It’s a big day. On the menu is the creation of a presentation for a crucial sales pitch. Roll up those sleeves, boot up the computer, and you are ready for work. Oh, just hold that thought — your computer informs you of the arrival of a new e-mail. Curious, you take a look, and then write a reply as well. Right, with that out of the way, it is back to the presentation. Then someone asks you whether you could meet a visitor, and you oblige — what is 10 minutes in a long day? Then you feel like having a cup of coffee. Before you realise, and without a single word being written on the presentation, you have lost 30 minutes.

Such delays are so commonplace that you do not think of the damage it can do to yourself, to your company and even to your country. Procrastination is a part of life, but have you ever thought that these tiny transgressions of your mind could be studied as an academic subject? Or did you imagine that your little delays and interruptions could be described in a mathematical equation? A Canadian psychologist is trying to do just that, and is attracting wide public attention.

For someone studying procrastination, Piers Steel can ill afford to dabble in it, such is his workload. He teaches at the Haskayne School of Business in the University of Calgary in Canada. He coaches students for competitions, does some public speaking and a few radio and TV shows. On top of that, he is interviewed frequently by the North American Press, and also runs a website where you can have your procrastination assessed, among other things. Ten years ago, when he started work on his PhD, procrastination was not a popular subject. Even now it is not exactly fashionable in the academia, but there is increasing interest in the subject. “Economists are also getting interested in studying procrastination,” says Steel.

He has just finished a massive analysis of all research literature on procrastination, and published the results in the journal Psychology Today. What he found was immensely worrying, although we had all known it in our bones for a long time. Procrastination is on the rise. About 95 per cent of the people practise it in the academic world, and about 50 per cent procrastinate problematically. And this is not just a phenomenon restricted to academics.

People procrastinate on virtually everything — filing taxes, making lifestyle changes, beginning retirement savings. In short, everything important. About 15-20 per cent of the people outside the academic world are chronic procrastinators. This figure could be higher — people cooperate more during research on the academic world, and it is easier to get these estimates there.

Steel often digs up forgotten research to prove his point. Two years ago, the Gail Kasper Consulting Group found that in 2002, 40 per cent of Americans waited till the last minute to file their taxes: procrastinating on payment cost people an average of $400, and the country over $473 million in overpayments.

The survey also found that
42 per cent of respondents delayed saving for the future, and 43 per cent delayed going to the doctor. “A variety of other fields repeat this theme, that procrastination is dangerous,” says Steel. As recently as a few days ago, Jonathan Spira, analyst at the research company Basex, had told the New York Times that interruptions at work cost the American economy as much as $650 billion a year.

Strictly speaking, people have known procrastination for a long time. The Bhagavad Gita mentions the malady, and so do old Greek texts written in 800 BC. Samuel Johnson, the famous biographer and critic, described procrastination as a general weakness that prevails in every mind. Despite all these references, we could be sure that procrastination is a modern disease. It is rapidly increasing, in hand with the amount of stimuli that exacerbate it. We all know some of the worst offenders — television, online video, Blackberrys, and video games.

Steel believes that e-mail addiction is also to blame. He calculates that if as little as 15 minutes of time is spent on unnecessary e-mail every day — with notifications of new messages constantly popping up — it translates to a loss of over $50 billion to the US economy every year. A rough calculation for India shows that 10 minutes of work lost for everybody a day works out to Rs 200 crore a year for the nation.

Steel’s meta-analysis showed several interesting aspects of procrastination. It appears to be an inherited trait, and one that decreases with age — older people tend to procrastinate less than the young. This is not because older people are intrinsically better, but because they have schemes to overcome procrastination, according to Mathew Rabin, economist at the University of Berkeley. Meta-analysis shows that men procrastinate slightly more than women, because women exercise greater self-control. And, as we have seen earlier, procrastination is increasing everywhere. So are other forms of self-regulatory failure such as excessive gambling, credit card debt, obesity and so on.

Why do people procrastinate? “We can see pleasure that we received today much more than the pleasure that we receive tomorrow,” says Steel. So we do something trivial that gives us immediate gratification rather than something else that gives us gratification some time later. Yet, this is a simple view. To a psychologist, understanding procrastination is not easy, because it is seemingly tied closely to a host of other traits. It is closely related to what psychologists call conscientiousness, an ability to be painstaking, careful and disciplined. We need to separate these traits to understand procrastination. Steel offers a solution, in terms of a mathematical equation.

In all of science, an equation is the hallmark of rigour and depth. But most people would tend to be sceptical of reducing human behaviour to an equation. The equation is translated like this: the utility of a task is the product of its expectancy and value, divided by the delay and sensitivity of a person to delay (see ‘Mind Math’). Every day, we are faced with tasks that compete for our attention. People tend to choose tasks where the utility is maximum. If the delay is low, that is if the fruits can be enjoyed in a short time, the utility becomes high. It is high also if the value and expectancy are high.

In other words, we prefer a bird in hand rather than two in the bush. The ancient proverb does not show us a course of action. However, one day, a mathematical equation might. “We can do computer simulation using the equation,” says Jeffrey Vancouver, associate professor of psychology at the University of Ohio, “and then do interventions to understand procrastination.” Such simulations and interventions are beginning to form a part of management studies.

Steel’s meta-analysis was complex, using non-linear regression. What this term means need not detain us. What it shows can be easily explained. Procrastination seemed to be associated with what psychologists call neuroticism: a tendency to maintain continual negative emotions. Yet procrastination is not strongly associated, as many business consultants would like us to believe, with anxiety. Many consultants have built whole careers out of this association. Steel’s analysis suggests that they are wrong. The trait of impulsiveness seems to be strongly associated with procrastination.
So, as Steel would suggest, put down this magazine and get back to work. That presentation will not finish itself.