The Procrastination Equation – The Mathematics of Getting Things Done

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The World Is Governed by Universal Laws

When you let go of an object, the law of gravity will make sure it crashes to the floor. If said object is a balloon filled with helium, it will go the opposite direction and float to the heavens. If you add energy to a substance, it becomes hot. If it loses energy, it becomes colder.

All of these are laws of physics.

There are other laws as well. For example, let’s take the classical economic law of supply and demand. If demand for a certain good increases, the price of that good will tend to go up. A recent example is cryptocurrency, like bitcoin. In its early years you could buy thousands of bitcoins for a few dollars; by the end of 2017, when everyone wanted in, one bitcoin was worth about twenty thousand dollars, and within a year, when they didn’t, it had lost more than three quarters of that.

Did something inherently change about the nature of bitcoin to justify these changes? Not really. It was just that people suddenly didn’t want their bitcoin anymore, so when demand dropped, the price crashed as well.

Then you’ve got certain biological and psychological laws. For example, we tend to find people more physically attractive when their faces are symmetrical. If people are nice to us, we tend to like them more as well (unless they’re just sucking up and act like sycophants to get favors in return).

Do You Know What Else Is Governed by Laws Like These?

Your tendency to procrastinate.

That’s right. When you have difficulty keeping your attention to the task at hand, this is because there’s a mathematical formula at work in your brain that measures certain factors and compares them to one another.

The author and professor of economics, Piers Steel, PhD., calls this formula the ‘Procrastination Equation’. In a book that he wrote about this topic, he delves a bit deeper into these elements that determine whether you’re eager to do a certain activity as soon as possible, or whether you’ll tend to postpone it.

This formula, according to Steel, looks like this:

At the center of it all, there’s motivation. This one is obvious. It’s the drive you experience, the inner desire to do a certain thing. You’ll notice in your life that your motivation for watching TV or playing video games is probably a lot higher than your motivation to clean your room or go on a diet.

According to Piers Steel, this motivation is determined by four different quantifiable factors. These are: value, expectancy, impulsiveness and delay.

At the top of the equation are ‘expectancy’ and ‘value’. At the bottom, we find ‘impulsiveness’ and ‘delay’. If you’re not much into math, what the formula says is this: the higher the expectancy and value that are associated to a certain task, and the lower your impulsiveness, and the time you’ve got to finish this task, the higher your motivation will be, and vice versa.

It’s this motivation that is the central determinant of whether you will procrastinate or not.

So let’s go a bit deeper into all these elements and examine why you’re procrastinating.

Factor 1: Expectancy

Expectancy, at first sight, seems like a bit of a vague word. What it means in practice is the chance that a certain activity will yield positive results. It’s the chance of success.

As an example, let’s take investing money. You’ve got a thousand dollars to invest. Let’s say there’s a certain stock that you think will perform well, and you expect a ten percent return on it. On the other hand, you could invest in triple A-bonds that yield about five percent. These types of bonds are very secure, so you’re certain to get your money’s worth.

The higher your expectancy that the stock will do well, the more likely that you’ll choose the stock over the bonds. On the other hand, when the stock is highly volatile, and the possibility that it will drop in value becomes higher, you’ll be more likely to choose the bonds instead.

Now, what if the financial markets are a complete mess? Stocks are doing poorly, bonds aren’t having a good time either, and all the banks are failing too. In this doomsday scenario, you’re probably not going to want to invest in either stocks, bonds or even a savings account, because the chance you’ll lose all your money is pretty high for all three investments.

When you expect to make a huge profit, you’ll probably be a lot more likely to invest

In this case, the expectancy of making a profit is close to zero. As a result, your motivation to invest will be non-existent too. Hiding your money under your mattress is the safer option here.

Now, maybe investing is a bit too abstract a concept to explain procrastination. When we procrastinate, sometimes money is involved. This often happens when we have to pay the bills, or we don’t put a part of our earnings in a savings account right away.

But it’s not the most common type. Most of the time, we have trouble with doing a school assignment, a project for work, cleaning the house, or something like that.

So let’s take another type of activity: a paper you have to write for school.

Now, imagine that this is a very easy paper. You don’t have to do a lot of research, the topic you have to write about is pretty simple too. The chances of getting good grades are pretty high. The chances of failing are more or less non-existent, provided you put in a minimum amount of effort. You’ll probably be eager to start this task, because hey, easy top grades.

In other words: the expectancy of success is high.

In another scenario, you have to write a PhD dissertation. Apparently, procrastination is rampant amongst people who are working on their PhD degree. And why is that?

Simple: it’s hard, the chance of failure is real, and your degree won’t be served to you on a silver platter. You really have to put in some serious work to get good results. The chances of success are a lot lower than when writing an easy 5000-word paper. If it was easy, everyone would do it.

In this case, expectancy is much lower, and as a result, motivation will drop as well.

Factor 2: Value

The second element that will decrease the risk of procrastination is a high value.

When talking about value, the first thing you might think about is how much something costs. For example, that diamond ring you bought for your fiancée is pretty valuable. A Porsche or a Mercedes are valuable cars, compared to say, a Fiat or a Volkswagen.

Value isn’t necessarily limited to the monetary cost you place on something. Some things can have great emotional or personal value. You might treasure a friendship with someone. You might place great value on your free time, or your ability to speak and think freely.

Value, in the sense that Piers Steel talks about it, is simply the reward that a certain activity brings. This can be both a material reward or a non-material reward.

To go back to our example on investing, let’s say you’ve got two banks that offer different savings accounts. With Bank A, you get an interest rate of two percent. With Bank B, you get an interest rate of three percent. Since these are normally very safe investments, it’s more or less guaranteed that you’ll get your money’s worth. So high versus low expectancy is out of the picture here.

In this case, the reward, or the value, is higher when you give your money to Bank B. That means that your motivation to put your money in Bank B will be higher than the motivation to put your money in a savings account with Bank A.

Let’s give another example, for example, your diet.

In this example, you’re a few pounds overweight. You’re not super obese, but you could lose a few inches and look a little better. So you decide to cut the Snickers bars and the ice cream and replace them with fruit and vegetables.

Problem is: salads and tomatoes just don’t taste as good as Ben and Jerry’s. Whereas ice cream lights up the reward center in our brains like a Christmas tree, the reward value when eating an apple is more akin to a small candle. So, in principle, your motivation to eat crappy, but highly rewarding food, is going to be much, much higher than your motivation to eat healthy, yet not-so-rewarding food. This is all the more insidious when you know that food companies actively try to engineer food to make it as rewarding as possible, so that you’ll eat (and therefore buy) more of it.

I doubt there are many people who procrastinate when it comes to eating hotdogs

On the other hand, since we humans are beings that can look ahead and forego instant rewards for future rewards, there are other factors at work.

For example, even though the instant reward of crappy food is higher, you still might forego it in favor of the healthier food. This is because you know that if you eat healthy food, you’re going to look better in the future, which will increase the chances of that guy or girl you fancy to notice you, which in turn will increase your chances of procreational activities (which are, let’s face it, much more rewarding than eating pizza). When you take in account this kind of reward, postponing your diet and exercise regime will become much less likely.

Different kinds of rewards can be weighed against each other to determine the motivation of doing one thing versus another.

So that’s more or less what value is all about.

Factor 3: Impulsiveness

Next stop: impulsiveness. Here, we’ve come to the factors that detract from motivation.

Our ability to stop and think about the consequences of our actions plays a HUGE role in whether we procrastinate or not.

Say for example, that someone wants to give you five thousand dollars. But, he says, I’ll give you double the amount in a year if you don’t accept it now. Now, let’s assume two different scenarios.

In the first, you only get five seconds to think about it. In the second, you get half an hour. Research has shown that we tend to go for the immediate reward if we only get a very limited time to think about such an offer, and are more likely to go for the postponed reward if we get more time. In a similar fashion, impulsive people, which are people that tend to make quick decisions without thoroughly thinking them through, tend to go for immediate rewards, whereas people who aren’t impulsive at all will see things in a long term perspective.

Imagine, for example, that you have the choice between going out for beers with your buds or finishing that school assignment. Impulsive people will tend to put off on doing that school assignment and will say yes to the booze. Someone who is a lot less impulsive will be more likely to stop and think: ‘hey, if I go out to drink beer and don’t make my assignment now, that might get me in trouble’.

An impulsive person will therefore tend to have a lower motivation to do the assignment, and procrastinate more.

By the way, this is the book. You can act impulsive for a change and buy it RIGHT NOW!

Impulsiveness plays a key role in your ability to adhere to a diet as well. If you’re an impulsive person by nature, you’ll be less likely to resist when someone offers you a cookie. If you’re less impulsive, you’ll be able to see things in a long-term perspective: a cookie might act as an instant reward now, but it will harm you in the future, as you’ll be more likely to get fat.

The big problem with impulsiveness, compared to all the other factors, is that it’s not something you can do much about. That’s because it’s mostly an inherent character trait, linked to your biology. Some people are just naturally impulsive, while others are more able to stop and think about their actions.

Factor 4: Delay

Finally, we have what’s called ‘delay’. This simply means the amount of time that we have to complete a task.

Even when you procrastinate, you’ll probably not postpone the activity indefinitely. You might delay working on your paper today. You can say you don’t feel like working on it tomorrow. You feel a bit ill on Saturday, so it’s not happening then either. But it’s due to be turned in on Monday morning, so you’re definitely going to write it Sunday. Any further delay is simply impossible (unless you don’t care that much about your academic results).

The more days you’ve got left on your calendar, the less likely you’ll do anything

You probably notice this during exam periods as well. When your exam is still ten days away, you’ll say to yourself: ‘I’ve got some time, let’s watch some more Netflix’. Five days later, you’ll be like: ‘I’ve still got a reasonable amount of time left, but I should start getting to work now’. But even though you’re getting some actual work done, you’re still taking way too many breaks. Then you suddenly realize that the exam is tomorrow, you’ve still got two hundred pages to study. So you start cramming like mad until deep into the night.

A similar thing happens with people who want to diet and exercise. Oftentimes, they’ll wait until summer is around the corner to start working out and start watching their diet. By which time, it’s usually too late to get completely lean and toned.

And this is more or less what delay is all about.

So Let’s Do Some Math, Shall We?

Now that we’ve talked about all the different pieces of the puzzle, it’s time to put everything together. So why don’t we create a few example equations to show what we have learned and put it into practice?

Let’s take an example of one of each of the above elements and give it a rating from 1 to 10, 1 being lowest, 10 being highest.

As we talked a bit about investing above, it seems like a good concept to explain the Procrastination Equation.

Say, you’ve got five hundred dollars. And you can either choose to invest that, or buy a new game console with a few video games. (in this example, you’re an avid gamer, so playing the newest video games is very rewarding).

On the other hand, you’ve got your eye on a stock that has produced a return of 8 percent in the last year. Let’s give this stock a reward value of 8, while the new video game console has a reward value of 9.

Then, there’s expectancy. The stock market is a bit shaky, and chances are the company will do less well in the future, even though it made a decent profit in the last years. So expectancy is about a 4.

The video games you can buy get average review scores of 80 out of 100. The expectancy, (the chance that you’ll enjoy playing them) is 8.

In this scenario, you’re also a rather impulsive person, so you’ll be likely to choose instant rewards over long-term ones. Impulsiveness is rated 8. It’s lower for video games since it has the short term reward, so let’s give that a 4 compared to other activities.

Yay. Math.

Delay: you’ve got lots of time to buy the stock. You can still buy it next week, for about the same price. Let’s give delay a score of 8 here.

The video game console is on sale today and you won’t be able to afford it next week. You have to buy it right now. Delay gets a 2 out of 10.

If we put in the numbers, we get two different equations with two different results

• Motivation to buy stock:
• (8*4)/(8*8)=32/64=0.5
• Motivation to buy video games:
• (9*8)/(4*2)=72/8=9

The result: your motivation to buy video games is 18 times higher than it is for investing money. You will therefore be much more likely to buy the video game console than buy stock.

Putting It All Together

So this is what procrastination is: comparing activities versus one another and choosing one of them based on the value they bring, the expectancy of success, your tendency towards impulsive behavior, and the delay you’re allowed for doing them.

How to Make the Equation Work for You

Once procrastination is broken into four parts, each one becomes something you can measure and then change. As the management guru Peter Drucker put it: “What gets measured, gets managed.” Raise expectancy and value, lower impulsiveness and delay, and motivation goes up. So, without much further ado, let’s go and unwind the knots.

Raise Expectancy: Become an Optimist, About the Right Things

Expectancy is about what you think will happen at the end of the road, and you can influence your own thoughts, so in theory this one should not be too hard. Start with your outlook. Pessimists, for whom the glass is half empty, won’t likely ever win any trophies, because why bother putting in any effort if failure is a sure thing? Optimists have a better chance of succeeding, because they believe in their ability to succeed and so are more likely to put in the effort. That can backfire too: an optimist who believes everything will work out fine anyway may not put in any effort either, and then it obviously won’t.

So lean towards the optimist side, but be optimistic about the right thing: not that a positive result is guaranteed whatever you do, but that the large effort you put in will lead to one. Don’t believe you’ll pass your exams without studying (that’s bad optimism, or even delusion); believe that you’ll pass if you study hard (good optimism); and never think you’ll fail anyway (pessimism). You won’t win a war by thinking you’ll lose. You won’t win one by thinking you won’t need to fight, either.

How do you turn yourself into an optimist? Not by endlessly repeating “I can do it!”. That doesn’t work at all. What does work is a success spiral: set yourself a small goal that is easily attainable, and when you hit it you gain a little self-confidence. Then set another, a bit harder but still well manageable. Keep succeeding, build up your trust in yourself, and optimism follows as a natural result.

Raise Value: Make the Task Pay

Whether a task is valuable to you depends on what you care about. The value can be extrinsic (something you receive as a reward) or intrinsic (the task being rewarding in itself). Intrinsically valuable tasks, such as creative work, are fulfilling; tasks without it feel like an awful chore. The most powerful thing you can do is find work you really like doing: there are people who play video games and stream them for millions of views, and it is highly unlikely they ever procrastinate on the job. You don’t have to look that far, though. If you are a fitness enthusiast, try becoming a personal trainer; if you like being creative with your pen, take up copywriting; if you like coffee, train to be a barista.

Getting a new job isn’t that convenient for most people, so if you prefer to stay where you are, find ways to make your current work more rewarding. Gamify the boring parts: set little goals to keep improving, and your mind will rekindle as you complete them. And acknowledge your own success. If you did a good job, reward yourself. Studying for exams and finding it hard to keep your attention on your books? Give yourself a reward for each chapter you finish today. It doesn’t have to be anything big: one episode of your favorite show (but only one!), or a cup of coffee and some cookies. Whatever floats your boat.

Lower Impulsiveness: Change Your Surroundings, Not Your Willpower

This one, I’ll be honest, is hard, because impulsiveness is mostly a biological trait, set as soon as you are conceived. Brain surgery is out, and so are chemicals. What’s left is going around it. At work, the company network blocks the websites that could interfere, and your boss and colleagues provide a powerful form of social control. At home you have none of that, so the best thing to do is install a program on your computer that blocks these distractions and is hard to get around, such as (insert shameless advertising) FocusMe. Eliminate pop-ups and notifications so you’re not encouraged to check e-mail every half hour; set fixed times and process your mail in bulk. Since you can’t do anything but work on your computer, that’s what you’ll do.

Then there is your environment. When you’re working, lots of usually uninteresting things suddenly become extremely interesting, so work in a clean, tidied-up room with no TV, no books, no magazines and definitely no video game console. What you should not do is rely on willpower and self-control. These are limited resources, easily used up, and very unreliable allies in your fight against procrastination. It’s much simpler not to give yourself the opportunity to get distracted.

Lower Delay: Bring the Deadline Closer

Delay might be the easiest one on the list. The longer the period you’re given (or give yourself) to finish a task, the greater the chance you’ll procrastinate. That’s why people who tend to procrastinate do better in jobs with lots of close deadlines, like journalism: a journalist can’t afford to report the news next week. If they do, they’re not a reporter but a historian. If you’re a chronic procrastinator, journalism might be the ideal job for you.

A more reasonable option than changing career is to promise your boss you’ll get the job done faster, so missing the date has real consequences. Find a co-worker and each commit to a task you have been putting off (our friends at Focusmate have an awesome solution for this). Or cut a large task into smaller pieces that are easy to achieve, put them in your calendar, and use the Pomodoro Technique on each chunk. Keep the goals realistic: writing a chapter in a few days is possible, writing a whole book in a week probably isn’t. Hitting those small goals also feeds the spiral of optimism above. Finally, create a routine. If you do a task regularly it becomes an automatic habit that starts without conscious effort, even if it’s unpleasant, and if it’s automatic there won’t be any delay.

Put It All on One Goal

All of the above is general. To get the full benefit, pick a specific objective and devise specific strategies for it from the toolkit; reading the book and applying it half-heartedly won’t help you at all. Say you want to write a book, but you’re procrastinating. Sit down and devise a battle plan:

• Objective one, instill optimism. Know that if you put in the effort, it will be a great book. Then build the success spiral: write a chapter every week. After the first one your optimism will start to bloom, and procrastination will drop with every chapter you finish.
• Objective two, increase value. Write what you actually care about. Then set an extrinsic reward for each mini-goal, a movie, dinner at a nice restaurant, a new video game, and write it down beforehand so you have a bucket list of gifts to yourself. Reward yourself with a vacation when all the work is done; you’ve earned it.
• Objective three, reduce impulsiveness. Create a working room with only a table to sit at, clean and tidy, with no other ways to distract yourself. Keep Steam off the laptop, and install an app like FocusMe (there we go again with the product placement) that blocks everything else during your writing hours. Your brain is easily distracted by its very nature, so optimize the environment rather than relying on willpower.
• Objective four, reduce delay. Divide the book into measurable goals and give each a deadline of a week or even a day (you can always edit later). Make a bet with a friend that you’ll pay up if you miss it or, even better, donate to a charity you hate. Create real deadlines with consequences, and a routine so conscious effort is not required.

The same toolkit works for studying, work or anything else you keep putting off. Be creative and, believe it or not, math will be your best friend: the equation starts working for you instead of against you. These are the CliffsNotes; there is more in Piers Steel’s book The Procrastination Equation itself, so pick it up if you have problems getting things done.

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