Procrastination researchers Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin set up an experiment that had two tasks for the subjects. Subjects who committed to both tasks and completed them got the most rewards, with the second-highest rewards going to subjects who committed to the first step and completed it. Subjects who committed to both tasks but didn’t complete both received the least reward. Hence, subjects were motivated to be honest with themselves about the likelihood of their really finishing both tasks. O’Donoghue and Rabin argue that some people who procrastinate know that they do so, and make allowances for it. These people, “sophisticates,” in O’Donoghue and Rabin’s study, made better decisions about their commitments and therefore (or thereby?) mitigate the damage done by their procrastination. “Naifs” are people who procrastinate, but “are fully unaware of their self-control problems and therefore believe they will behave in the future exactly as they currently would like to behave in the future” (“Procrastination on long-term projects”). That is, although they have procrastinated in the past, and may even be aware that this practice has caused them grief, naifs make decisions about future commitments predicated on the assumption that they will not procrastinate in the future. They are not harmed by their procrastination as much as they are harmed by their belief that they will magically stop themselves from procrastinating in the future.
The short version of this post is that we all procrastinate, and so we plan for it.
O’Donoghue and Rabin conclude that naifs are more likely to incur the greatest costs from procrastination. They say: “The key intuition that drives many of our results is that a person is most prone to procrastinate on the highest-cost stage, and this intuition clearly generalizes. Hence, for many-stage projects, if the highest-cost stage comes first, naive people will either complete the project or never start, whereas if the highest-cost stage occurs later, they might start the project but never finish. Indeed, if the highest-cost stage comes last, naive people might complete every stage of a many-stage project except the last stage, and as a result may expend nearly all of the total cost required to complete the project without receiving benefits.”
Sometimes procrastinating the highest-cost stage to the end is necessary: the dissertation is the highest-cost stage of graduate school, and it is necessarily the last. Many people advise leaving the introduction to the dissertation or book (or theoretical chapter) till last because it’s more straightforward to write when we know what we’re introducing–we’ve written the rest, but that also means procrastinating the highest- cost stage. It isn’t necessarily bad to procrastinate the highest-cost stage, but it does mean that people who sincerely believe that 1) they don’t procrastinate, or 2) they can simply will themselves out of procrastinating this time (“I just need to sit my butt down and write”) may be setting themselves up for a painful failure, especially if this kind of procrastination is coupled with having badly estimated how much time writing the dissertation would actually take. It would be interesting to know how many ABDs are “naifs.”
In a sense, the story that “naifs” tell about procrastination is a simple one—they can make themselves behave differently this time the same way one can make oneself get out of bed. But such a view—that willing one’s self to write an article is like willing one’s self to get out of bed—ignores “procrastination” in regard to scholarly productivity is not a question of lounging in bed or getting up, of eating cupcakes or writing an article. These posts are from a book project I was thinking about writing, and the first very rough draft wasn’t too hard to write; it went quite quickly, probably because I’d been thinking (and reading) about the issue for years. But when it came time to work on it again—incorporate more research, especially the somewhat grim studies about factors that contribute to scholarly productivity—I instead reprinted my roll sheet, deleting from it the students who had dropped, adding to my sheet the dates I hadn’t included, composing and writing email to students whose attendance troubled me, and comparing students’ names with the photo roster (in a more or less futile effort to learn all their names). I then printed up the comments I’d spent writing and stapled them to the appropriate student work. I sent some urgent email related to a committee I chair, answered email (related to national service for a scholarly organization) I should have answered yesterday, and sent out extremely important email to students clarifying an assignment I’d made orally in class. None of that was very pleasurable—I’d far prefer to have eaten a cupcake. And yet it was procrastination.
My procrastinating one task by completing others is typical of much procrastination (it’s sometimes called “procrastiworking”); it isn’t a question of choosing between something lazy and self-indulgent and something else that is hard work. Take, for instance, this poignant description of a scholar who keeps procrastinating applying for grants:
“Grant application season has rolled around once again. Amanda, who has in the past regularly failed to submit applications for research grants that many of her colleagues successfully obtain, feels that she really should apply for a grant this year. She prints out the information about what she would need to assemble and notes the main elements thereof (description of research program, CV , and so on) and—of course—the deadline for submission. She puts all of these materials in a freshly labeled file folder and places it at the top of the pile on her desk. But whenever she actually contemplates getting down to work on preparing the application—which she continues to think she should submit—her old anxieties about the adequacy of her research program and productivity flare up again, and she always find some reason to reject the idea of starting work on the grant submission process now (without adopting an alternative plan about when she will start). In the end the deadline passes without her having prepared the application, and once again Amanda has missed the chance to put in for a grant.” (Stroud, Thief 65) Whatever complicated things are going on in this story, or in the minds of people who find themselves in Amanda’s situation, it’s absurd to say that she is choosing pleasure over pain.
I find this story heartbreaking, probably because the details are so perfectly apt. Of course she would neatly label the folder, and add it to a pile (I used to keep a section of my file cabinet labeled “Good Intentions”). And I have to add, she needs to get “down” to work on the applications—why is it always “down”? When people are beating themselves up about not doing writing (or grading), they tell me, “I just need to sit down and do it” or “buckle down and do it” or variations on those themes. Why don’t people need to “sit up” and work on the project? Or “get up and go” on it?
That this method of managing grants has never worked doesn’t seem to register, and so there is what Jennifer Baker calls “a cruel cycle:” “Procrastinators are inefficient in doing their work, they make unrealistic plans in regard to work, and they are so cowed by perfectionist pressures that they become incapable of incorporating advice or feedback into their future behavior.” (Thief 168). Baker is here describing something much like “naifs”—unwilling or unable to recognize that there is a pattern, they hope or expect to be able to work on getting a little better: they will do it completely different in the future. Applying the same sense of perfectionism to our work habits, we set unrealistic goals for our future selves, virtually ensuring that we fall back into imprudent delays. Because no grant could possibly be as good as we want, we write no grant at all. Instead of setting up fantasies of behaving completely differently in the future, we need to be honest about what we are doing now, and why we are doing it.