productivity

by Elliot Berkman, University of Oregon and Jordan Miller-Ziegler, University of Oregon

“I love deadlines,” English author Douglas Adams once wrote. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

We’ve all had the experience of wanting to get a project done but putting it off for later. Sometimes we wait because we just don’t care enough about the project, but other times we care a lot – and still end up doing something else. I, for one, end up cleaning my house when I have a lot of papers to grade, even though I know I need to grade them.

So why do we procrastinate? Are we built to operate this way at some times? Or is there something wrong with the way we’re approaching work?

These questions are central to my research on goal pursuit, which could offer some clues from neuroscience about why we procrastinate – and how to overcome this tendency.

To do, or not to do

It all starts with a simple choice between working now on a given project and doing anything else: working on a different project, doing something fun or doing nothing at all.

The decision to work on something is driven by how much we value accomplishing the project in that moment – what psychologists call its subjective value. And procrastination, in psychological terms, is what happens when the value of doing something else outweighs the value of working now.

This way of thinking suggests a simple trick to defeat procrastination: find a way to boost the subjective value of working now, relative to the value of other things. You could increase the value of the project, decrease the value of the distraction, or some combination of the two.

For example, instead of cleaning my house, I might try to focus on why grading is personally important to me. Or I could think about how unpleasant cleaning can actually be – especially when sharing a house with a toddler.

It’s simple advice, but adhering to this strategy can be quite difficult, mainly because there are so many forces that diminish the value of working in the present.

The distant deadline

People are not entirely rational in the way they value things. For example, a dollar bill is worth exactly the same today as it is a week from now, but its subjective value – roughly how good it would feel to own a dollar – depends on other factors besides its face value, such as when we receive it.

The tendency for people to devalue money and other goods based on time is called delay discounting. For example, one study showed that, on average, receiving $100 three months from now is worth the same to people as receiving $83 right now. People would rather lose $17 than wait a few months to get a larger reward.

Other factors also influence subjective value, such as how much money someone has recently gained or lost. The key point is that there is not a perfect match between objective value and subjective value.

Delay discounting is a factor in procrastination because the completion of the project happens in the future. Getting something done is a delayed reward, so its value in the present is reduced: the further away the deadline is, the less attractive it seems to work on the project right now.

Studies have repeatedly shown that the tendency to procrastinate closely follows economic models of delay discounting. Furthermore, people who characterize themselves as procrastinators show an exaggerated effect. They discount the value of getting something done ahead of time even more than other people.

One way to increase the value of completing a task is to make the finish line seem closer. For example, vividly imagining a future reward reduces delay discounting.

No work is ‘effortless’

Not only can completing a project be devalued because it happens in the future, but working on a project can also be unattractive due to the simple fact that work takes effort.

New research supports the idea that mental effort is intrinsically costly; for this reason, people generally choose to work on an easier task rather than a harder task. Furthermore, there are greater subjective costs for work that feels harder (though these costs can be offset by experience with the task at hand).

This leads to the interesting prediction that people would procrastinate more the harder they expect the work to be. That’s because the more effort a task requires, the more someone stands to gain by putting the same amount of effort into something else (a phenomenon economists call opportunity costs). Opportunity costs make working on something that seems hard feels like a loss.

Sure enough, a group of studies shows that people procrastinate more on unpleasant tasks. These results suggest that reducing the pain of working on a project, for example by breaking it down into more familiar and manageable pieces, would be an effective way to reduce procrastination.

Your work, your identity

When we write that procrastination is a side effect of the way we value things, it frames task completion as a product of motivation, rather than ability.

In other words, you can be really good at something, whether it’s cooking a gourmet meal or writing a story, but if you don’t possess the motivation, or sense of importance, to complete the task, it’ll likely be put off.

It was for this reason that the writer Robert Hanks, in an essay for the London Review of Books, described procrastination as “a failure of appetites.”

The source of this “appetite” can be a bit tricky. But one could argue that, like our (real) appetite for food, it’s something that’s closely intertwined with our daily lives, our culture and our sense of who we are.

So how does one increase the subjective value of a project? A powerful way – one that my graduate students and I have written about in detail – is to connect the project to your self-concept. Our hypothesis is that projects seen as important to a person’s self-concept will hold more subjective value for that person.

It’s for this reason that Hanks also wrote that procrastination seems to stem from a failure to “identify sufficiently with your future self” – in other words, the self for whom the goal is most relevant.

Because people are motivated to maintain a positive self-concept, goals connected closely to one’s sense of self or identity take on much more value.

Connecting the project to more immediate sources of value, such as life goals or core values, can fill the deficit in subjective value that underlies procrastination.

Elliot Berkman, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Oregon and Jordan Miller-Ziegler, PhD Candidate in Psychology, University of Oregon

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

by Selin Malkoc, The Ohio State University

It can seem like there’s never enough time – not enough for sleep and not enough for play, not enough for cooking and not enough for exercise.

There’s a relatively new term to describe this feeling: time famine, or the sensation of having too much to do without enough time to do it.

In order to structure what little time we feel we have, one strategy we deploy is scheduling. In fact, reliance on organizational tools like daily planners has been on the rise. In two recent surveys, 51 percent of respondents said they regularly used their calendar app, while 63 percent of office workers consider calendars “very important.”

The idea is that scheduling will make you more efficient: When you allocate your time, it organizes your day into a series of appointments, meetings and calls, while blocking off free time for other activities or tasks.

But in a series of eight studies, Gabriela Tonietto, Steve Nowlis and I found that scheduling can sometimes backfire – and actually make us less productive.

An appointment approaches – and time ‘shrinks’

Much of scheduling’s downside has to do with the anticipation of a meeting or appointment. When we know a scheduled meeting or phone call is looming, it can make us feel like we have less time to do what we need to do.

In one study, we asked attendees of an academic conference whether they would go to the presidential address taking place about an hour later. Some said they would, and others said they wouldn’t. Those who planned to attend the address reported that the hour leading up to it felt shorter.

In another study, we had half of the participants imagine that a friend would be coming over in an hour, while the other half were told to imagine they had no plans. We asked all of the participants how many minutes they “subjectively” felt like they could spend reading during that same hour.

Those who were told to imagine that a friend would be coming over reported that the hour leading up to the visit had only 40 usable minutes for reading. Those who were told to imagine they had no plans felt as if they had 49 minutes to read.

So the presence of an upcoming activity seems to have shrunk how much time people felt they had to do something.

Why might this happen?

We believe that when there’s an appointment looming, we direct our attention to it, whether it’s mentally preparing for it or simply dreading it. This makes the future appointment feel more substantial; as a result, the time interval leading up to the scheduled activity feels limited and insufficient.

Free to do … less?

But in the end, you still have the same amount of time leading up to a scheduled event.

So feeling like you have less time shouldn’t really matter, right? But it does. The feeling by itself can influence what people decide to do.

We know that when something is scarce, people consider it more valuable and are less willing to part with it.

The same is true for time. If time feels limited, people are less likely to use it – even when it’s in their best interest.

So in another study, we gave participants an empty calendar for the next day and asked them to fill it up, as accurately as possible, with what they had scheduled (including preparation or transition times). This allowed us to correctly calculate how much free time they had in between each planned event.

We then gave participants an opportunity to participate in a second study. Everyone made a choice between participating in a 30-minute online study that would earn them US$2.50, or signing up for a 45-minute online study to receive $5.00. Each would take place during an hourlong window.

On our end, we strategically chose the hourlong window for the participants. We told half of them that the study would take place within an hour of an event they’d scheduled. The other half would take the study during a time period that concluded with a half-hour cushion before their scheduled event.

We found that participants in the first group were much less likely to choose the longer but more lucrative study – despite having more than enough time to complete the study.

In yet another study, we wondered if the mere reminder of an upcoming event could have a similar effect.

Before beginning an unrelated study, we told half of the participants that they would have about five minutes to do whatever they wanted. We told the other half they had about five minutes before we would “get started.”

For those in the latter group, the simple mention of “starting something” was enough to change their behavior. We found that they engaged in significantly fewer activities, whether it was answering emails or checking social media, in this short five-minute period.

You’re less famished than you think

Some might think that time famine arises because they have too much to do and not enough time to do it.

While this may certainly be the case at times, our results suggest that the fault also lies in our own perception of what we feel can be done with the time we have. In other words, it’s important to realize that we might be contributing to our time famine.

If you love scheduling and planning out your days, a trick could be to schedule events or tasks back-to-back, which leaves you with larger chunks of unscheduled time. Several uninterrupted hours of unscheduled time will feel longer, especially if there’s nothing scheduled looming.

It can be effective to remind yourself that time isn’t as short as it feels. Even if you don’t think you’ll have enough time to complete something, you can still start a task and finish it later.

As Aristotle once said, “Well begun is half done.”

Selin Malkoc, Associate Professor of Marketing, The Ohio State University