The Psychology Of Procrastination

Psychology Of Procrastination: Procrastination is voluntarily delaying something you intend to do despite knowing you'll be worse off, and researchers now see it mainly as a problem of managing unpleasant emotions rather than managing time, with about one in five adults chronic procrastinators.

Piers Steel: His 2007 meta-analysis of hundreds of studies produced Temporal Motivation Theory, an equation where motivation rises with expectancy and value and falls with impulsiveness and how far away the payoff is.

Joseph Ferrari: The DePaul University psychologist's research estimated that around 20 percent of adults are chronic procrastinators, a share he found across multiple countries.

Fuschia Sirois: Working with Tim Pychyl, she framed procrastination as 'the priority of short term mood repair,' meaning we dodge tasks to feel better now at the expense of our future selves.

Timothy Pychyl: In a 2010 study he co-authored, students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before a first exam procrastinated less before the next one, showing that self-criticism can feed delay.

Hal Hershfield: His brain imaging research found that thinking about your future self activates patterns similar to thinking about a stranger, which helps explain why we happily dump work on 'future me.'

Amygdala: A 2018 Ruhr University Bochum study of 264 people found that those who struggled to act on their intentions had larger amygdalae and weaker links between that emotion center and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.

Hyperbolic Discounting: People value rewards far more as they get closer, so a distant deadline barely registers until it suddenly looms, a pattern economists and psychologists use to model procrastination.

Dan Ariely: In a 2002 study with Klaus Wertenbroch, students voluntarily set themselves costly deadlines, but those given evenly spaced deadlines by someone else still did the best proofreading work.

Planning Fallacy: In a 1994 study by Roger Buehler and colleagues, students predicted they'd finish their theses in about 34 days on average, but actually took about 56, and only about a third finished by their own estimate.

Sydney Opera House: A textbook case of the planning fallacy, it was expected to open in 1963 for about 7 million Australian dollars and instead opened in 1973 at around 102 million.

Parkinson's Law: Historian C. Northcote Parkinson's 1955 Economist essay declared that 'work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.'

Student Syndrome: Eliyahu Goldratt used the term in his 1997 book Critical Chain for the habit of starting a task only at the last possible moment, no matter how much buffer time is built in.

Victor Hugo: According to his wife, he locked away his clothes so he couldn't go out and wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame wrapped in a big grey knitted shawl to meet his publisher's deadline.

Douglas Adams: Famous for saying 'I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by,' he was locked in a hotel suite by his publisher to finish So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

Leonardo da Vinci: Vasari wrote that the prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie complained to the Duke of Milan about how slowly The Last Supper was going, and many of Leonardo's commissions were never finished at all.

Charles Darwin: He sketched his theory of natural selection by the late 1830s but delayed publishing for about 20 years, until a 1858 letter from Alfred Russel Wallace with the same idea forced his hand.

Fallingwater: Frank Lloyd Wright reportedly let the commission sit for months, then drew the plans in a matter of hours after client Edgar Kaufmann phoned to say he was driving over to see them.

Pomodoro Technique: Francesco Cirillo developed it as a student in the late 1980s using a tomato shaped kitchen timer, working in 25 minute bursts so a task feels small enough to start.

Implementation Intentions: Peter Gollwitzer's 'if X happens, then I will do Y' plans produced a medium to large boost in goal completion across 94 studies in a 2006 meta-analysis with Paschal Sheeran.

Temptation Bundling: In a 2014 study by Katherine Milkman, people who could only listen to gripping audiobooks while at the gym initially made 51 percent more gym visits.

Fresh Start Effect: Research by Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis found gym visits and goal searches spike after 'temporal landmarks' like a new week, month, year or birthday.

stickK: Founded in 2008 by Yale economists Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres, the site lets users put money on the line, and even pledge it to an 'anti-charity' they hate if they fail to follow through.

Structured Procrastination: Stanford philosopher John Perry's 1995 essay argued you can get a lot done by avoiding something even more important, and it won him the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature.

Tim Urban: His 2016 TED talk Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator, starring the 'Instant Gratification Monkey' and the 'Panic Monster,' became one of the most watched TED talks ever.