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Evidence-Based Primer on Procrastination

Summary of 200+ research articles and 10 concrete techniques to beat procrastination!

Suren @ Key Ideas
Best Posts on Managing Startups
13 min readFeb 21, 2014

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Let me first explain the science and then list top 10 evidence-based techniques for you to increase your drive and beat procrastination.

As part of their Temporal Motivation Theory, Piers Steel and Cornelius J. Konig proposed this equation

Here, value is the reward associated with the task andexpectancy is the confidence that you can complete the task. The ‘reward’ can vary — if a task is pleasant then it in itself is of high value. Perhaps it will result in something good for you, like a good performance evaluation at work and a bonus — it is high value in this case as well. Delay is the amount of time on hand to get the reward. In this definition, impulsiveness is your sensitivity to delay and usually tends to decrease with age. If you’re more impulsive, it is easier for a current distraction (coffee with a buddy) to get your eyes off a distant target (getting that report done).

Piers Steel’s theory explains why you are more motivated to do something you enjoy (higher value), but procrastinate another task. However, once your deadline looms, your motivation to do the unpleasant task increases. You are also more motivated to do things when you are more confident in your skills (higher expectancy), or when you are less susceptible to distraction (lower impulsiveness).

Example: Students preparing for exams

Let’s look at an example to make things clearer. A student with an exam is more motivated to study for a subject he or she enjoys and knows well, because the enjoyment is of greater valueand there is a greater confidence (expectancy) that studying will lead to a desired outcome, i.e. high grades. If the exam is a month away (delay), the student will be less motivated to study today (unless he or she is very sensitive to deadlines, i.e. lessimpulsive) but as the exam day gets closer, the motivation to study increases.

The way we perceive a task’s value is time-sensitive

Studies on “delayed gratification” have shown that most subjects prefer getting $100 the same day to $110 a month later. Economists use the term “hyperbolic discounting” to describe how, when given a choice between two rewards, we tend to give a higher value to the one that occurs sooner. In his book, psychologist Dan Ariely talks about “hot states vs. cold states” to describe how we are level-headed about temptation when it is not immediately present, but find it hard to resist when it’s there. When planning your study sessions a couple of weeks before an exam, you might think in your “cold state” that you can skip watching the big game. But when the day arrives, the game puts you in a “hot state” that makes the temptation to watch irresistible, so you put off studying.

Deadlines matter

Here’s another illustration of the effects of deadlines, the “delay” in the equation above. In one study, Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch looked at how deadlines affect students’ tendency to procrastinate. In some classes Ariely imposed set deadlines for three papers his students had to submit, in another he suggested that they could submit all three papers on the last day of the semester and in a third group, he instructed the students to set their own “official” deadlines, which they would commit to and communicate to Ariely at the beginning of the course. He found that the class that did worst was the one with papers due on the last day of the semester — the students in the third group performed better because they had artificially increased their motivation by setting themselves deadlines that were earlier.

10 concrete techniques to beat procrastination!

1.
If you know your weaknesses, you can take certain steps to mitigate their consequences, like Ulysses asking his men to tie him to the ship’s mast, knowing that he would not be able to resist the song of the sirens. If you’re easily distracted, you might change the conditions in which you work, minimize noise, stay logged out of certain websites, maybe even switch off your phone. After all, you’re never really doing nothing when you’re procrastinating, you’re simply not doing what you should be doing at that time.

2.
Part of this self-analysis is also to check your tendency towards optimism (see the study by psychologist Roger Buehler and his colleagues showing how overoptimistic our estimates are). When you think that you only have about a day’s work to do and you leave it to the last day, you usually find that something else comes up or there is more to do than you expected. Your over-optimism put you in a situation where you had much less time than you originally thought. Counterbalance your optimism with a dose of reality to avoid this planning fallacy.

3.
After you analyze yourself, it’s time to closely analyze the task at hand. Is there a specific part of it that is of low value? You can artificially increase this value by promising yourself a reward at the end, a kind of self-bribe. or by linking your task to something of greater value. You can try to make mundane tasks more enjoyable, through music or by trying to make a game of it. You can also create peer pressure by pre-committing to a friend or colleague — this increases the value of the task (because you want to look good to your friends and colleagues) and can reduce the “delay” if you set yourself a tighter deadline.

4.
One approach to tackling the “expectancy” variable in Steel’s equation is to improve self-confidence by setting a series of smaller and more easily achievable tasks first. This division of a large task into smaller pieces also results in shorter delays, further boosting motivation. This is well illustrated through thePomodoro technique. The concept is simple — you set a timer for 25 minutes and try to complete a specific task in that time period. That makes one pomodoro (Italian for ‘tomato’), after which you take a short break for a few minutes and start on another task for the next 25 minutes. After four such pomodori , you take a longer break. This method keeps delays small and expectancy high, because you are focused on one particular task. The frequent tasks also help with energy levels, boosting expectancy further. Timeboxing is a similar concept used often in project management and software development.

5.
It’s not just about smaller tasks and frequent breaks, though. It’s also about clarity. Author David Allen advises making sure that your to do list includes the immediate next action for every task. Tasks like “write report” or “discuss with partner” are more likely to be procrastinated because they are complex and consist of a few steps. The to-do list should consist of specific and smaller actions like “prepare income table for report” or “set up appointment with partner for Friday.”

6.
Procrastination as a bad habit can be overcome by developing “good habits”. Piers Steel gives illustrates how this works in his book, “Exercise programs, for example, should take place at regularly scheduled times, leaving little guesswork about where and what the fitness activities will be. Like clockwork, every Tuesday afternoon at 5:00, you go and lift weights, and every Thursday morning at 6:00, you go running. Take whatever you have been putting off and specify where and how you intend to implement it.”

7.
Another method that Steel outlines is called theimplementation intention. This is particularly useful to avoid the self-deceptive excuses. It works when you use an “if-then” approach to plan how you will do something, tying the procrastinated task in some way with another event. Steel says, “Take whatever you have been putting off and specify where and how you intend to implement it. For instance, make a vow: ‘When breakfast is finished on Saturday morning, I will clean out the storage room.’ This seems so easy and simple that it couldn’t work, but it does. When you make an explicit intention to act, the desired behavior just happens.” In one study, women set themselves the goal of performing a breast self-examination over the next month. 100% of women who used implementation intention fulfilled the task, compared to 53% of women who did not use these implementation intention techniques. How’s that for reducing the negative health effects of procrastination?

8.
A novel approach (and that’s a pun — some authors use this trick!) to avoid procrastination is called the Nothing Alternative. Psychologists Roy F. Baumeister and Dianne M. Tice have documented the tendency that procrastinators often avoid doing what they need to do by simply doing something else. By using this fact, Baumeister proposes a new way to overcome procrastination—the “do nothing” alternative. The idea is to set some time aside for a task and tell yourself that you will either do that particular task or you will sit idly and do nothing else. Baumeister illustrates this using some advice that author Raymond Chandler gave to encourage a budding writer, “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.”

9.
To make a more profound change in how you approach tasks, you might want to think about willpower. Psychologist Roy F. Baumeister’s book on willpower describes how belief in a greater cause has had profound impact on people trying to achieve something. Work songs, for example, were developed to increase the productivity of group work both by making work less boring and, more importantly, by creating a sense of unity and a greater cause. For instance, Henry Stanley led his men through the jungles of Africa with poems about the glory of England.

10.
Baumeister’s studies show that willpower is like a muscle that can be strengthened, which means that you can work on reducing your overall tendency to procrastinate. More willpower means less impulsiveness, so you don’t give in to distractions and focus on the task at hand.

Is procrastination always bad?

Maybe not. Some people are suggesting that procrastination can be forged into a powerful tool.

Author Robert Benchley believes that “anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” Stanford professor John Perry says that if you need to get something done, put it on a to do list below an item that you would much rather do less, calling thisstructured procrastination. “The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don’t). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren’t).”

Baumeister advocates the use of “positive procrastination” for other purposes. He says that postponing something tempting but harmful might make it less appealing later, helping you to avoid it. “If a TV show is keeping you from getting back to work, record it and tell yourself you’ll finish watching it later. You might discover, once you’ve finished work and don’t need an excuse to procrastinate, that you don’t really want to watch the show after all. Vice delayed may turn out to be vice denied.” Remember the “hot and cold states” that Dan Ariely described? When it comes to reducing impulsive buying, he prescribes the “ice glass method” — another example of positive procrastination. You put your credit card in a glass of water and put in the freezer. When you’re browsing online and see something you want to buy impulsively, you take out the glass and have to wait for the ice around your card to freeze. By the time this happens, the impulse to buy might have waned — you put off the purchase by a few minutes and saved money by cooling down from that hot state.

Let me sum up this post quoting Y Combinator’s Paul Graham,“I think the way to “solve” the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you. Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and you’ll leave the right things undone.”

Further Reading

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Suren @ Key Ideas
Best Posts on Managing Startups

Written by Suren @ Key Ideas

504 Followers
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2x entrepreneur, grew prev. business to $0.5 billion valuation, currently building Artificial Intelligence startup based on my PhD research, Stanford GSB grad.

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