Thursday, January 11, 2007

Procrastinating about procrastinating

This has to be the best news I've heard in a while: Why We Procrastinate.

Some other tidbits from the study (which took 10 years):

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 (Ã) and the person’s sensitivity to delay (D).

It looks like this and uses the Greek letter Ã: Utility = E x V/ÃD


It’s still unclear why some people may be more prone to developing procrastination behavior, but some evidence suggests it may be genetic.
and
"But the good thing about doing a study on procrastination is that if you put work off for a day or more, you can always call it field research and get away with it."
Damn, I knew I was doing the wrong work.

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