in which jeremy retypes highlights from someone else's article

Tonight I read this Psychological Bulletin article on procrastination* that was featured in the news and that I mentioned in my post about the Kiwi Cloak quasi-coercive anti-procrastination tool. Beyond whatever personal-practical interests I might have in better understanding procrastination, I also find it interesting as someone in sociology who is interested in rational choice, both because procrastination is perhaps by definition irrational and it's also a great example of something people experience as an individual failing even though there's ample reason to think that it has much to do with the social-cognitive environments in which people find themselves.

Anyway, not that the article is especially splendid, but it's a good systematic review of the area and I did found myself typing in parts as I read it. I've decided to re-arrange and present a dozen quotes here. Not that anybody who reads this blog procrastinates, but I thought maybe some of you might know someone, or know someone who knows someone, and thus perhaps parts will either resonate or not with what your thoughts about procrastination.

• "[T]o procrastinate is to voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay." (p. 66)
• "The intention-action gap refers to the degree to which people follow up on their original work plans. Most procrastination researchers suppose that delaying is not only irrational but unintentional... Failure to act upon one's intentions is quintessentially self-regulatory failure [cite], almost the definition of low self control." (p. 70)
• "Several studies have linked procrastination to individual performance, with the procrastinator performing more poorly overall [cites] and to individual well-being, with the procrastinator being more miserable in the long-term [cites]" (p. 65)
• "The first actual historical analysis on procrastination was written by Milgram (1992), who argued that technically advanced societies required numerous committments and deadlines, which gives rise to procrastination." (p. 66)
• "Kachgal et al. (2001) believed that procrastination is on the rise. This would be consistent with the increase in other forms of self-regulatory failure (e.g., obesity, gambling, excessive debt) over the last 25 years [cites]." (p. 71)
• "[J]obs are expected to become more unstructured or at least self-structured [cites]. The absence of imposed direction means that the competent worker must create the order--he or she must self-manage or self-regulate [cite]. As structure continues to decrease, the opportunity for workers to procrastinate will concomitantly increase. Furthermore, the prevalence and availability of temptation, for example, in the forms of computer gaming or Internet messaging, should continue to exacerbate the problem of procrastination." (p. 84)
• "[A] poor mood itself may not only result from procrastination but also create it." (p. 70)
• "Procrastinators tended to spend more time on projects if they were likely to fail, whereas the opposite relationship was seen for nonprocrastinators [cite]." (p. 77)
• "As O'Donoghue and Rabin (1999) concluded, 'Many people who procrastinate only moderately do so not because of intrinsic self-control, but because they have developed schemes to overcome procrastination.'" (p. 71)
• "Researchers should be able to reduce procrastination simply by adjusting situational aspects, specifically the proximity to temptation and prevalence of stimulus cues. A good example is e-mail, with over 90% of college computer users reporting that they use it to delay irrationally [cites]. Because the e-mail icon is perpetually in the field of view, and its access borders on the instantaneous, simply making e-mail less visible or delaying access to it should decrease procrastination." (p. 82)
• "For Kuhl and Goschke (1994), 'The repeated use of strict time schedules... fosters the formation of behavioral habits that circumvent conflicts with competing tendencies by establishing quasi-automatic trigger conditions.'" (p. 83)
• "A considerable amount of reesarch has shown that goal setting does reduce procrastination. Boice (1989) found that daily writing goals helped to keep academic writers on a healthy schedule of publications... Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) investigated goal setting (specifically, creating deadlines to prevent procrastination), finding that they were effective, but more effective when set by other people." (p. 83)

*Steel, Piers. 2007. "The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure." Psychological Bulletin 133:65-94.