By one recent estimate,
80-95% of college students
engage in procrastination, with a full 3/4 of all
students considering themselves to be (habitual)
procrastinators. Another estimate says that 15-20% of
all adults are chronically affected -- and I can't
help but wonder whether the rest are simply lying.
Most people are troubled by procrastination, most
characterize it as bad, harmful, and foolish. And
most of us do it anyway.
It's hard to see how procrastination
per se could
be adaptive. The costs are often considerable,
the benefits minuscule, and it wastes all the mental
effort people put into making plans in the first
place. Studies have shown that students who routinely
procrastinate consistently get lower grades;
businesses that miss deadlines due to the
procrastination of their employees can lose millions
of dollars. Yet many human beings can't help
themselves, and
an article that just appeared in
Slate suggests that procrastination may be a
cross-cultural universal.
Why, when so little good comes of procrastinating, do
people persist in doing it so much?
The problem, of course, is not that we put things
off,
per se; if we have to buy groceries and do our
taxes, we literally can't do both at the same time.
But often we postpone the things that need to get
done in favor of things -- like watching television or
playing video games -- that most decidedly don't.
Procrastination is a sign of our inner
kluge
for the simple reason
that it shows how our top-level goals (spend
more time with the children, finish that novel)
are routinely undermined by goals with
considerably less priority. (If, that is,
getting caught up on
Desperate
Housewives can be counted as a "goal" at
all.)
People need their down time and I don't begrudge them
that, but procrastination does highlight a
fundamental glitch in our cognitive "design": the gap
between the machinery that sets our goals (off-line)
and the machinery that chooses (on-line, in the
moment) which goals to follow.
The things we procrastinate the most on are tasks
that meet two conditions: we don't enjoy doing them
and we don't have to do them now; given half a chance
we put off the aversive and savor the fun, often
without really considering the ultimate costs.
Procrastination is the bastard step-child of
future-discounting (that tendency to devalue the
future in relation to the present) and the use of
pleasure as a quick-and-dirty compass.
We zone out, we chicken out, we deceive. To be human
is to fight a life-long, uphill battle for
self-control. Why? Because evolution left us clever
enough to set reasonable goals, but without the
willpower to see them through.
The text of this blog entry is adapted from
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction
of the Human Mind
