Why do we humans almost universally experience a mighty struggle with procrastination? It’s because we’re seemingly hardwired to favor short-term pleasure over short-term annoyance/effort, even if the latter leads to greater long-term gains. We like to do whatever feels good in the moment.
The key to overcoming procrastination is thus to increase your motivation for tackling a task, so you feel more inclined to do it now, and less inclined to put it off.
That’s the conclusion reached by Dr. Piers Steel, the foremost researcher of procrastination. In The Procrastination Equation, Steel explains that our given level of motivation for something is determined by four factors that interact in the following formula:
Motivation = Expectancy x Value / Impulsiveness x Delay
Let’s unpack the role each of these variables play in causing us to be more motivated (Expectancy and Value) or less motivated (Impulsiveness and Delay).
Motivation Multipliers
Expectancy: How much you expect to succeed at doing a task. Several elements influence Expectancy. Steel’s research shows that an individual who has a higher sense of personal agency — that is, confidence in their ability to get things done — will have higher levels of Expectancy than an individual beset with learned helplessness — the belief that you don’t have control over your environment.
Another factor that can influence Expectancy is the difficulty of the task. I picked this up from behavioral psychologist BJ Fogg’s book Tiny Habits. If you set “lose 100 pounds by the end of the year” as a goal, the daunting enormity of the task will weaken your confidence in being able to achieve it, likely resulting in you giving up before you even get going. A goal like “walk for 10 minutes each day,” on the other hand, is much easier to accomplish, which ups your Expectancy quotient, in turn increasing your level of Motivation and your chances of sticking with it.
Value: How much you enjoy doing a task and how much you’ll enjoy the reward you’ll get for completing it (or dislike the punishment you’ll receive for failing to). Like Expectancy, several factors can influence Value. Your personal tastes have a significant impact on whether you value a task, and thus your likelihood of doing it. If you want to start exercising, and hate running, but set a goal of running every day, you’re probably not going to run. However, if you do enjoy rucking, and instead make it a goal to ruck every day, you’re far likelier to follow through on your intention.
How much you will enjoy/appreciate not only the process of engaging in a certain task, but its end reward, also influences Value. If getting an A+ on your research paper is really important to you, then you’ll probably work hard on your report and not put it off. If you couldn’t care less about getting an A+ and would be happy settling for a C+, you’ll likely be less motivated to get started on your paper.
Something that Fogg adds to Steel’s idea of the value lent to tasks, is factoring in the punishment of not doing something on time. The bigger the punishment, the more you’ll value doing the task to avoid the penalty.
Take paying taxes. Most people don’t like doing them, but if you don’t file your tax return or pay your taxes, there can be severe financial and legal consequences. So while you might not enjoy the reward of doing your taxes, you’ll definitely value avoiding the dire consequences of not doing them.
Motivation Diminishers
Impulsiveness: The degree to which you get distracted versus staying focused. According to Steel, Impulsiveness is a huge divisor of Motivation in the Procrastination Equation.
While some people are more impulsive than others thanks to genetics, all of us have to grapple with impulsivity to one extent or another. And of course that’s more true than ever in the modern age, in which our smartphones and digital devices clamor for our attention. When you try reading War and Peace on your phone, as soon as you feel a slight niggle of boredom, you can swipe over to Instagram to see what new things are in the feed.
As Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, discussed on the podcast, if you’ve been using the internet regularly for the past couple decades, you’ve likely experienced an erosion in your ability to concentrate — particularly when it comes to deep reading and reflective thinking, but also in simply being able to hold a conversation or clean up the kitchen without intermittently breaking off to check your phone. These short checks can turn into big time sinks, leading you to continually put off completing the task at hand.
Delay: The fact that the further away the due date is for the completion of a task, the less motivated you will be to work on it now. The sooner something has to get done, the more motivated you’ll be to get to it. Concrete urgency encourages us to take action; a lack of urgency encourages us to be complacent.
We’ve all experienced this dynamic at some point in our lives. In college, when you had a research paper due in two months, you felt like you had plenty of time to work on it, and kept procrastinating getting started. Then, when the night before its deadline arrived, you finally did get going, because you had to.
According to Steel, to increase Motivation, you simply have to increase the factors in the numerator of the Procrastination Equation (Expectancy and Value) and decrease the elements in the denominator (Impulsiveness and Delay).
It’s as simple as that.
The trick is figuring out brass tacks ways of doing so.
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