Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

Don’t keep putting it off. Procrastination is an almost universal vice. Cicero called procrastinators “hateful”;

The psychologist Piers Steel, who has analyzed data from around the world over the past four decades, reports that there’s been a sharp increase in the ranks of dedicated ditherers—those who consider procrastination to be a defining personal characteristic. That category today includes more than 20 percent of the people surveyed internationally. In some American surveys, more than half the people consider themselves chronic procrastinators, and workers themselves estimate that they waste a quarter of their hours on the job—two hours per workday.

Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide.

For me it is painfully obvious

He realized that he and his son, then four years old, had to leave quickly, and they started to gather up the boy’s toys and put them into the two boxes he’d brought to the beach. It was a routine task, but with his glucose level so low, Turner was flummoxed by his options: which toy in which box? He desperately settled on the first rule that occurred to him—each toy had to go in exactly the same box that it had arrived in—and wasted time obsessively rearranging the toys as his blood sugar kept falling. Then, when they finally left and headed toward the beachside facilities—a snack bar and a public restroom—he was stymied by another decision. “I stood there for fifteen minutes with this internal dialogue going on: pee first or eat first?” Turner recalls. “My son was tugging at me, but I couldn’t decide. It was so exhausting I finally just sat down. My son was freaking out. We were there close to half an hour before I finally managed to get up and go eat.”

Decision paralysis

In the honors-thesis experiment, when students were directed to base their future plans on their previous projects, they were much more realistic in predicting the completion date of their theses. Another finding was that students were also much more realistic and hence more accurate at predicting the completion dates for other students’ theses.

Vice delayed may turn out to be vice denied.

Benchley wrote. “The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Constructive procrastination

You might, for instance, resolve to start your day with ninety minutes devoted to your most important goal, with no interruptions from e-mail or phone calls, no side excursions anywhere on the Web.

Nothing alternative

Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.”

Young people who seem hopelessly undisciplined in school or on the job will concentrate for hour after hour on games that involve the same skills needed for more productive work at the computer:

Like pathological tightwads who end up with saver’s remorse, procrastinators of pleasure wind up regretting the trips not taken and the fun forgone.