The procrastination equation
Do you surf the Web instead of finishing overdue projects? Do you always say you’ll start that diet... tomorrow? Do you stay up late watching television instead of going to bed? You are not alone. In fact, you belong to the 95 percent of the world that admits to procrastination. We are hardwired to procrastinate, and with so many new ways to distract ourselves in the digitized world, putting things off has never been easier. Using a mix of psychology, science, self-help advice, and his own research, Dr. Piers Steel—internationally recognized as the foremost authority on procrastination—dispels the myths and misunderstandings of motivation, replacing them with a clear explanation of why we put off until tomorrow what we should be doing today and providing cutting-edge techniques you need to get things done in the workplace and at home.
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8recommend
21mentions
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2011–2025years
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- There's a great book called the Procrastination Equation that addresses this, and offers a different equation than Fogg.
Motivation = (Expectancy + Value) / (Impulsiveness + Delay)
It's useful to know what each of those terms means.
Your motivation is for a specific task or goal.
Expectancy is your confidence that you can complete a task or reach the goal.
Value is the importance you assign to the goal.
Impulsiveness is how distractable you are, or your susceptibility to other interesting things that you might do instead of working toward the goal (like writing comments on HN! ;).
Delay is the amount of time you have until the task should be completed.
The more distractable you are, and the more time until you hit your deadline, the less motivation you have.
The more confidence you have in your ability to complete the task, and the more importance you assign to it (eg this is life or death), the more motivated you are.
Cedric Chin has a nice overview here:
https://commoncog.com/blog/a-user-review-of-the-procrastinat...
- I'm reading The Procrastination Equation right now, and it has the following (excellent, IMO) advice:
Find tasks of any sort at all that you can do. Do them, noting your success. Do this every day. Again, pay attention to successes. Recognize that you accomplish your goals, and expand on those goals.
For goals that take multiple days to accomplish, your first task is to plan by breaking the goal down into smaller tasks you can accomplish in a day. Appreciate completion of each of these, including the planning itself.
The book does a better job of pitching it & giving examples. The most relevant bit is in Chapter 8.
- This quiz is based on the The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel, which is perhaps the best book I have read on the topic.
- I'd recommend reading The Procrastination Equation. It sets out a simple model of how your brain makes these choices, and makes it clear what all the levers are to help you "game" your brain. It explains why shorter productivity cycles are so powerful, for example. It also sets out that there's a lot of variability in how sensitive individuals are to changes in the parameters - this is just a fact of life: you - and I! - may be more predisposed to it than most other people, so we have to work harder to battle it.
One very interesting parameter is how valuable - to your mind - the outputs of your labour are to you. It's of course not an easy parameter to change, but it's good thinking about it. Is your procrastination telling you something about your work?
- I don't know if there is a way to be transformed overnight. But I have definitely achieved incremental improvement after reading a good book like The Procrastination Equation. You just keep iterating, like any skill.
- Also good seems to be The Procrastination Equation [1]– the key insight is that there are (at least!) 4 variables involved in why we don't do things that we say we want to do:
* Expectancy, which is your own estimation of how likely you are to complete a task
* Value, which is how important something is to you
* Impulsiveness, determined by the environment that you're in
* Delay, which is the amount of time between whatever you're doing, and the consequence or implication of the thing you're doing.
Getting things done requires dealing with all of the above variables. "Screw Motivation, You Need Discipline" essentially addresses Impulsiveness- it says to be less impulsive, by cultivating good habits. Sure, but that's just 25% of the battle.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Procrastination-Equation-Putting-G...
