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D

Doubt. The eccentric British writer soaked for

hours in the bathtub, lollygagged away entire days in bed and dreamed up ever more fanciful excuses for his exasperated editor. When he died in 2001, he had spent a decade on the book without even a complete first draft to show for it. Adams was a poster boy for procrastinators everywhere, even though he did manage to finish four Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books and many others. “I love deadlines,” he once quipped. “I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

We all struggle occasionally with the desire to postpone an unpleasant job, be it dealing with boring paperwork, studying for an exam or clearing out clutter. “Everyone has times when at the end of the day they don’t know what they have done with it,” says retired psychologist Robert Topman. “But procrastinators have these big black holes.” For some 15 to 20 per cent of us, the problem is serious. Regularly delaying tasks you know you should start working on immediately doesn’t just prevent you achieving your goals and full potential; it can also be expensive, bad for your health, and may even endanger your life and those of the people around you.

There have been numerous attempts to identify what makes a procrastinator. Perfectionism, a fear of failure and having a hostile or rebellious personality have all been blamed. Now one researcher has taken a broader view of the problem, looking not just at the ditherers themselves but also at the sorts of tasks and situations most likely to suffer delays. Using all the available information from previous studies, psychologist Piers Steel at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, has identified the four key factors behind procrastination and used them to draw up a formula that predicts when it is likely to occur. Steel claims his analysis could not only help unhappy procrastinators minimise their delaying tactics, but also shed new light on motivation in general.

So does leaving things till the last minute ever pay off, or do procrastinators inevitably pay a price for their delay? One North

American survey found that individuals who leave the preparation of tax returns to the last moment make errors costing them $400 per return on average – so no pay-off there.

Then there are the students, journalists and others who spend their evenings in the pub and watching TV, leaving assignments and term papers to the eleventh hour, confident that they do their best work under pressure. Are they deluding themselves? Bruce

Tuckman, an educational psychologist at Ohio State University in Columbus, decided to test this claim in one of his study-skills classes.

First he gave 116 students a questionnaire to measure how prone they were to procrastination. Then he tracked each student’s progress on a series of 216 course activities and assignments, most of which had to be done online by a specified time

and submitted electronically. Students who scored low on the procrastination

questionnaire and who worked at a steady pace tended to fare well academically, with an average grade of 3.6 out of 4. Not so those who scored high on the questionnaire, whose grade average was just 2.9. It is possible that they were simply not as bright as their peers, but previous studies have shown virtually no correlation between general mental ability and procrastination. Instead, Tuckman believes that students are merely indulging in wishful thinking when they claim that deadline pressure hones their performance. “They really don’t know how well they would actually do

if they didn’t procrastinate,” he says. The pitfalls of delay don’t end there, however. In 2007, psychologist Fuschia Sirois, then at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, revealed that procrastination also poses health risks. Using an online survey of 254 adults from Europe, the US, Canada and Australia, Sirois discovered that those who continually postponed things were less likely than others to get annual medical and dental check-ups and to practise basic healthy behaviours, such as exercising regularly. The survey also revealed that procrastinators suffered more from stress and illnesses such as flu and digestive problems. “Procrastination is bad for your health in more ways than one,” she notes.

Sirois also asked whether subjects had accident-proofed their homes in standard ways, such as clearing stairways of trip hazards and regularly testing their smoke alarms. The more serious the procrastinator, she discovered, the less likely they were to take steps to prevent home accidents. “They weren’t looking after basic household safety issues, from owning a fire extinguisher and making sure that the batteries in the smoke detector worked, to seeing that faulty electrical appliances were dealt with,” she says. Even in households with a history of accidents, procrastinators still put off addressing problems or asking others, such as building managers, to do so.

“Procrastination is a style of dealing with problems that’s not only maladaptive and potentially dangerous for the individual, but also for the people around them,” she says. “We tend to think that procrastinators make their own hell and then have to deal with it. But it does seem to be having a wider impact.”

Someone who knows this all too well is Steel. Sitting in his office, he recalls some of his own experiences with procrastination. As a college student he once fell asleep during an exam, after a long night of last-minute cramming. Later, while working as an industrial psychologist, he decided to take a fresh look at the causes of his desire to defer. It took him over a decade of planning – and postponing – to write a book on the subject. When Steel began his quest, however, he quickly discovered a wealth of data. Other researchers had conducted hundreds of >

studies looking for connections between procrastination and a variety of factors including age, sex, the nature of the task, the timing of rewards, and a host of personality traits. Each seemed to Steel like a separate piece of a bigger puzzle which nobody had attempted to piece together. This, he decided, would be his task.