The Truth About Procrastination

University of Calgary professor Piers Steel, an expert on procrastination, has a recently published a paper that dispels some commonly held beliefs on the subject. For example, in The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure, Steel says that the popularly cited perfectionism is not at the root of most procrastination. Rather, a lack of confidence combined with other factors such as self-control, distractibility, motivation to achieve, task aversiveness, self-efficacy and impulsiveness are strong predictors for an individual's likelihood to procrastinate.

Math-minded individuals might also be interested to see that Steel has reduced procrastination to a formula he calls the Temporal Motivational Theory. Where one's expectations of success equal (E), the value of finishing the job equal (V), the desirability of job equals (Utility), the immediacy or availability equal (Ã), and one's sensitivity to delay equals (D)...it looks like this: Ã: Utility = E x V/ÃD.

Read more: Read this right now. Or maybe put it off for awhile