questions regarding your last bout of procrastination? - Did you know the task was going to take so long?
- Did you realize that the consequences of being late were so dire?
- Could you have expected that last-minute emergency?
The honest answers are likely yes, yup, and definitely, but it’s difficult to answer
honestly, isn’t it? And that is the problem.
Some procrastinators will even try to frame their self-destructive inaction as a
thoughtful choice. For example, is it wrong to put off your career to pursue more
family time? It depends on who you are. Some people relish the work-focused
model of success, resenting time taken away from the job, and so they may miss
out on family dinners and school plays. Others prosper in the home and
community, enjoying the relationships nurtured there, at the expense of tasks at
work. To the casual observer, it isn’t easy to tell which choice is procrastination
and which is a purposeful decision. Only the procrastinator knows for sure.
In the back of their minds, many procrastinators hope they won’t need excuses.
They bank on Lady Luck. Sometimes it works. Frank Lloyd Wright drew his
architectural masterpiece, Fallingwater, in the three hours before his patron,
Edgar Kaufmann, came to see the sketches. Tom Wolfe cranked out in a
midnight panic forty-nine pages of almost unedited prose for an Esquire
magazine piece on California’s hotrod and custom car culture. Byron Dobell, his
editor, simply removed “Dear Byron” from the top of Wolfe’s memo and printed
it under the title “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored
Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” and a new style of journalism was born. But
I don’t need to tell you how rare such outcomes are. By your own standards, if
you thought delay was a good idea in the first place, you wouldn’t be
procrastinating.
THE PROCRASTINATOR’S PROFILE
If it makes you feel any better, procrastination puts us in good company. It’s as
common as morning coffee. Across scores of surveys, about 95 percent of
people admit to procrastinating, with about a quarter of these indicating that it is
a chronic, defining characteristic.3 “To stop procrastinating” is at any time
among the world’s top reported goals.4 Procrastination is so prevalent that it has
its own brand of humor. Possibly the best excuse for missing a deadline came
from Dorothy Parker. When asked by The New Yorker’s editor, Harold Ross, for
a piece that was late, she woefully explained, using her dark and sorrowful eyes
to full effect, “Somebody was using the pencil.” And, of course, there is the most
infamous of all procrastination jokes. Don’t you know it? I will tell you later.
No occupational category seems immune from procrastination, but writers
seem especially prone. Agatha Christie was guilty of it and Margaret Atwood
admitted she often spends “the morning procrastinating and worrying, and then
plunges into the manuscript in a frenzy of anxiety around 3:00 p.m.”
Newscasters can also suffer from it; witness Ted Koppel’s quip: “My parents and
teachers used to be exasperated by the fact I would wait until the last minute, and
now people are fascinated by it.”5 Procrastinators come from every letter of the
occupational alphabet, from astronauts to Episcopalian priests and from X-ray
technicians to zookeepers.6 Unfortunately, whatever the job, procrastinators are
more likely to be unemployed or working part-time compared to their nonprocrastinating counterparts. Procrastinators can be of either sex, though the Y
chromosome has a slight edge. A group of a hundred hardened procrastinators
would likely be composed of 54 men and 46 women, leaving 8 unmatched males
vying for a female dalliance. You see, procrastinators tend to be available . . .
sort of. They are more likely to be single than married but also more likely to be
separated than divorced. They put off ending as well as beginning commitment.
Age also determines procrastination.7 As we progress from grade school through
to the retirement home and the closer we come to life’s final deadline, the less
we put off. Those who have matured physically are, unsurprisingly, more mature
in character.
This demographic exploration, though interesting, isn’t as useful as identifying
procrastinators by their psychological profile. There is indeed a core trait
explaining why we put off, but it might not be what you have heard. It is
commonly thought that we delay because we are perfectionists, anxious about
living up to sky-high standards.8 This perfectionist theory of procrastination
sounds good and even feels good. Perfectionism can be a desirable trait, as
shown by the canned response to the interview question, “What is your biggest
weakness?” When Bill Rancic was asked that question just before winning the
first season of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, he replied, “I’m too much of a
perfectionist; it’s a flaw,” prompting his interviewer to interject, “Being a
perfectionist is a good thing; it means you keep striving.” But the perfectionismprocrastination theory doesn’t pan out. Based on tens of thousands of
participants—it’s actually the best-researched topic in the entire procrastination
field—perfectionism produces a negligible amount of procrastination. When the
counseling psychologist Robert Slaney developed the Almost Perfect Scale to
measure perfectionism, he found that “perfectionists were less likely to
procrastinate than non-perfectionists, a result that contradicted the anecdotal
literature.”9 My research backs him up: neat, orderly, and efficient perfectionists
don’t tend to dillydally.10
How, then, did we come to believe that perfectionism causes procrastination?
Here is what happened. Perfectionists who procrastinate are more likely to seek
help from therapists, so of course they turn up in clinical research about
procrastination in greater numbers. Non-perfectionist procrastinators (and for
that matter, non-procrastinating perfectionists) are less likely to seek professional
help. Perfectionists are more motivated to do something about their failings
because they are more likely to feel worse about whatever they are putting off.
Consequently, it is not perfectionism that is the problem but the discrepancy
between perfectionist standards and performance.11 If you are a perfectionist and
are suffering from high standards that are unachievable, you might want to do
something about that too, but you will need an additional book: this one is about
procrastination.
What is really the main source of procrastination? Thirty years of research and
hundreds of studies have isolated several personality traits that predict
procrastination, but one trait stands above the rest. The Achilles Heel of
procrastination turns out to be impulsiveness; that is, living impatiently in the
moment and wanting it all now.12 Showing self-control or delaying gratification
is difficult for those of us who are impulsive. We just don’t have much ability to
endure short-term pain for long-term gain.13 Impulsiveness also determines how
we respond to task anxiety. For those of us who are less impulsive, anxiety is
often an internal cue that gets us to start a project early, but for those who are
more impulsive it is a different story: anxiety over a deadline will lead straight to
procrastination.14 The impulsive try to avoid an anxiety-provoking task
temporarily or block it from their awareness, a tactic that makes perfect sense if
you’re thinking short term. In addition, impulsiveness leads procrastinators to be
disorganized and distractible or, as my colleague Henri Schouwenburg puts it, to
suffer from “weak impulse control, lack of persistence, lack of work discipline,
lack of time management skill, and the inability to work methodically.”15 In
other words, impulsive people find it difficult to plan work ahead of time and
even after they start, they are easily distracted. Procrastination inevitably
follows.
LOOKING FORWARD
So there it is. Procrastination is pervasive. Almost as common as gravity and
with an equal downward pull, it is with us from the overfull kitchen garbage can
in the morning to the nearly empty tube of toothpaste at night. In the next
chapter, I’ll let you in on the research that has helped me understand why we
delay things irrationally and why procrastination is so widespread. I’ll reveal and
explain the Procrastination Equation, a formula that shows the dynamics of this
way of behaving, and then I’ll tell you about the amazing opportunity I had to
study this phenomenon in the real world. Subsequent chapters will describe the
different elements that are at play in our minds and hearts, and then we’ll look at
the price of procrastination in our lives and in society at large. There’s always a
good side to the kind of research I present—within the causes we can also find
the cures. So the last part of the book will offer ways in which individuals,
bosses, teachers, and parents can improve their own motivation and motivate
others, in the hope that procrastination will be less of a scourge. The final
chapter pushes you to put these proven practices into your own life. The advice
here is evidence-based, as scientifically vetted and pharmaceutically pure as it
gets; it’s the good stuff from behind the counter, so don’t overdo it.