Research into procrastination shows surprising findings

A University of Calgary professor in the Haskayne School of Business has recently published his magnum opus on the subject of procrastination " and it''s only taken him 10 years.

Dr Piers Steel's comprehensive analysis of procrastination research presents some surprising conclusions on the subject, such as:

• 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
• Procrastination can be explained by a single mathematical equation.

"Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task," Steel said.

"Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact, perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more."

Other predictors of procrastination include: task aversiveness, impulsiveness, distractibility and how much a person is motivated to achieve. Not all delays can be considered procrastination the key is that a person must believe it would be better to start working on given tasks immediately, but still not start.

It''s estimated that about 15-20% of the general population are procrastinators.

Steel has also a formula for procrastination 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 Utility = E x V/ÃD

It''s still unclear why some people may be more prone to developing procrastination behaviour, but some evidence suggests it may be genetic.