Houston Southard

Piers Steel - The Procrastination Equation

Procrastination is the nemesis to success and the root of all unhappiness. It's mental gymnastics, delusions of grandeur and the blame game all retro-fitted into a deadly cocktail of do it later. It's also a beautiful little bitch.

In this not-so-expose, Dr. Piers Steel distills all of motivational science into a single formula: motivation = expectancy x value / impulsiveness x delay (i.e., the more trust we have in being able to follow through on a plan we deem important, we're more likely to do it amid the denominating due date length and distraction strength).

The 500% increase in procrastination over the past 50 years can be blamed on marketers hijacking a brain evolutionarily built atop an impulsive limbic system to keep us exclusively distracted from our lives. Ironic how a species whose surroundings groomed us to rule the planet also selectively adapted us for the same immediate gratification that will ultimately ruin it.

We procrastinate because something is far off or thought to be unimportant or because we're tired or convinced ourselves we are. The fatigue, real or imagined, increases task-aversion, saps interest, and makes the difficult more so. I originally read this to put off writing my thesis on hypocrisy induction to increase good habits, but in reading through its latter chapters' tried and true tactics of temptation bundling, urge surfing, mental contrasting, environmental manipulation, and public advocacy, I managed to defend. That's the short term upside of procrastination: Once the delay timer tolls, the anxiety-riddled mind is laced with the otherwise untappable creativity to cram and get shit done fast, albeit sloppily.

I'm not a professional procrastinator. I'm a distraction genius. It's why I can read so much, partly because I've learned to frame reading as a way to put other things off, so it feels like procrastinating, and also because I just break it down. 25 pages a day, no matter what (although as evidenced by my lack of recent posts, I've been putting that off, too).