Slashdot Mirror
Formula For Procrastination Found
kandela writes "Science Daily reports that a University of Calgary academic has published a paper titled The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure in the Psychological Bulletin. The research reveals that most people's New Year's resolutions are doomed to failure, most self-help books have it completely wrong when they say perfectionism is at the root of procrastination, and procrastination can be explained by a single mathematical equation. The research is apparently the culmination of 10 years work. However, no indication was given of how much time was spent putting it off before it was begun." From the article: "Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task... Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact, perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more."
I have to remember to read it later.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I wanted to post this in the last story, but I just got around to it now.
"A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure" - sounds like something out of Calvin and Hobbes. "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes."
Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task... Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact, perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more.
I procrastinate. Hard-core. I'll put off week-long tasks until the night before. I don't do this because I expect to fail and can blame starting too late - I do it because I know perfecly well that I can do that and still finish the task on time.
If you accuse me of any confidence-related shortfall, you'd have to call me over- confident. Perfectionist, though? In some things, yes. But I don't procrastinate for that reason either. Where do these absurd theories come from?
You want to know why I procrastinate, knowing full-well that, while I may not produce my best results, I also have no doubt that I will succeed in producing an acceptible finished product? Simple - Because I've found that at least half the time, the task's nature changes significantly or the task outright goes away. No joke.
In school, teachers/professors would always extend deadlines because most people whined too loudly that they considered the (perfectly easy and reasonable) assignment too hard or unfair. Professors would scale back the requirements, excuse subpar work, and often never even bother looking at what people turned in.
In the working world, most "urgent problems" that come up, go away without any intervention by the next day. Long term projects have their budgets slashed at the end of the quarter. reports never get read anyway.
So, by putting everything off until the last minute, I find myself with a hell of a lot more time to spend on meaningful (aka "self directed") activities.
That doesn't, however, translate to "lazy". When I say "self-directed", I mean self-directed. I have always impressed my professors or managers not with the quality of my assigned work, but with the quality of what I do for its own sake. But then, I enjoy what I do, so my "personal" projects tend to have value to any endeavor I take on.
And all this because I procrastinate, a habit looked down on by most people.
So this is slashdot.. I'll report my cure for cancer ... sometime soon ... perhaps..
From TFA: It's still unclear why some people may be more prone to developing procrastination behaviour, but some evidence suggests it may be genetic"
If it is genetic, then procrastinator should be protected under discrimination laws, like vets, the blind, etc. "You can't charge me interest or penalties on my unpaid income tax! I'm disabled by GPD." ( Genetic Procrastination Disorder )
Steel has also come up with the E=mc2 of procrastination, a formula he's dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (G) and the person's sensitivity to delay (D).
It looks like this and uses the Greek letter G (capital gamma [except I changed the gamma to a G since slashdot wouldn't take the gamma]): Utility = E x V / GD
Here's my problem with psychology types coming up with formulae--the results of the calculation depend heavily on the scale used for measurement of the variables. I don't know of any standard scale for "expectancy of succeeding with a given task" or any of the other variables. Further, it seems that these variables would depend on self-evaluation, which we all know is not particularly useful--particularly in this area.
In other words--why did this guy claim to make a formula? Formulae are for people looking for a result that is reasonably precise; but in this case the extremely imprecise input will result in useless output.
do {
if (job.time_allocated < job.deadline - now()) {
play();
}else{
work();
}
} while (!job.finished)
That's how I do it even though this is clearly more efficient:
while (!job.finished) work();
play();
+0 Meh
Depression goes together with both procrastination and perfectionism (although I don't profess to know which way (if any) the causality works). Depressed people tend to feel guilty they've procrastinated so much, and, as a result, they avoid the task - in other words, they procrastinate further. Depressed people also tend to be dissatisfied with their work (even or perhaps especially when others praise it). Sometimes, that can be a reason to not take the last step in completion or submission.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
While the Type-A do-gooder hardworkers were busy digging holes in the dirt with their bare hands, the lazy procrastinators decided to invent a hoe to do it twenty times faster (and probably starting the job two days after the hand diggers). All technology serves to implement laziness and procrastination, which in turn drives progress.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Posting anonymous for obvious reasons...
I procrastinate because, yes, I'm an under-achiever and uncertain of myself. But I think I'm an underachiever because I've intentionally and strategically kept new people out of my life for fear of being found out as a bisexual (including remaining a virgin... I don't know if remaining a virgin throughout college is common or if I'm in an extremely tiny minority).
Instead of succeeding, I purposefully have kept away from doing anything that might even remotely mean people being near or around me for over the last ten years, almost becoming a shut-in hermit except for going to my university (in which I'd talk to nobody). When you're hard-working and successful, and finish your work on time, you have a chance of being in some spotlight, such as the Dean's list or honor roll... remaining anonymous and unknown meant nobody would notice or get hurt if I, oh, just happened to jump off a bridge someday, and I performed accordingly in my work to reflect that. I have nobody to blame but myself for being a coward, having very recently come to terms with how my irrational fears of irrational people have severely jeopardized my well-being; and that if someone has a problem with something so trivial about me, that's THEIR fucking problem, not MINE. But that's another story... I procrastinated on purpose. During these last couple of months I have finally been working on some of the things I wanted to do when in college, at least those things related to computer programming such as teaching myself other programming languages, writing a small game, making a crude graphics rendering engine to learn more OpenGL than I did in college... of course, it's not as fun when you're not working on something like this with fellow students and having fun, but I've graduated and now I'm not sure where or how to meet people in my town.
Anyway, I'm getting distracted from the subject at hand. Long story short, irrational fears not directly related to what you're procrastinating may indirectly cause you to procrastinate what you're procrastinating... (I hope that wasn't grammar-diarrhea)
I've always thought Procastinators were people who kept their virginity in exchange for money... or people who cut each other's genitals in exchange for money... either way I think I probably need a shrink :/
It's not even something new. You can head over to "badscience.net and find a few more such examples in their archives, including the formula for the perfect football match, the perfect vacation, the perfect ice cream, the perfect beach, perfect day to book a vacation, most depressing day of the year, etc.
The way at least those invariably happened is: some company, let's call it Moraelin Tobacco Ltd, contacts some PR agency to drum up interest in smoking a bit. Tobacco taxes are up, people have made new year's resolutions to quit smoking, etc, and I could use a bit of reminding them to light one. Remember, PR isn't marketting: marketting tells you "buy Moraelin's cigarettes", PR works in more insidious ways, like telling you "boffins discovered that smoking is actually good for your health." It's marketting's evil stealthy brother. It loves to disguise itself as news.
So the PR agency concocts some stupid formula, say, "the formula for the perfect smoking experience." It's usually a stupid formula: for example the ones at badscience.net routinely do stupid stuff like add numbers that don't even have the same units. (E.g., one adds time to time squared.) They also invariably don't even tell you how to measure any of the factors involved, don't have any studies to prove it (and never a control group), etc. But the purpose of that formula isn't to be scientific, but to get Joe Sixpack's attention to whatever I'm selling, and/or to undermine whatever he had against it. Marketting will take it from there.
Ok, now they have a formula they can disguise as news, but if it comes from a PR agency, noone will take it seriously. Even Joe Sixpack isn't usually _that_ stupid. So the next round there is to find someone with some "Dr", "Prof" or whatever important sounding title, and preferrably from some university (sounds all smart and stuff to Joe Sixpack), who's willing to sell his name for some money. A lot will tell them where to shove it, but eventually they find, say, Prof Jack Conman from the university of East Bumfuckistan, who wasn't doing any research anyway and doesn't give a damn about getting a bad reputation among his peers. Sure, he'll take the PR agency's money and sign his name on their pseudo-science "paper."
And now we have all we need to send that "news" to every major newspaper, disguised as academic research.
Does it start to sound like TFA yet?
Because that's exactly what we have here: a stupid formula where they even admit that they don't even know how to measure the variables involved. Nor have any statistical data to show that that's how it works. Did they take two groups, told them to do the same project, but group A got told it's a critical, while group B was told it's unimportant? Was the time difference really linearly proportional to the value difference in dollars? Well, I don't see any such study, much less the values and error bar that would accompany real research.
And how about the elementary issue that all tasks are ultimately split into smaller sub-tasks. Any program you ever wrote, you didn't deal with it as one monumental indivisible task, but broke it up in packages, modules, functions, etc. Do you become automatically demotivated and likely to procrastinate for weeks, just because next on your list is a sub-task like the file input dialog (low V in his formula) than going after the whole program in one step (high V)? Well, blimey, wonder why we've been doing it then, in all these decades of structured design and project management.
And how about other factors, like morale, stress, or being overworked? Shouldn't they be at least mentioned in a real scientific study? Doing a big "we don't know why, it might possibly be genetic" shrug doesn't strike me as particularly clued.
And does procrastination really work that way? Really? Because the RL cases I've seen weren't as much a case of adding a fixed number of days, as a case of expanding to fill the deadline and then some. I.e., more of a case of "ah, I s
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.