http://www.psychologytoday.

com/blog/yourehired/201112/the-limits-ambition The Limits of Ambition

Five steps to achievable goals Published on December 9, 2011 by Carl Beuke, Ph.D. in You're Hired

Jumper (Peak District, UK) - (C) Matt Bayliss 2006 Watching the climber, you could tell that he was doing this against his better judgement. He inched his way up the rock face, trembling, tense, gripping tightly. Every couple of metres he would stop and fumble for several minutes, finding a nut or cam to place in a crevice or a sling to place over a protrusion. He then clipped a quickdraw caribiner onto the gear, and his climbing rope through the caribiner for safety, before he continued to climb up above this most recent piece of protection. He was never really sure, though, whether he had placed the gear right, because he had only been shown the mechanics of placing gear that morning.

Over eight metres above the ground, and around a metre above his last piece of protection, he fell. The force of his fall dislodged the cam, and then the next piece of gear, and then the next, and then he hit the ground with a thud. A group of my friends saw this climber fall and the ambulance take him away, but I don't know how he fared in hospital. At best, it would have been a long and painful recovery process. In the workplace, people sometimes make similar mistakes to that climber, and at times the result is a collision with reality that can be nearly as painful. People seek roles that are far beyond their current levels of experience and skill, and sometimes they get them. The result can be failure and a difficult managing out' process. Ambition, achievement striving, and risk-taking are highly valued by our society, but they can come with a dark side. High achievers typically believe in setting themselves ambitious goals and working hard to achieve them (see How Do High Achievers Really Think?), but how do you know when you're pushing things too far? There are two ways that overambition can bite. The first is skipping steps. The climber mentioned at the start of this article falls into that category. No doubt if he had completed appropriate training and developed his gear placement skills through large amounts of deliberate practice, within a few months he would have been able to scale the rock face in safety, which would have been an exhilarating rather than tragic experience. Focusing on the basics first is one of the keys to success. The second type of overambition is setting unattainable or highly improbable goals (occasional claims that anything is possible notwithstanding). If I were to set myself the goal of becoming an All Black (i.e. a player in our national rugby team), the odds of success would be functionally equivalent to zero. While skipping steps' often entails risk, the most common problem with setting unattainable goals is the opportunity cost - that is, while you are working towards this goal that you will never achieve, you are missing out on the opportunity to do something else at which you might be more likely to succeed, or which you might enjoy more. So how do you set a realistic goal? Here are some essential questions to ask yourself.
1. Why do you want this?

It can be hard, but it's essential to reflect honestly on why you want to achieve a goal. Your reasons for wanting to achieve the goal are what will keep you going when times get tough. It's also worth asking yourself what other ways might there be of satisfying the underlying motivations behind your goal. For example, maybe you want to study medicine in order to help people stay healthy', but your level of academic interest and past performance suggests this might be unrealistic and/or involve some undesirable tradeoffs. You could consider setting a goal of acceptance into one of the allied health professions (e.g. radiology or speech therapy) to achieve the same ends by different means. If your reason for wanting to tightrope walk across Niagra falls is to get famous', you could consider making a funny youtube video with you and your dog wearing a silly hat instead, thus reducing the risk of a plunge to your death.

2. What's the base rate of achieving the goal?

The base rate of success is the percentage of qualified applicants' who seek to achieve a goal, who succeed. You can calculate the base rate of success by taking the number of people that succeed in attaining the goal, and dividing that by the number of people that try to attain it. For example, New Zealand's squad for the 2011 Rugby World Cup contained 30 men (15 of whom take the field at the start of a game), and there are roughly 750,000 New Zealand males between 15 and 39 years of age. If you assume that every New Zealand male in this age group would like to be an All Black (most people do), you can calculate the base rate' of becoming an All Black at around 0.004%, or 1 in 25 000. So, to become an All Black I would need to become a better rugby player than 24 999 other young (or young-ish) men, which sounds pretty difficult (because it is). Similarly, in the US many young men aspire to earn a money playing professional sport, but this is often highly unrealistic. For example, statistics show that of high school basketball players, only one in 3,400 go on to play professionally. On the other hand, the success rate at long-term weight loss is around 20%, which is still pretty difficult but is well within the realms of the possible. Maybe you are trying to achieve something that no-one else has succeeded at before (good for you). It's worth investigating how many people may have tried before you, and the reasons they failed.
3. What are the factors that increase the likelihood of success?

Find out what leads to success at the goal you are seeking to achieve - you're going to need to know anyway. How many of these factors work in your favour, and how many can you control? Consider how you compare against these success factors in the light of the base rate of success. For example, you might be tall, well co-ordinated and dedicated to training, but are you taller, better co-ordinated and more dedicated to training than 3,399 other high school basketball players? People have a tendency to ignore the base rate of success and just focus on the success factors when estimating how likely they are to succeed at a given task.
4. What will the cost be of reaching the goal?

Make an informed estimate of what it would take to achieve your goal (e.g. the time and money required). Achieving any worthwhile goal requires tradeoffs and sacrifice, most often the sacrifice of time available to do something else. You are more likely to achieve your goal if you are realistic about this from the outset. Bear in mind that it's easy to underestimate the costs of reaching a goal (e.g. most people underestimate the time required to complete a given task by over 50%). Compare the costs of reaching to goal with your reasons for wanting to achieve it. Which weighs the heavier?

5. What's the cost of failure?

What happens if you don't reach your goal? A more positive way of asking this question is, "What's my contingency plan?" For example, most medical schools have very low acceptance rates. However, applicants who 'just miss out' have a range of other career options which may prove to be equally or more satisfying, depending on their interests (e.g. research, science writing, teaching, or other health professions like pharmacy or dentistry). On the other hand, the cost of just missing out on a professional athletic career could be very high if you haven't planned an alternative to fall back on. The consequences of an overly ambitious or poorly planned hiking expedition could be fatal.
The compelling story test

When you understand why you want to achieve your goal, what the base rate of success is, what the key success factors are, the cost of reaching the goal and the cost of failure, you are in a good position to make an informed decision about whether this goal is realistic for you. Do the answers to these questions add up to a compelling story? Can you convince others that you have a realistic chance of achieving the goal? Can you convince yourself? Aim high, but don't forget to aim. p.s. What are your experiences with goal setting? Have you set any goals that you later regretted or realised were unrealistic? Leave a comment if you'd like to share your experiences.

Does Visualization Really Work? Heres Evidence That It Does

Do you remember a scene in The Matrix when Neo opens his eyes and says I know Kung Fu? I bet you wished you could learn that fast. I know I did. I have wonderful news for you. You can become an expert in a similar way, just not as fast, by using the power of your mind. You just need to learn a technique called visualization.
What is Visualization?

In laymens terms, it means recreating all the images, sounds and feelings in your mind surrounding an activity in order to practice in a perfect environment. Just like the small dojo where Morpheus and Neo fight in the movie.

It may sound hard, but let me prove to you that you can do it. Take a couple of minutes to close your eyes and imagine yourself going to the kitchen and getting a cup of coffee. Try to imagine every detail, even the smell of the coffee. Were you able to imagine the cup of coffee? Maybe you were using your favorite cup, and that awesome coffee brand that you love. You may even want a cup of coffee right now. Thats how visualization works. Dont worry if you didnt catch all the details, just like any other skill, you need to practice. However, it is worth the time it takes to learn it.
Some Proof That This Technique Works

This example has been used to death because it proves visualization works time and time again. Australian Psychologist Alan Richardson made a little experiment. He took a group of basketball players, divided them in 3 groups and tested each players ability to make free throws.

The first group would practice 20 minutes every day. The second would only visualize themselves making free throws, but no real practice was allowed. The third one would not practice or visualize.

The results were astounding. There was significant improvement on the group that only visualized; they were almost as good as they guys who actually practiced. Another great example comes from one of my favorite artists. Emilie Autumn, who is a great violinist, and claims that her music writing skills were developed by playing Pachelbels Canon in D mentally every night just to suppress her auditory hallucinations. She would picture herself playing it with her violin while still being very young. Imagine all the hours she accumulated playing in her mind. That could actually get you closer to the 10,000 hour mark.
How to Use Visualization

Visualization is simple, but it requires you to practice often to get the best results out if it. Just follow the steps and enjoy the process:

Relax: Take a couple of deep breathes, let go of all the tension, and close your eyes. It works even better if you find a quiet spot where nobody will bother you. I do it right before I go to bed. Start imagining the environment: Lets say you want to play guitar. Start by imagining your guitar, the shape, then the strings, the thickness of each string, until you have a clear and defined picture of your guitar.

Third person view: Now imagine yourself coming closer to the guitar look at your hands and slowly add detail to the image. Look at how you sit and hold the guitar, always trying to add as much detail as possible. First person view: Feel the guitar in your hands, feel each string and also focus on the sound that each string produces. Allow yourself to start playing, just as you would do in practice with the same exercises. Imagine yourself playing through the whole set without failing or stopping, just as if you were an expert. Wrapping it up: Allow yourself to slowly come back. You completed your practice and the image slowly fades. When you feel ready, open your eyes again.

The steps above work because you are strengthening the paths for that skill in your brain. Your mind doesnt even notice the difference, so practicing this way during those times where you are away from your practice environment can truly help you improve. Start with a simple skill that you want to learn, like waking up earlier or eating slower. That way you can practice with something easier and strengthen your visualization skills before tackling the big complex skills.
On Route to Expert Status

Remember that just visualizing wont do the trick. You cant expect to be an expert by just visualizing, but its an amazing tool to improve your practice. If you use visualization alongside actual practice you will be able to improve faster than ever and soon you will be able to speak like Neo and prove us that you know kung fu.

Keep it Simple Stupid

Should you being focusing more on the basics? Published on August 13, 2011 by Carl Beuke, Ph.D. in You're Hired

Modern business is in love with the complex and advanced (and the public service even more so). The strategic' is better than the operational'. Frontline managers want to do courses aimed at company directors, rather than basic management courses. Incomprehensibility is taken as a sign of genius. But are we forgetting something important?

In sport, it's recognised that focusing on the basics is key to excellence. The best teams spend more time refining fundamental skills like passing and catching than learning complex new plays'. Martial artists regard moving smoothly and in balance as a surer sign of proficiency than any showy high kick. Sports like golf or autoracing seem from the outside relatively simple in terms of the basic movements and strategies, but the skilled professional outperforms the beginner to an astounding degree. What makes the difference between top and mediocre performance? Ten thousand small, seemingly insignificant refinements, honed over ten thousand hours of focused practice. The same principle applies to your profession and your business. Business is not the only profession which sometimes loses sight of the fundamentals in pursuit of the grandiose. Education is notoriously entranced by esoteric, grand-sounding, and often somewhat vague theories' and fads, while basic principles of effective teaching are routinely ignored, or unknown altogether. Psychology is perhaps too much of a soft target to even mention. What are the fundamentals in your profession? They're the skills that you draw on practically every hour of every day. In management, they include things like giving clear instructions, teaching people the basic skills they need to do their jobs, checking things are being done right, and treating people well. In complex, high-technology fields like aviation, surgery, and nuclear power generation, accidents are often caused by failures in the basics (clear, concise communication; staying aware of what's going on; listening to others in the team). For a writer, writing simply, precisely, and succinctly is a finer art than learning how to throw every word in the dictionary with ten syllables or more into a short story. If you work in HR and you can't pay people the right amount, on time, no-one wants to hear about you being their strategic business partner'. And essential time management, communication and interpersonal skills are key to most modern jobs. It's not easy to improve the basics, whether it be in your professional skills, how you run your business, your sport, or any other area of your life. Your worst enemies are arrogance, complacency, and impatience, which are scourges of our age. But focused attention to the basics is the key to high performance. As the politically correct like to phrase it - Keep It Simple Sweetheart.

The Science of Motivation

October 22 by Dustin Wax | 99 Shares | Featured, Productivity

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What motivates you?

While there are thousands, millions, maybe billions of answers to that question, a growing body of research, some of it dating back 50 years, shows two things that dont motivate us very well the promise of rewards and the threat of punishment. It seems counter-intuitive, since after all we take it for granted that we need incentives to do work. Its the basis of our whole economic system, for crying out loud! And yet, the research is abundantly clear: once a reasonable standard of living is achieved, rewards and punishment not only dont motivate us to do more, better, or faster, they often demotivate us. One classic example of this is a study involving lawyers asked to provide legal services for lowincome persons. One group was asked to do so for a low fee, $10 or $20 an hour, while the other was asked to do so for free. Interestingly, the subjects asked to provide services for a fraction of their typical rate were unwilling to do so, while those asked to do so for free were overwhelmingly willing. By offering a small fee, the subjects were actually less motivated, since they could only think of the work in relation to their normal, much larger fees. The other subjects were not pushed to think about their work as an economic transaction (in which the fee was nothing) and so were able to imagine other ways in which the work itself was its own reward.

Rewards force us to consider our work in a limited way, even work that we might gain great satisfaction from doing without the promise of reward. In fact, offering incentives can limit not only ones perception of the work but ones ability to even do the work. Consider the candle problem (watch author Dan Pinks TED talk on the candle problem for more information). Subjects are seated at a table against a wall, given a candle, some matches, and a box of tacks, and told to work out a way to burn the candle without getting wax on the table. In one study, one group was offered money for figuring the puzzle out, while another wasnt and the subjects who were not offered any reward did remarkably better. (The solution, by the way, is to empty the box of tacks and set the candle up inside of the box most people ignore the box at first, because they see it only as a holder for the tacks and not as part of the equipment available to them. People working for a reward have a much harder time making the creative leap to seeing the box as part of the puzzle than people who are not being incentivized except by the pleasure of solving the puzzle itself.) I should clarify here: it should be clear by now that its not rewards in the abstract that demotivate us, its rewards that are external to the task at hand. We are actually very easily motivated by any sort of challenging work, which is why so many of our hobbies involve complex problem-solving (working on motorcycles, woodworking, gourmet cooking, reading mysteries, sailing, training pets, collecting rare things, fantasy sports, and so on). But when someone else offers us money (or some other reward) to complete the same problems, it gets shunted into the category of work and our creativity shuts down. The trick to motivation, then, is to find the intrinsic reward in our work and to enjoy it. Note that this doesnt mean that nobody should ever accept money for anything before our drive for mastery and personal challenge lies our drive to survive! But theres a reason why so many painters are willing to suffer for their art while so few people are willing to become hobby investment bankers one kind of work has its own intrinsic motivation while the other, except for a very rare few of us, does not. Knowing all that, there are a few things you can do to keep yourself motivated.

1. Have a mission.
Perhaps the single most motivating factor in our lives is the sense that were fulfilling a greater purpose. Thats why lawyers will do for free what they wont do for cheap the sense that theyre contributing to something greater than themselves. A lot of people have taken a page from the corporate world and written a short, one- or at most two-sentence mission statement, against which their actions can be evaluated. If your mission is, for example, to make the world a better place (which is maybe too vague to be all that effective, but itll do for illustration purposes) then knowing that some task is helping to make the world better can be very motivating, indeed!

2. Measure improvement.
While work that engages with the rest of the world can be very intrinsically rewarding and thus very motivating, so too can work that makes us better people. Personal growth is an important motivating factor. But most of us take little time to determine just what constitutes being better we set goals like be more moral, spend more time with family, or do my job better but those arent very powerful motivators because theyre not concrete. This is the idea behind S.M.A.R.T. goals, goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound. Set goals whose progress you can measure according to whatever metric matters most to you! and keep track of your progress.

3. Make learning a primary goal.

An important part of personal growth is achieving or moving towards mastery of a body of knowledge, of a tool or system, of a particular task. Work that helps us move closer to mastery is generally rewarding in its own right. But its not always clear what, if anything, were learning. So Id like to borrow an idea from marketing guru Seth Godin. Godin advises readers of business books, to Decide, before you start, that youre going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as youre reading, find the three things and do it. This can apply to just about anything: ask yourself, as you start a new project or a new job or anything else, What three things am I going to learn from doing this? This will put you in a mastery frame of mind so that youre aware of the learning youre doing as you move through your various tasks.

4. Examine your life.

Alan Webber, the founder of Fast Company, keeps two lists in his pocket on index cards. One is a list of things that get him up in the morning, the other of things that keep him awake at night. Ask yourself what gets you out of bed in the morning, and what keeps you up at night. If your answers are positive things, youre in pretty good shape but if theyre not, youre begging for a motivation problem. When you get out of bed eager to tackle the challenges of the day, and lay awake at night dreaming up new challenges, new projects, and new directions to take your life in, motivation comes pretty easily!

5. Separate work from rewards.

This is a tough one, because we often battle procrastination by depriving ourselves of something positive and promising ourselves we can have it once weve gotten some work done. The problem is that it paints the work were doing as something undesirable, something we wouldnt do unless we had that grand latte, trip to the mall, or afternoon swim as a reward. In his classic, The Now Habit, Neil Fiore suggests that procrastination comes not from the nature of the work but from our relationship with it work we see as drudgery that we have to do in order to get something we want is ripe for procrastination. Instead, he suggests we change the very

language we use to talk about our work, emphasizing that we choose to work on a task or project. Work we choose to do like hobbies rarely suffers from motivation problems! With all that weve discovered about what motivates people, it will be interesting to see how businesses, who have until now depended on perks, stock options, and other bonuses to increase motivation, will adapt. Its become clear that, while rewards and punishments might have increased productivity on the factory floor, it actually hinders the kind of knowledge work that makes up the vast bulk of our economy these days. Already a few companies are experimenting, quite successfully, with ways of helping employees to discover the intrinsic rewards of their own work Googles 20% time, which gives engineers one day a week to work on whatever project they choose and which has resulted in products as crucial to the company as Gmail, AdSense, and Google News, is one prominent example most managers remain convinced that their employees will never do work without the promise of a reward or the threat of punishment. Which is kind of a sad commentary on all of our lives, isnt it?

5 Keys to Unlock Your Creative Motivation

Boosting your motivation leads to better creative output. Published on July 19, 2009 by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D. in Creating in Flow

Motivation is a much more complex process than just "wanting" to do something. When you're working on a creative project and the going gets tough, if you're not motivated enough, you'll quit. And it always gets tough, whether you're a novelist, artist, musician, or even a creative entrepreneur. In my own research with highly experienced writers, I found that motivators are often combined for best effect. Here, then, are 5 ways to raise your motivation level:

1. Increase the challenge of your project.

Try something you've never done before. When I interviewed bestselling novelist Diana Gabaldon, she told me that she once gave herself the challenge of writing a "triple-nested flashback." For many of us, concocting an ordinary flashback is challenge enough, but those are a snap for her.

2. Change your creative method for the stimulation of a fresh approach.

If you typically write with an outline, try not to. Or begin writing without an ending in mind. If you never write with a plan, see what happens if you plan ahead. Even if it doesn't work, you'll

learn something. Here's Wells Tower, author of a volume of short stories, Everything Ravaged Everything Burned: I can never coldly write a story; it doesn't work. I've tried it where I have an outline, and I'll think this is going to be so easy, but when I sit down of course it's not. You have to get into a state of autohypnosis and let the story be what it wants to be.

3. Create from a different point of view.

Do you always write in first-person? Do you never write in first-person point of view? Try the opposite. Or create something artistic from the point of view of the bicycle, or the car, or the dog or cat, or the new immigrant or the alien from outer space.

4. Look deeper to find your intrinsic motivation.

Here's how poet Ralph Angel put it: As much as I hate to admit it, I've learned in recent years that writing, even more than some of the most important relationships in my life, is where I am most in touch with myself, and, worst case scenario, people I love die and my life goes on. But if anything took me away from the work, I would be separated somehow from myself.

5. Forget about the goal and find the fun.

This is the most crucial key to entering flow. Put all thought of audience aside for the time being and find something pleasurable about what you're trying to create. If it's not fun, figure out why not and make it more engaging for yourself. There's nothing trivial about fun, as I've found in my talks with great creative individuals. It's one of the many motivators that bring them back to the work they do, day in and day out.

How Do High Achievers Really Think?

Beliefs that lead to success. Positive affirmations are a staple of the self-help industry, but there is a problem with standing in front of the mirror every morning and saying something like: "I prosper wherever I turn and I know that I deserve prosperity of all kinds." "I am my own unique selfspecial, creative and wonderful." Or "I will be king of the world in just five days, I just know it." It makes you feel kinda silly (and sometimes worse).

What does research show about how high achievers really think? High achievers are often marked, unsurprisingly, by a strong motive to achieve. Less accomplished individuals are often more motivated to avoid failure.

Achievement motivated individuals have a strong desire to accomplish something important, and gain gratification from success in demanding tasks. Consequently they are willing to expend intense effort over long timespans in the pursuit of their goals. Failure-avoiding individuals are more focused on protecting themselves from the embarrassment and sense of incompetence that can accompany failing at a valued task. Consequently they are less likely to attempt achievement-oriented tasks, and may give up quickly if success is not readily forthcoming. Where total avoidance of tasks is not possible, failure-avoiding individuals may procrastinate, give less than their best effort, or engage in other self-handicapping behaviour that provides a face-saving excuse in the event of failure (e.g. drinking heavily the night before the morning of an important exam). Of course, achievement motivation versus failure avoidance motivation exist on a continuum, with most of us falling somewhere in the middle. In the research literature, this continuum is described as Relative Motive Strength. An individual's relative motive strength does not exist in a vacuum, but is associated with an elaborate matrix of beliefs that justify the commitment of intense effort toward goal achievement, or the relative lack thereof. The core beliefs that differentiate achievement motivated individuals are: 1. Success is your personal responsibility Achievement motivated individuals tend to believe that initiative, effort, and persistence are key determinants of success at demanding tasks. Failure-avoiding individuals are more likely to view success as dependent on available resources and situational constraints (e.g. the task is too hard, or the marker was biased). 2. Demanding tasks are opportunities Achievement motivated individuals tend to see demanding tasks where success is uncertain as challenges' or opportunities'. Failure avoiding individuals are more likely to see them as threats' that may lead to the embarrassment of failure. An achievement motivated individual might tell a failure avoiding individual, "Anything worthwhile is difficult, so stop acting so surprised". 3. Achievement striving is enjoyable Achievement motivated individuals associate effort on demanding tasks with dedication, concentration, commitment and involvement. Failure-avoiding individuals categorise such effort as overloading or stressful. They see perseverance in the face of setbacks and obstacles as slightly compulsive. 4. Achievement striving is valuable

Achievement motivated individuals value hard work in and of itself. Failure-avoiding individuals may mock achievement striving as uncool (e.g. the attitude that the L on learner plates stands for Loser). They may associate achievement striving with lack of a social life or even early death by heart attack. 5. Skills can be improved Achievement-motivated individuals have a strong belief that they can improve their performance on demanding tasks with practice, training, coaching, and dedication to learning. Failureavoiding individuals tend to see skills as fixed and/or dependent on innate talents. The research into how skills can most effectively be improved is discussed here. 6. Persistence works Achievement motivated individuals are inclined to believe that continued effort and commitment will overcome initial obstacles or failures. Failure-avoiding individuals are inclined to see initial failure as a sign of things to come. So the achievement motivated individual says, "Don't assume that you can't do something until you've tried. And I mean really tried, like tried 3000 times, not that you tried three times, and 'oh I give up.'" And the failure-avoiding individual responds, "You really need to learn when to quit."

Fly Rock, Wellington, New Zealand - (C) Carl Beuke 2007

The beliefs held by achievement-motivated individuals are not necessarily more logical or objectively correct than the beliefs held by failure-avoiding individuals, certainly not in all situations. However, they are empirically associated with high levels of achievement.

Once you understand the modes of achievement motivated versus failure-avoiding thinking, you will recognise them in the way that others talk about their goals, dreams, successes, and setbacks. You will also recognise them in your own thinking, and you can choose to cultivate the beliefs

that will support you to achieve your goals. This is more effective than just trying to think positive and relying on the law of attraction to provide you with what you want. How do you know when you might be overdoing the achievement motivated thinking a bit, to the point of being unrealistic and not acting in your own best interests? I'll cover this topic in a forthcoming post. You can click on "Subscribe via RSS" toward the top right of this page if you'd like to be alerted when this and other articles in this series are published.

Living Backward in Time: How to Set Intentions, and Remain Present

Being present versus making plans. Published on June 3, 2008 by Michael J. Formica, MS, MA, EdM in Enlightened Living

Here's a dilemma. Yoga, meditation, mindfulness training, blah, blah, blah, all rely on the notion of being present, as well as setting an intention. If you are setting an intention, you are thinking about the future. And if you are present, you are not. Quoting one of my teachers, "If you are present, who pays the light bill? -- and if the lights are on, is anyone home?" Setting an intention means thinking forward in time. Being present means being here now. So, how do we manage both? Simply, we live backward in time! Living backward in time means living in the now as if it were the future that you envision. A friend of mine calls this living "as if", instead of "what if"...and it's very effective. Let's look at this very practically... Let's say that you want to lose 15 pounds. You know that to do this you need to eat more healthily, exercise regularly, learn something about nutrition, learn something about supplements, etc. Big job. So, you go on a diet. Great! You lose 15 pounds...but then you gain it back. Why? Because you approached the moment like a person who wanted to lose 15 pounds, not someone who was 15 pounds lighter, and therefore more healthy and the owner of a different lifestyle. We create our lives. Figure out what kind of life you would like to create for yourself. Figure out what that life would look like. Then, do it NOW! As if that life and lifestyle were yours NOW! Live backwards in time...and live in the present...

The Goals That Guide Us

Setting objectives can guide us to well-being and success. Having a road map for the future is a key element to success.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on July 22, 2003 - last reviewed on November 11, 2010 "Not all who wander are lost," they say, but for the great majority of us, having a road map for the future is a key element to well-being and success, however we choose to define it. This means setting goals for ourselves, and finding ways to achieve them. If you're a wanderer, it might be time to realize the boundless utility of setting goals.

It's simply a fact: when people have goals to guide them, they are happier and achieve more than they would without having them. It's a brain thing. Achieving a goal you've set produces dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of pleasure. Reciprocally, dopamine activates neural circuitry that makes you eager to pursue new challenges. Goals provide focus. With no guiding vision or plan, people tend to drift. Goals provide a measuring stick for progress. Goals enhance productivity. They bolster self-esteem. And most of all, goals increase commitment, so you're more likely to achieve whatever you set out to conquer. While it's not a good idea to try to change everything at once, you can set goals in virtually any domain of your life, from your wardrobe to your church to your workplace. Of course, a thousand mile journey starts with the first small step. And whether we're embarking on the long trek of a mid-life career switch or the walk to the bedroom to finally organize that closet, it can be hard to gather up the motivation to make that initial step. While setting goals is in itself motivating, sometimes it's just not enough. Here are some tried-and-true ways you can begin to move toward achieving your goals, and maintain resolve when the going gets rough.

Put your goals in writing.

The act of writing down what you are going to do is a strong motivator. Writing down goals prevents you from leaving your goals vague. Be specific. Use action verbs. Let your goals have measurable outcomes. Specify completion dates. Also record what your reward will be for achieving the goal. Make a contract with yourself, then read it each morning and night. This will help you to be more committed your goal as each day passes. And while you've got the pen in your hand...

Make a list of obstacles.

Think of everything that might stand in your way. Then decide what you can do about each obstacle. Design a plan to reduce the influence of each obstacle and increase the chances that you will be successful in reaching your goal.

List the benefits of achieving your goal.

Knowing exactly what you will gain from reaching your goal is a strong motivator. Keeping my checkbook balanced will give me more spending money on the weekends. Walking a mile every morning will help me stay focused at work.

Identify subgoals.

Break down complicated plans into manageable chunks. Be specific about what has to be accomplished. Decide what you are going to do, and when. Make sure each step is challenging but achievable, and that you have a complete plan of action. Then write it on your calendar and review it regularly.

Learn what you need to learn.

If information or skill is keeping you from achieving your goals, determine ways to fill in the gaps, and build this into your action plan. Be willing to study and work hard to reach your goals. Think about how much time and effort will be required, and ask yourself whether you are really willing and able to do what is necessary. It is better to adjust your goals or your timetable than to proceed with a plan that is unrealistic.

Enlist the help of others.

Find someone, a coworker or friend, with whom you share a common goal. Get someone to go to the gym with you, or to quit smoking with you, or to share healthy meals with you. A partner can help you stay committed and motivated. Look for role models, people who have already achieved the goals you seek to reach. Ask them for advice and suggestions. Find how they got where they are, and incorporate what you learn into your plan.

Visualize yourself having achieved each of your goals.

The more real you can make your visualization, the better. Find a quiet place, visualize, write down your experiences afterward. Go through magazines and cut out pictures that represent your goal, then put them around the house. Provide constant reminders to yourself about what you're working towards. Describe your ideal life in the future. Write a few paragraphs describing what you have accomplished, and how your life is better as a result. Use the present tense as if it is happening right here, right now. This is another way of making your vision real.

Get organized.

When you are prepared and organized, you will feel better about your ability to reach your goals. Having information scattered in too many places makes you feel out of control and undermines motivation. Set up a filing system, set aside your workout clothes.

Reward yourself each step of the way.

Let yourself feel good about progress you've made. Treat yourself to rewards that will give you a lift as you accomplish each subgoal on your road to success.

The Tough Track

Howand whyan average guy became an ultramarathoner.
By Jeff Wise, published on March 15, 2011 - last reviewed on January 18, 2012 It's a pitch-black winter night and Troy Espiritu is in the middle of a forest somewhere in western Georgia. Espiritu, a compact, wiry man with close-cropped hair, jogs along the wilderness trail with a steady, dogged pace, his face a mask of exhaustion. He's been on the run since yesterday morning, nearly 20 hours ago, and he's utterly spent. Shivering uncontrollably from the cold, he notices that the trees on the margins of his headlamp beam seem to be falling on him. I'm hallucinating, he realizes. He's already run the equivalent of three consecutive marathons, and he's got a fourth left to go. If he can keep pace, he'll cross the 100-mile mark just as the sun rises.

Ultramarathons like this one are among the most grueling competitions ever devised, defying conventional notions of what the human body can do. But Espiritu is tough: He's completed four 100-mile races. And what's even more remarkable is that just five years ago, he was an ordinary guy who couldn't jog more than two miles at a stretch. At age 35, Espiritu, a podiatrist, was raising a family and managing a growing medical practice. "We had a 4-year-old, 2-year-old twins, and a newborn, with no family nearby to help," he says in his genteel Southern accent. The thought of taking on another challenge, not to mention a superhuman one, would seem inadvisable at the least. But as Espiritu was to discover, pushing yourself in one area can have positive ripple effects in other domains. Espiritu's transformation started with a few words from a friend. At the time, Espiritu was jogging a mile and a half each weekend to keep fit. At church, a member of the congregation mentioned that he'd noticed Espiritu out running. "There's a group of us that meets every Saturday morning," the man told him. "You ought to come out." With his fellow runners' encouragement, he achieved longer and longer distances. After a few months, he was able to make it to three milesthough, he says, "I was sore for about a week after." What kept him coming back was the group bonhomie. "It's like hanging out in the bar and having a beer," he says. "It's guy time." Within a few months, some of his running buddies started training for a marathon, and suggested he join them. Espiritu agreed. "I love putting a plan together, and working at that plan, and checking things off on the calendar," he says. "I'm a very goal-oriented person." Espiritu's wife, Mary Denise, wasn't surprised at the turn her husband's hobby was taking. "I knew that eventually he'd start running marathons," she says. "That's just the way he is. I don't want to say he's obsessive, but when he does something, he does it 120 percent." As Espiritu notched up marathon after marathon, he learned about races that were longer still the so-called ultramarathons, which can range from 32 miles to more than 100. At first, such

distances seemed absurd, but Espiritu kept thinking about it, and realized that if he could run 26.2, then 32 wouldn't be that much harder. And once he'd done his first 32-miler, 40 didn't seem out of reach. To prepare his body, Espiritu gradually inured himself to the hardships of extreme distance. He would come home each Friday evening after working all day long, eat dinner with his family, put his kids to bed, and then start running at 10 p.m. He'd return at 6 a.m., shower, coach his kids' soccer game, and keep going all day. "With practice, it definitely got easier to handle," he says. "I can function now on less sleep than I did before." Early on in his all-night runs, Espiritu passes the time with mental games, such as spending 10 minutes thinking about each of his children. But by the later stages, he's so exhausted that he's frequently hallucinating or falling asleep on his feet. "The way I handle it is to break things up into very small, manageable pieces," he says. "The idea of running 100 miles is incomprehensible, even for me, sometimes. My only goal is to get to the next aid station. That's it." In an ironic twist, Espiritu is a podiatrist engaging in a hobby that nearly guarantees multiple foot ailments. Espiritu has had heel spurs and stress fracturesconditions he says make him a much better and more sympathetic doctor, especially to the running aficionados who now seek him out to get his first-hand expertise.
Espiritu understands that his pastime can be hard for others, including exercise buffs, to fathom. "Patients ask me all the time, 'Why would you do that?' The short response is, 'Because I can.' I've learned I can do it, so why not do it? If you knew that you could run 10 miles, why would you want to run just two?"

His wife teases him by saying, "Your heart is in great shape, but you should get your head checked." She's not the only one to suggest he might be a little bit crazy. "Let's face it, running 100 miles is abnormal. Statistically, probably less than 1 percent of the population can do that," says psychologist Jonathan Abramowitz, who specializes in the treatment of obsessivecompulsive disorders. But, he says, Espiritu's behavior is very different from this illnessthe struggle to contain or prevent thoughts about an outcome that a patient wants to avoid. Rather, says Abramowitz, Espiritu is unusual in the degree to which he becomes attached to positive goals. "Some people have an all-or-none personality. They feel that they either have to do something perfectly or it's 100 percent crap. When that mind-set causes distress, that's a problem. But if it's not getting in the way of your life, then I wouldn't say you have a disorder." Beyond his love for long-term planning and execution, it's likely that Espiritu is driven by the many mood boosters hidden in the training process: "Achievements give us a temporary feeling of elation," says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a social psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The How of Happiness. "But it's the pursuit of goals rather than the achievement that creates happiness. When people run long distance, they often get into an engaged state of concentration called flow. They are truly in the present moment, and the present is all we have."

For her part, Mary Denise says that her husband's extreme regimen has actually been a boon for their home life. "When our children were small, he took up golf for a little while, and that just wasn't working. He'd leave at 9am on Sunday morning and come home at 2pm," she says. "This is healthier for him, and we get to have him around more. He can run all night and still spend the next day with the kids." Mary Denise has become an avid runner herselfthe two sometimes hire a babysitter so they can train together. She even paced her husband for a full 25 miles during one of his ultramarathonsa bonding experience that they will always remember. John Cobis, a high school teacher and fellow ultramarathoner who has trained with Espiritu, affirms that Espiritu is, in fact, as balanced as he appears to be. "Troy doesn't miss a beat with his children. He runs a thriving medical practice and his patients love him," Cobis says. For all the pain, both mental and physical, that long-distance running has caused him, Espiritu considers it an irreplaceable part of who he is. It's made him more even-keeled: "I'm an avid LSU football fan," he says, "and before, when I would watch a game on TV that wasn't going well, I would scream and yell. The dogs would be all nervous and running around, and Mary Denise would take the kids and say, 'You know what? We're going to leave the house for a little while.' Now, when my team's losing, my attitude is: 'Ah, no big deal.'" Right now Espiritu is in the process of buying property and hiring an architect and a contractor to build a new medical building. "I've been meeting with banks and architects, civic designers and engineers, real estate agents," he says. "It's an elaborate process. A couple of years ago, I would have said, 'I just can't do it all.' And now it's like, 'If I can find time to run 90 miles a week and have four kids and run a practice, surely I can do this.'" Read author Jeff Wise's PT blog: Extreme Fear

Toughen Up
Four keys to handling challenges. Espiritu's transformation from suburban dad to iron man is extraordinary, but it offers lessons for all of us. While no one really needs to be able to run 100 miles in a day, we all require the emotional and mental strength to accept challenges and reach new heights at work and at home. The modern understanding of toughness has its roots in the research of Salvatore Maddi, a professor of psychology at UC Irvine. In 1975, Maddi began a 12-year project to evaluate the psychological well-being of managers in a telephone company. The study took an unexpected turn six years later, when the government deregulated the telephone industry. Half of the company's employees were laid off. For two-thirds of this group, the transition was traumatic. Many were unable to cope. They died of heart attacks and of strokes, engaged in violence, got divorced, and suffered from poor mental health. But the other third didn't fall apart. Their lives actually improved. Their health got better, their careers soared, and their relationships blossomed. "The general idea at the time was that you should stay away from stress because it can kill you," Maddi recalls. "But it turned out that some people thrive on it."

What made these people different? Maddi discerned that those who responded well to the crisis shared a characteristic he called "hardiness." In essence, hardy people have the ability to treat each crisis as an opportunity. "Hardiness," says Maddi, "gives you the courage and the motivation to do the hard work of growing and developing rather than denying and avoiding." Hardiness, he found, can be developed. Although each of us is born with temperamental proclivities, there are steps that we can take to mold what we've got. Like a pip-squeak who exercises himself into hunkdom, we can buff up those parts of our character that will maximize toughness. And because it fosters resilience, hardiness is a path to general well-being. "If we all lived in bubbles, we wouldn't need to be tough," says Chris Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. "But we don't. Everyone takes hits, but the people who can get back up are much happier in life."
1: ENLIST LOVED ONES

Tending to friends and family doesn't sound like a particularly tough endeavor. But loved ones are crucial to the cultivation of both inner strength and physical endurance. Close supporters not only make us feel cared for and appreciated as we move toward our goals, they also provide a font of motivation. When a new project gets overwhelming and we're ready to scrap it, we think of those who have been our cheerleaders and enablers, and resolve to not let them down. For friends with mutual goals, such as Espiritu and his running pals, a natural desire to remain a part of the group and a sense of obligation to its other members is often much stronger than personal reserves of willpower. "I don't think you can look at toughness in a vacuum. It's almost by definition a social phenomenon," says West Point psychologist Michael Matthews. "Many Medal of Honor winners were just normal soldiers who were put in a situation where their love of their buddies overcame any concern about their own well-being." "The camaraderie among these guys who run in our community is strong. They're all extremely disciplined men. But they're all devoted husbands and fathers, too," says Espiritu's friend John Cobis, who is part of a tight group that trains together, goes to church together, and spends time with their wives and kids together. It's much easier to commit to a path when everyone around you is doing the same. Friends who push each other to succeed often become closer in the process. Nothing strengthens bonds between people more than shared struggle. "Some of the best friends I have I made through the running community," says Espiritu. "Given the kind of mileage we do, we've gotten to know each other pretty well." It may even literally ameliorate their aches: Oxytocin, the "bonding hormone," has been shown to lessen sensations of pain and fear.

2: SEEK OUT CHALLENGES

Most people actively avoid problems and needless work, and think of resilience as something they'll reluctantly have to tap, should a disastrous event ever hit them. The truly tough don't want calamity any more than the rest of us, but they tend to light up at the unexpected obstaclesuch conflicts and dilemmas are exciting moments for them to conquer, not reasons for crawling back into bed. The key to mastering this challenge-hungry mind-set is to develop a sense of confidence in your abilities. You can do this, Matthews says, by getting in the habit of pushing your personal envelope. "Set reachable goals that become progressively more challenging," he says. "Intentionally expose yourself to things that you're afraid of." Start telling yourself that the smooth, comfortable life is not something to strive for, but rather a recipe for boredom and stagnation. Yale psychologist Charles A. Morgan III has been studying Navy personnel who undergo an intense 12-day course that realistically simulates the experience of being captured and interrogated by the enemy. Morgan has found that those who embrace challenge as a natural part of living are less likely to exhibit symptoms that could grow into post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). If a particular challenge seems too overwhelming to tackle, practice the foolproof method of breaking it down into bite-size tasks. Rob Shaul runs a gym in Jackson, Wyoming, called Mountain Athlete, where he works with elite mountaineers and soldiers preparing for special forces selection programs. "Guys who've made it through Navy SEAL selection say that they just tried to think about making it to the next meal. Pretty soon those meals add up, and the next thing they know, they've made it," he says.
3: GET PHYSICAL

Exercise is the obvious ticket to physiological toughness, but it's also a building block to overall hardiness. A Princeton University study found that rats that exercise generate new neurons that are less responsive to stress hormones, for instance. Lilly Mujica-Parodi, director of the Laboratory for the Study of Emotion and Cognition at Stony Brook University, tested the heart rates and hormone levels of novice skydivers before, during, and after their first plunge. She found that skydivers with a higher percentage of body fat took longer to return from elevated stress-hormone levels and performed worse on tests of mental ability. "Not only does physical fitness produce stress resilience," she says, "but fit individuals are better able to preserve their cognitive functions." As his training ramped up, Espiritu noticed unexpected benefits from exercise: He tolerated his children's temper tantrums more easily. He also slept better and discovered that he had more energy on the days that started with a good long run.

GREAT FEAT: Espiritu is highly in demand as a podiatrist, now that he can advise fellow runners.
4: REWARD YOURSELF

Completing any worthwhile goal requires a special balance of rewardsthose you receive from the stimulating parts of the process itself or from completing sub-goals, and those you use as carrots to nudge yourself through the most dreaded aspects of that same process. Giving yourself external rewardsa great meal or a shopping tripto mark your progress and reinforce your hard- working behaviors is sometimes very effective. But the challenges you take up should ideally reflect your passions. As David Nowell, a clincial neuropsychologist based in Massachusetts, puts it, "There's nothing you could buy me to entice me to do an ultramarathon." Nowell recommends you pick a challenge that is relevant to your broadest, "why-am-I-on-thisEarth?" life goals. If you want to be remembered for helping others, take on a toughness challenge that, if carried out, will benefit the needy. Then, when the project temporarily loses its inherent appeal, you can reflect on its ultimate purpose to muster motivation. Raising children, for example, is akin to an 18-year ultra-ultramarathon. Many facets of child-rearing are unpleasant and frustrating. Yet, an overarching wish to raise independent, healthy kids can get parents through the daily trials. "Facing a challenge is not always going to be fun," says Nowell. "If we waited around for intrinsic motivation to kick in before doing anything, we'd spend all our time eating candy apples and soaking in hot tubs."

When the going gets tough and the hot tub beckons, Nowell suggests a visual meditation: Imagine, in as much detail as you can, how you're going to feel when you reach your goal. "Experiencing that state of mind will push you further than any treat will."

Self-regulation Failure (Part 1): Goal Setting and Monitoring

Procrastination: Quintessential self-regulation failure. Published on February 16, 2009 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay The simplest way to think about a self-regulating system is how your thermostat functions with your furnace. As simple as this may be, this model does speak to our own ability for self-regulation, and it's a good place to start this discussion about when self-regulation fails.

To understand procrastination, we must understand self-regulation failure. And, of course, to understand self-regulation failure, we must begin with a little about self-regulation. I'll use the next few blog postings to share some thoughts on self-regulation failure. What I will attempt to show is that there a number of places at which our self-regulation can and does fail leading to procrastination (or any other number of self-defeating problems like overeating, overspending, drug and alcohol abuse, problem gambling). In the end, I will not leave you with a mechanistic model. It won't surprise regular readers of this Don't Delay blog that we'll return to a fundamental notion of what motivates you in life. Self-regulatory systems: The basics Homeostasis, roughly translating to a relatively stable state of equilibrium, is the goal of many systems, living and mechanical. In the case of our household heating, the system is designed to keep the ambient temperature stable at our chosen level. The thermostat plays the key role of monitoring the temperature and signaling either action (start heating) or termination (shut off). One way that a self-regulating system like this is summarized is the T.O.T.E. model: testoperate-test-exit. The thermostat executes the key test and exit roles, based on a chosen standard (or target) that we set. Self-regulation and procrastination: A key first step Even this simple model of self-regulation certainly applies to our everyday behavior. Studies that I'll discuss over the next few blog entries include behaviors as mundane as regulating our junk food consumption, impulsive spending, television viewing, even whether we procrastinate on washing our dishes. Let's see where this process begins. The self-regulating thermostat begins with two key functions: recording a chosen standard and monitoring the environment in relation to this standard.

Standards The simple standard we set with our thermostat is temperature, but standards for self-regulation are the concepts we hold of our possible selves (our ideal or ought selves) as well as our overall expectations, values and goals. With that said, it's pretty obvious that the first place that our selfregulation can fail is simply when we set unrealistic or inappropriate standards about our possible selves or our goals.. New years resolutions are one obvious place where our standards are often unrealistic. Overly optimistic and hopeful, we imagine ourselves going from no exercise this year to exercising everyday next year. A recent example of this can be found in Marissa Kristal's PT blog, "Shake your beauty" with her blog entry "Re-do your resolution to get fit" She argues that we may need to re-do our resolutions in February. And, while she notes a program that draws on social support to maintain motivation, a key first step is ensuring that you have a reasonable goal. Enough said, I think we all recognize the importance of setting attainable, realistic goals. Without this starting point, self-regulation is impossible from the outset. Goal setting tips
1. Break it down, make it concrete, frame it as an approach goal (rather than avoiding failure) and create an implementation intention - you should be able to say what you'll do when as the next step towards goal completion 2. Enhance your interest in the goal - be sure it's related to your values, and if the connections aren't obvious at first, think through how the task at hand complements your values and overall goals (and if it doesn't, think about why it's on your "to-do list" - maybe it's a task you should delegate or delete)

Together, these simple tips represent the "manageability and meaning" of your goals. Do everything you can to keep your personal goals manageable and meaningful, and you will see the tasks as less aversive. If you do, you'll probably procrastinate less (yes, "probably" as no one change can ensure personal success, and as we'll see, self-regulation can break down when we exhaust our willpower). Monitoring: Mindful attention Once realistic goals and standards are set, the first regulation step is monitoring our activity in relation to these standards. We have to pay attention to our goal pursuit. Here's a summary of the psychology behind this process in relation to procrastination:

Procrastination is a form of self-regulatory failure (this is a prevalent view of researchers, and it fits with all explanations of procrastination, although the cause of the regulatory failure itself is debated, e.g., whether it's something like discounting future rewards, fear of failure, a personality trait or living in bad faith). Self-regulation is the process whereby systems maintain stability of functioning and adaptability to change. It's based on feedback loops as described above. Self-regulation failure is largely a problem of under-regulation. We fail to regulate and maintain the feedback loop. Most models of the cognitive control of behavior through feedback begin with noticing a change that needs to be regulated in the system. These models begin with attention to the system.

Therefore, loss of attentional control is a common harbinger of self-regulatory failure.

As Baumeister & Heatherton (1996) write, "Over and over, we found that managing attention was the most common and often the most effective form of self-regulation and that attentional problems presaged a great many varieties of self-regulation failure. . . The effective management of attention was a powerful and decisive step, and self-regulatory failure ensued when attention could not be managed." Concluding thoughts The implications are clear, we need to set well-defined, attainable goals (standards) and pay attention to our goals as an ongoing process in self-regulation. If you want to know more about paying attention, self-regulation and procrastination, you may want to read my previous PT Blog, "Mindfulness Meditation: Thoughts on paying attention." However, this is only part of the process of self-regulation, and it may not even be the weakest link in terms of self-regulatory failure. We need to consider exerting effort towards a goal - the thing that procrastination really seems to undermine.
"Good intentions pave the road to hell" they say, and we all know that we need the willpower to act on our intentions and goals. The surprising thing that recent research has shown is that willpower is like a muscle, and it's a limited resource (no surprise here I guess) . . . more on this next time where I'll explore how the "operate" phase depicted in the T.O.T.E. model depends on a limited reserve of willpower strength. We'll also consider an answer to the question: How can we maintain our "willpower" in spite of depleted self-regulatory strength?

Want to Start a Task Sooner? Make it Concrete!

Think of your tasks concretely, it makes a difference. Published on January 25, 2009 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

A recent study published in Psychological Science reveals a simple answer to getting tasks done. Make it concrete!

Sean McCrea (University of Konstanz), Nira Liberman (Tel Aviv University), Yaacov Trope (New York University) and Steven Sherman (Indiana University Bloomington) published their

paper "Construal level and procrastination" in a recent issue of the journal Psychological Science. They based their research on Construal-level theory. As the authors explain, "Construal-level theory holds that greater psychological distance is associated with more abstract, higher-level construals [of objects or tasks], such that more distal objects are represented on a higher level, and also that objects represented on a higher level seem more distant" (p. 1308). In other words, when we think of a task in a more abstract way we think of it as something that belongs more to the future, and vice versa. Of course, this has obvious implications for procrastination. They reason that concrete construal of a task will lead to more timely completion, and they set out three studies to test this hypothesis. Their studies As always in my blog, I will provide only an overview of the basic design. The complete reference to the paper is provided below for readers who want to digest all the details. In each study, McCrea and his colleagues manipulated their participants' construal level to be more abstract or concrete. They did this in three different ways, hence the three studies. The simplest way they tried to affect the participants' construal (Study 1) was to have the participants either write about the characteristics of the activity (abstract-construal condition) or write about how they would go about each activity (concrete-construal condition). Perhaps the most interesting manipulation to achieve the same potential effect was in Study 3 where they used the painting "La Parade" (1889) by Seurat where in one case they focused on how the painting evoked "harmony and emotion" and in the other case, using a color print close up, they focused on the contrasting points of color (the pointillism technique). Respectively, these conditions reflected the abstract- and concrete-construal manipulations, and they were effective as in the first two studies. What they did In each case, participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions described above, and in the context of the task, they were requested to follow-up by providing their response by email within 3 weeks. Importantly, their participation payment was contingent on their reply. Although they had 3 weeks to reply, the earlier they replied, the earlier they got compensated for their participation. The time that participants replied was the main outcome measure in the study. The researchers' expectation was that those in the concrete-construal group would respond more quickly. What they found Their results from each study confirmed their expectation, "participants were more likely to respond in a timely fashion in the concrete-construal condition than in the abstract-construal condition . . . and participants responded sooner in the concrete-construal condition" (p. 1310). The authors conclude by noting that their results indicate that ". . . the way the task is represented influences when individuals complete it. Across a variety of manipulations of construal level, we observed that procrastination was reduced when participants were induced to construe the task more concretely. . . we think that the effect of construal level on completion times reflected an association between concrete construal and sooner time" (p. 1313).

Comments and Caveats Certainly this is an interesting study and it makes a contribution to our understanding of procrastination. As the authors note, their results are consistent with much earlier research that suggests that goal pursuit is more successful when goals are represented at a more concrete level (see Vallacher & Wegner, 1987). There is one significant limitation to this study, however, and that is the nature of the task. As the authors write, ". . . we designed the tasks to be relatively easy and only moderately important to participants . . ." (p. 1313; emphasis added). Of course in my experience and from my own research on procrastination, relatively easy tasks that are only moderately important are NOT usually a problem in terms of procrastination. In fact, I doubt that making the construal of the task more concrete would have much of an effect on difficult tasks that are very important and not very pleasant to us. This remains an empirical question for a future study . . . in fact, one of my thesis students is working on a study right now that might address this issue. Finally, although of interest, these results are only part of the "research conversation" in this area, and previous research has found conflicting results. For example, in terms of chronic procrastinators (as opposed to the temporary behavioral delay used in the present study), Dewitte and Lens (2000) found that chronic procrastinators actually construe their tasks less abstractly than non-procrastinators. Dewitte and Lens argue that one explanation for these results is that focusing on the details is overwhelming; low-level, concrete construal doesn't get chronic procrastinators moving faster as the present study would suggest. Concluding thoughts New research results are always, and at best, penultimate. New results raise new questions, and on it goes as we search to understand any phenomenon more clearly. In the case of procrastination, this study published by Sean McCrea and his colleagues does add to a literature that says concrete plans make implementation more likely. My earlier blog on Gollwitzer's implementation intentions and procrastination is one good example of this previous research. In the end, I hope you can see that it simply makes sense to ask yourself, "how am I going to do this task?" In asking this question, you're more likely to move forward from a plan to action in a timely manner. If you can manage your emotion and not get overwhelmed as Dewitt and Lens argue might happen (careful, don't give in to feel good), then I think that the more concrete the construal, the more likely that you'll "just get started!"

Giving in to Feel Good: Why Self-regulation Fails

Focusing on regulating mood can lead to self-control failure in other areas. Published on April 25, 2008 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

We give in to feel good. Give in to what? Food, shopping, drinking, smoking, gambling, and, you guessed it, procrastination. The problem is that focusing on regulating our moods and feelings can lead to selfcontrol failure in other areas.

"Giving in to feel good" is the first part of the title of an important paper written by Dianne Tice and Ellen Bratslavsky (complete reference below). Anyone interested in knowing more about issues of the self and self-regulation should search out resources, and there are plenty, written by Dianne Tice or Roy Baumeister, or their students. I have quoted Roy's work before, and I will again given his prolific prominence as a psychologist. Procrastinators will tell you that the task they're facing (avoiding) is difficult, and it creates bad feelings like anxiety or general emotional distress. Putting off the task at hand is an effective way of regulating this mood. Avoid the task, avoid the bad mood. This is what Tice and Bratslavsky refer to as "giving in to feel good." We give in to the impulse to walk away in order to feel good right now. Learning theorists would even add that we have now reinforced this behavior as the decrease in anxiety is rewarding. Of course, this short-term strategy has long-term costs. The last-minute efforts that become necessary when we put off the task usually mean a sub-standard job overall (although not always, and this is a classic reward to the procrastinator and very memorable). More importantly, as Tice and Bratslavsky explain, "the final and overall level of negative affect is likely to be even greater than if the person has worked on the task all along" (p. 152). We actually feel worse later! In fact, earlier research conducted by Tice & Baumeister across two academic terms demonstrated that procrastination caught up to students in the second term. Whereas in the first term, the non-procrastinators were more stressed, by second term the costs of procrastination became obvious for the procrastinators in terms of course performance, stress and illness. The message of their research is clear. Putting off a task to control immediate mood results in problems later. They demonstrate this across a number of domains as I noted earlier, including eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, shopping and procrastination. When we give primacy to

addressing our emotional distress, we usually do so at the cost of self-regulatory failure. They summarize this key idea with, "People will engage in behaviors that may be self-destructive (gambling, excessive shopping, overeating, smoking, procrastinating) if the behaviors make them feel better in the short term. Thus, emotion regulation may have a special place in the field of self-control, because emotion regulation takes precedence over other self-control behaviors and even undermines other selfcontrol efforts" (p. 154). The message to each of us should be clear as well. If we focus on our feelings in the short term, we'll undermine ourselves in the long run. I've been teaching my 3-year-old daughter this. A typical "lesson" goes something like this. Me: "Sweetie, it's time to pick up your toys before we go." [Mood now visibly changing.] L: "I don't feel like it. I don't want to." Me: "Sweetie, according to Dianne Tice and Ellen Bratslavsky it's not the best strategy to focus on your feelings now, it's . . . sweetie?? Where are you?" Ok, so it is about delay of gratification, and we do (should) learn this early in life. But, the evidence seems to show that we all can (and do) act like 3-year-olds at times. In fact, we may spend a lifetime acting like a 3-year-old, and rationalizing it to ourselves the whole time. I don't feel like it. I need to feel better in order to act. First, I need to feel better. No you don't. In fact, your feelings will follow your behaviors. Progress on that task will improve your mood. For example, new research where introverts are instructed to act extraverted shows that the introverts who act extraverted also feel happier (an affective advantage of extraverts). We'll talk about this more in the near future. For now, the message is, don't give in to feeling good, get going instead - don't delay!

Just Get Started

Just get started, it will change your outlook Published on March 26, 2008 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

If you're reading this, chances are you're procrastinating right now. At least that's what readers tell me. The topic has personal relevance.

Given that your reading may be motivated by a desire to procrastinate less, I thought it would be wise to say a little more about my mantra, "just get started!" It all began with some interesting research using pagers to track procrastination over time. In a series of studies, my students and I used electronic pagers to gather what is called experience-sampling data. We paged research participants randomly throughout the day over a week or two. Each time we paged them, we asked things like "What are you doing?" "Is there something else you should be doing?" "How are you feeling?" "What are you thinking?" In addition, depending on the study, we got participants to rate what they were doing and what they were suppose to be doing on things like how stressful they perceived the task to be. A rating of 10 indicated extremely stressful, while a 0 meant not stressful at all (and all points in between reflected the variability). This type of data allows us to take a sort of snapshot through time of what the participants were doing. Importantly, we also got a real-time glimpse of what they were thinking and feeling as well. Some of our findings were expected. Some surprised us. I'll summarize these findings by simplifying the research as a Monday-to-Friday process and focus mainly on the task avoidance. As expected, on Monday when participants were avoiding some task(s) in preference to others, we found that they typically said things like, "I'll feel more like doing that tomorrow" or "Not today. I work better under pressure." We rationalize the dissonance between our behaviors (not doing) and our expectations of ourselves (I should be doing this now). Later in the week few, if any, participants spontaneously said things like "I feel like doing that [avoided task] today" or "I'm glad I waited until tonight, because I work better like this." More surprisingly, we found a change in the participants' perceptions of their tasks. On Monday, the dreaded, avoided task was perceived as very stressful, difficult, and unpleasant. On Thursday (or make that in the wee hours of Friday morning), once they had actually engaged in the task they had avoided all week, their perceptions changed. The ratings of task stressfulness, difficulty and unpleasantness decreased significantly.

What did we learn? Once we start a task, it's rarely as bad as we think. In fact, many participants made comments when we paged them during their last-minute efforts that they wished they had started earlier - the task was actually interesting, and they thought they could do a better job with a little more time. Just get started. That's the moral here. Once we start, our attributions of the task changes. Based on other research, we know that our attributions about ourselves change too. First, once we get started, as summarized above, we perceive the task as much less aversive than we do when we're avoiding it. Second, even if we don't finish the task, we have done something, and the next day our attributions about self are not nearly as negative. We feel more in control and more optimistic. You might even say we have a little momentum. Of course, this simple advice is not the answer to our procrastination problems, but it will take you a long way towards decreasing procrastination. When you find yourself thinking things like, "I'll feel more like doing this tomorrow," let that be a "flag" to recognize that you're about to needlessly delay the task, and let it be the stimulus to "just get started." As with everything from obesity to problematic gambling, the etiology of procrastination is tremendously heterogeneous as is effective treatment. There is a great deal to take into account to understand this self-defeating behavior including emotions, self-regulation, the role of personality interacting with situation and how we perceive reward. That leaves me (and you) lots more to write and think about. In the meantime, give it a try. Just get started.

Approaching Success, Avoiding the Undesired: Does Goal Type Matter?

Approaching success or avoiding the undesired: Does goal type matter? Published on February 8, 2009 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Approach-oriented goals involve reaching or maintaining desired outcomes. Avoidance goals focus on avoiding or eliminating undesired outcomes. Although both types of goals are common in our lives and both are functional, one goal-type is associated with more happiness than the other. I also think that there's something to learn about procrastination here.

Almost anything can be framed as an approach or avoidance goal. For example, I could frame an approach goal as "make my house sparkle" (because I like it that way), or "vacuum, dust and scrub the floors today" (to avoid being criticized again). I could head to the gym to stay strong and fit, or to avoid heart disease. Andrew Elliot and Ken Sheldon have pioneered a great deal of research about approach and avoidance goals. Their research indicates that the pursuit of a greater number of avoidance goals is related to:

less satisfaction with progress and more negative feelings about progress with personal goals, decreased self-esteem, personal control and vitality, less satisfaction with life, and feeling less competent in relation to goal pursuits.

It seems obvious that avoidance goals are not the goals on which we make a great deal of progress, and they don't lead us to a "happy place" In fact, Matt Dann and I think avoidance goals are more likely to be related to procrastination, and he's conducting research exploring just this hypothesis. As we wait for the outcome of his study, I can share an anecdote relating avoidance goals and task aversiveness to procrastination in my own life.

Two-hundred toenails I have a small team of sled dogs, 11 dogs in my kennel. Of course, this means a lot of daily care. I have many daily goals related to my dogs. Some of these are approach goals, particularly around getting them out on the trail. Some of the goals are avoidance goals, such as scooping "poop" (and lots of it) to avoid . . . well you figure it out.

One of the avoidance goals associated with my dog care is nail trimming. It's an avoidance goal for me because the purpose of this procedure is to avoid split nails and stressed feet (among other things). It also happens to be one of the most aversive tasks that I face. Not all dogs like having their feet handled for nail trimming, even when they accept booties with ease. Of course, 11 dogs with 18 nails per dog (give or take a few without dew claws) means that I have nearly 200 nails to trim. And, while a few of my dogs will lie patiently presenting their feet gently as if in for a manicure, others remind me of a high school wrestling match, except this opponent has teeth (which is why a muzzle may be involved). I digress.

Toe nail trimming for me is an avoidance goal, it's aversive, and I put it off. The trouble is, putting it off is the worst thing I could do, as the nails get too long. There is an obvious cost to this procrastination. So what's the solution? Tips for beating procrastination A key lesson from the approach-avoidance motivation literature is that I might benefit by reframing the toenail trimming goal. Rather than thinking of avoiding split nails and foot injuries, I could think about this aspect of dog care as reaching or maintaining optimum health and fitness. Certainly, anything I can do to reduce the avoidance goals in my life wouldn't hurt. In the end, I take an eclectic approach to reduce my procrastination.
1. 2. 3. 4. I work at reframing the goal from avoidance to approach as noted above. I make an implementation intention to act on a specific day at a specific time. I focus on the positive and the progress I make with each nail and each dog. I don't give in to feel good (i.e., give up until another day) when a particularly reluctant dog makes the task difficult.

Taken together these strategies work, and once I "just get started," I feel great about getting the job done. I think each of us faces "two-hundred toenails" in different ways everyday.

Procrastination: A Strategy for Change

A strategy to keep your appointments Published on April 15, 2008 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

It's not as effective to make yourself a "to do" list of goal intentions as it is to decide how, when and where you are going to accomplish each of the tasks you need to get done. In fact, a recently published study reveals that stating an implementation intention of when and where you'll act will make it more likely that you'll keep your appointments.

Shane Owens, Christine Bowman & Charles Dill of Hofstra University have explored the potential of implementation intentions as a way to overcome procrastination (see the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2008, 38, 366-384). Implementation intentions, a term coined by Peter Gollwitzer, is a specific type of intentional statement that defines when and where a specific behavior will be performed. Gollwitzer argues that forming an implementation intention causes the context specified in the intention to replace habitual acts making it the kind of plan

that will overcome potential distractions. In addition, given that the context is the cue for behavior, there is less conscious intent needed, as environmental cues signal behavior. There is an accumulating body of research that demonstrates the efficacy of implementation intentions for initiating behaviors, including following through on the intentions to take vitamins, participate in regular physical activity after surgery or ensuring that women perform breast selfexamination. In short, implementation intentions seem like a powerful tool to move from a goal intention to an action. Based on this research, Owens and his colleagues hypothesized that forming implementation intentions would help procrastinators. This makes sense to me and the students in my research group (www.procrastination.ca). We have done a few studies of this sort with mixed results. Not surprisingly, Owens et al. also had some unexpected results. Their method was simple yet elegant. They set up the appearance of two studies. Students who showed up for the first study were given a few questionnaires to complete including a measure of procrastination as well as a few items measuring behavioral intention. For the second study, now that they had some background information about the students, they had professors distribute sheets of paper that described an opportunity to earn extra credit through experimental participation. The paper listed 10 times at which the participants could report to take part in the second experiment. Here is where they did their experimental manipulation. For one group, the non-implementation intention (Non-II) group, all they asked is that the students sign up for a particular time as explained above. For the second group, the implementation intention (II) group participants were given the following instructions along with the potential times: "You are more likely to keep your appointment if you commit yourself to arriving to the assigned room at one of the times listed above. Select now the time at which you plan to come for the second experiment, write at the bottom of the second page, and return that page to your instructor." In actuality, there wasn't a second experiment, and when participants showed up they were "debriefed" and the whole experiment was explained to them. This research involved a series of statistical analyses that are beyond the scope of a blog posting to describe. Instead, I'm just going to summarize their main findings and what the authors interpreted them to mean about implementation intentions and procrastination. 1. There was a statistically significant difference between the implementation intention (II) group and the Non-II group in terms of attending the second experiment. A majority (61.8%) of the II participants got to the second study as opposed to 18.4% of the Non-II group. 2. The odds of getting to the appointment were about 7.73 times greater for the II group than the Non-II group.

3. Those who rated themselves low on procrastination kept their appointments more often than did those who rated themselves as high procrastinators. 4. Implementation intentions led to a more than a 40% increase in attendance, regardless of whether a participant was high or low on procrastination (this was a surprise, as we might expect high procrastinators to benefit more). 5. Lower intention (as measured at Time 1) and Non-II group participants kept their appointments 10.8% of the time, compared to Lower Intention/II-group participants who attended 48.6% of the time. 6. Finally, while the effects of implementation intentions within high or low procrastinators were nearly the same, it was evident that there was improvement for high procrastinators who formed implementation intentions (thus, both high and low procrastinators benefited from forming implementation intentions). Owens and colleagues conclude, "With regards to a model of procrastination, the results indicate that the best prediction of behavioral enactment includes main effects for procrastination and implementation intentions." In other words, low procrastinators are more likely to keep their appointments and people who form implementation intentions are more likely to keep their appointments as scheduled, but procrastinators do benefit from making implementation intentions. What can we take away from this study? Forming a specific implementation intention about what you will actually do, when and where will help. I certainly recommend this as a key strategy for anyone struggling with procrastination, even though our actual research results to date leave lots of questions unanswered. Implementation intentions seem to benefit us all, and those of us who procrastinate might just need them to combat the liability we face with our habitual task delay. Although I'm not personally prone to chronic procrastination, there are some tasks that I find easy to put off such as flossing my teeth or doing daily push ups, sit ups and back exercises. To help ensure I get these important health behaviours done daily, I make implementation intentions about when and where I will do each, so that the context signals the behavior. The results make me a believer

Enhancing Your Interest in a Task Affects Energy and Action

Procrastination: No interest, no energy, no action Published on October 17, 2008 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

"I break complex projects down into smaller tasks, and plan the order in which I will perform these tasks." "If an activity gets boring, I can usually find a way to make it fun again." A recent study indicates that people who endorse statements like these as typical of them are less likely to procrastinate.

In the most recent issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Volume 45), Peter Gropel (University of Trnava, Slovakia) and Piers Steel (University of Calgary) present their findings of a mega-trial research project. A mega-trial is a study with an unusually large sample size and is often used in the medical literature. The power of large samples is that the results may be more generalizable. In this case, Gropel and Steel collected their data on the Internet, so it's questionable as to how generalizable the findings are, but their results are of interest in any case. The authors base the rational for their study on Steel's Temporal Motivation Theory (TMT) which I have discussed previously (see TMT: Formula or Folly? for a description of the theory and a related limerick to make you smile). Although couched in the language of this theory, they needn't have done so as their results do little to test the theory itself. In essence, they argue what clinical psychologists have for years as general advice to defeat procrastination: 1) set short-term goals, 2) learn and use strategies to make the task at hand more interesting and 3) look past the initial negative feelings you might have about a task that may manifest themselves as "I'm too tired to do this" or "I don't have the energy." In any case, we needn't summarize their theory here to learn something from their results Their Study Using the Internet, Gropel and Steel collected data from 9351 people (5938 males). Although

they make no mention of the over-representation of males in the study, their sample is not typical in this respect, and it may indicate the effects of Internet sampling. Each of the participants completed the short form of the Volitional Components Inventory that includes 4-item measures of self-regulatory skills and related outcomes. They used 4 of the measures: procrastination ("I postpone many things which I have to do"), interest enhancement ("If an activity is boring, I can usually find a way to make it fun again"), goal setting ("Several times per day I rehearse the things that I want to get done"), and lack of energy ("I usually lack energy"). They used the data from these scales in a series of correlational analyses, including analyses to explore interactions among the variables in the prediction of procrastination. The Results Lack of Energy What interested me most in their results was that the largest correlation in their data set was between procrastination and lack of energy (r = .60). This is certainly something that people will report in regards to procrastination, "they don't have the energy to do that right now." The question it raises for me is whether these people truly lack energy overall or whether it's task specific or whether it's simply a rationalization for not acting now. In other words, could it be just another way of saying, "I don't feel like it"? The answer to this question awaits future research, but I would certainly like to hear what you think about this. Interest enhancement and lack of energy Using a mediational model, the authors showed that the relationship between interest enhancement and procrastination was mediated by lack of energy. In other words, "Persons low in interest enhancement reported on the low level of energy and, as a result, scored higher on procrastination. Conversely, interest enhancement affected the increase of energy and, in turn, facilitated initiation of actions" (p. 409). These results reflect an important message about interest enhancement which I have addressed previously (see Lighting the Fire for Learning). Given that interest is an emotion, I suspect we'll see quite a bit of research yet that reveals important individual differences in the ability to enhance interest. For example, extraverts are known to be happier and higher-energy individuals. I wonder if extraverts tend to use interest enhancement (enhancing their positive emotions) more as a strategy for self-regulation, as opposed to people who score low on emotional stability who might need to harness their fear of failure more to motivate action. Goal setting versus interest enhancement Not surprisingly, Gropel and Steel found that ". . . people high in goal setting and interest enhancement scored lower on procrastination" (p. 409). Each of these volitional skills, being able to set short-term goals and being able to increase your interest in the task at hand, reduced procrastination. Most importantly, however, the authors also note the following, "Goal setting is less effective for those who already have interest enhancement in their selfregulatory repertoire" (p. 410). As the authors conclude, ". . . self-regulatory techniques are not automatically additive in effect. Consequently, determining what is already in a person's motivational repertoire becomes critical

in recommending new techniques . . . We need to learn boundaries of our techniques as well as learn how to match people to those techniques they would most likely benefit from" (p. 410). Concluding thoughts - What is in your motivational repertoire? Are you able to find ways to make a task interesting when it's not? Can you break a task down into manageable pieces that include immediate short-term rewards? Can you keep the larger meaning of a task or its relevance to your value system in mind as you labor at the immediate sub-task to get it done? Can you tolerate the negative feelings that seem to overwhelm you as you begin an aversive task? Each of these questions reflects self-regulatory skills that are important in reducing procrastination. Perhaps the most important question to pose in my blog is: What strategies might you develop for each of these areas to reduce procrastination?

Fear of Failure
The latest research on fear of failure and procrastination. Published on February 13, 2009 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

It was an exciting day in our research group. Adam presented the preliminary analyses of his thesis data. His study provides some interesting insight into the relationship between fear of failure and procrastination.

Human motivation: Active engagement and psychological growth Last fall, Adam McCaffrey set out an interesting project in which he would explore the relations between the need for autonomy, competence and relatedness (three fundamental human needs proposed by Edward Deci & Richard Ryan in their Self-Determination Theory) and procrastination (For another Don't Delay blog that draws on Self-Determination Theory and the need for human autonomy see "Where there's a will, there's a").

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a general theory of motivation and personality that evolved over three decades of research to explain the natural human tendencies toward active engagement and psychological growth. Their theory frames human behaviors as volitional or self-determined. They argue that we have a fundamental need that is basic to human motivation to engage in actions with a full sense of choice (an existential theme that I think it essential to overcoming procrastination). Given that higher scores on a measure of self-determination reflect this strong volitional choice in action, Adam hypothesized that the higher an individual's scores on the measure of selfdetermination, the lower their procrastination. Fear of Failure In addition to this focus on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), Adam was interested in fear of failure - that irrational fear that we will not succeed. Of course, fear of failure is often discussed as a reason for procrastination, and we might expect a fear of this sort to undermine the sense of agency expressed in SDT. The measure of fear of failure that Adam used included a number of subscales that captured uncertainty about the future, upsetting important others, and devaluing one's sense of self. Vitality In contrast to this sense of fear, Adam was also interested in the notion of "vitality" (perhaps because he's such an energetic and spirited man himself). Adam's measure of vitality consisted of items such as, "Sometimes I am so alive I just want to burst", "I have energy and spirit" and "I look forward to each new day." Not surprisingly, he hypothesized that higher fear of failure scores would predict higher procrastination, whereas higher scores on a measure of personal vitality would predict lower procrastination. To explore the relation among these variables, Adam collected data from a large sample of undergraduate students on our campus using an online survey. His results are so strong, he's going to continue collecting data so that we might use more sophisticated statistical modeling techniques to tease out the relations among the variables. For today, however, I can summarize the key findings. What he found As expected, scores on the measures of autonomy, competence, relatedness and vitality, were strongly related to lower scores on two different measures of procrastination. And, not surprisingly, higher scores on the fear of failure measure predicted higher scores on procrastination. In other words, if you're feeling like your behaviours are self-determined and/or you feel "vital" vigorous, lively, animated - you procrastinate less. These were very strong relations statistically. The smaller, yet still statistically significant relation was between fear of failure and procrastination. Higher fear of failure predicted more procrastination.

The important role of competence The one interesting result I really want to focus on today is an analysis that involves three of these variables together in what is known as a mediational model. In this case, we examined what happens to the relation between fear of failure and procrastination when we statistically control for the effects of the measure of competence (the ability to learn new skills, feeling capable). KEY FINDING: After we take into account the relation with competence, fear of failure no longer predicts procrastination! What does this mean? Although we might all have some fear about the future (feelings that are often related to avoidance goals), to the extent that we feel competent to engage in the tasks ahead of us, this fear of failure doesn't predict procrastination. We get on with our goal pursuit. In a sense, these results echo one of my favorite expressions, "I can have fear, but I need not be fear - if I am willing to stand someplace else in my inner landscape" (Palmer, 1998; p. 57). Given the results of Adam's research, I would argue that this alternative place within myself needs to be rooted in my sense of competence, not my sense of fear. It isn't unusual for any of us to have fear. In fact, it can be considered part of the human condition). A key question in spite of this fear is, are we fulfilling our basic human needs, finding the ongoing nutriments and supports from the social environment in order to function effectively? Adam's research, and I'm only touching on our early look at these data, indicates that developing and maintaining our sense of competence plays an essential role in our ability to pursue our goals effectively. In fact, to the extent that we feel competent, our fears of the potential for failure are not related to our procrastination. Concluding comments The question now is how do we foster that sense of competence in our lives that is so essential to our well-being? Competence, sometimes known as self-efficacy or our confidence in our ability, is built on earlier success. It is an upward spiral of confidence in our ability based on previous experience. It's also partly perception. When we recall the past, what do we recall? Where do we put our focus? Are we feeding our fears by remembering times when we did fail (because we all do at times), or are we optimistically and strategically focusing on our many successes to bolster our sense of competence? The choice is ours (ok, there are personality differences here, and we may discuss those at another time, but it is ultimately up to us).

As the image of the sign for this blog post said so clearly, "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" The attempt is the "courage to be", and our well-being depends on our moving forward with this courage in our lives.

Temporal Motivation Theory: Formula or Folly?

Equations are not theories; prediction is not explanation. Published on March 27, 2008 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

One of the most significant, recent publications about procrastination is a comprehensive meta-analysis conducted by Piers Steel (University of Calgary, Alberta) and published in Psychological Bulletin (2007). This paper is well written and a must read for my thesis students. Unfortunately, I find it misleading, because of its focus on an equation to explain procrastination. Economists and nave realists need not read on.

Given that the paper is a recent review of much of the procrastination literature, I will summarize aspects of this paper in blog postings to come. For example, Dr. Steel clearly identifies a number of important variables that are strongly related to procrastination such as: self-efficacy, need for achievement, proneness to boredom, distractibility, impulsiveness, self-control and organization. Each of these deserves attention, and we'll get there. My focus today is on the expression of Temporal Motivation Theory (TMT) as an equation that Dr. Steel proposes to explain procrastination. TMT attempts to synthesize well-established motivational formulations with a specific focus on time. In short, the theory integrates two ideas, expectancy theory and hyperbolic discounting, in 4 variables: 1. we are more likely to do things at which we expect to succeed (E) and we value (V), and 2. we typically discount future rewards in favor of immediate rewards (D) which is moderated by our tolerance for or sensitivity to delay ().

Taken together, these variables in the expression, E x V/ x D, predict how desirable a task or choice is for an individual (defined as "utility" = U). This all makes sense, at least in principle, as an integration of a number of concepts related to our motivation over time. As Dr. Steel explains through his literature review, many (but not all) of the variables that have been found to relate to procrastination can be linked to the variables in the equation. However, these links and the application of this equation to the understanding of human behavior, relies on many assumptions. I take exception to the assumptions in the application of this theory. I'll take one assumption as an example. In the graph in the diagram above, the horizontal line represents the utility of "socializing," while the utility of "writing an essay" (a task typically associated with academic procrastination) is represented by the hyperbolic, curved line on the graph. The assumption is that socializing has a fixed utility. I believe, as do my students, that this doesn't reflect reality. As presented in the graph, this assumption of a fixed utility for socializing makes the equation and theory fit our experience well. We see the desire (motivation) for essay writing overcome (intersect) the desire for socialization late on the time line, reflecting our own experience of endof-term efforts. More realistically, here's how socialization might change: a party for Friday night is put off to next week greatly reducing expectation of success and increasing delay, thus decreasing the utility of socializing overall. So on that particular Friday night, the utility of socializing could dip down below the level of the utility of essay writing. Without the assumption that socialization remains constant, the theory would now predict that the individual would begin work on the essay. However, we still may not see essay writing. In fact, my experience and my students tell me that we wouldn't. There are more things to consider here once we remove the assumption in the model. The point is that complex human behaviors are not best understood by simple equations or formulae, although the theories that these formulae represent can be useful in our discussion of behavior. The reason this is important is that we sometimes mistake a mathematical equation (particularly one that reminds us of Newtonian physics) with real theory and understanding. We begin to believe that we could plug numbers into the equation and predict behavior, or in this case procrastination, much like we could predict the trajectory of a projectile. Unfortunately, this is not true except for overly constrained examples that depend on unwarranted assumptions as noted. Predicting human behavior is analogous to something our kindergarten teachers told us years ago, "Each of us is like a snowflake." In this regard, the modern physics of snowflakes that incorporates chaos theory and understands a phenomenon in terms of non-linear, unstable, freeboundary conditions may serve us much better than an equation as presented in TMT. Interestingly, another PT blogger, Jesse Bering, recently posted about the two types of psychologists (see the blog "Quirky Little Things"). As he puts it, there are those who get into psychology to help others, and those who work to explain others. I'm adding to his distinction by

saying that even those of us who belong to the "explain it" camp (i.e., research psychologists), don't necessarily agree about the best approach to making these knowledge claims. Does this mean that I believe people don't discount future rewards or that we are not motivated to do things we value and at which we expect success? Not at all. These are well substantiated theories about human behavior. In addition, temporal issues of our projects over time must be taken into account as we explore how our volitional action breaks down. The issue is that these theories and variables as expressed in the TMT equation fall short of explaining procrastination, even if the computational formula predicts general trends in the population. As Dr. Steel notes in the concluding section of his important review paper, "extensive research is needed that will fully explore procrastination and its underpinnings." I couldn't agree more, and I would advocate that we not adopt an overly simplified approach to providing a unifying theory as we move forward. We have to ensure that we don't mistake the statistical partitioning of variance or the mathematical product of psychological measures as an understanding of the phenomenon or the individual. But, that's me, and as Dr. Bering noted in his distinction of the types of psychologists, it could be that we're just in different camps.

Where There's a Will, There's a . . .

Mistaken beliefs about brain and will Published on May 8, 2008 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

. . . human being. The recent emphasis about will being merely an illusion is another example of the "baby being thrown out with the bath water." At the least, it's a misunderstanding of the definition of conscious will. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I . . .

A recent graduate from our psychology program, emailed me the other day to say that he'd been reading my blogs, and although he agreed with the various perspectives about why we might procrastinate, he wanted to remind me that procrastination can also be understood as a habit. He's right, of course. Certainly John Bargh would agree. As Bargh and his colleagues argue clearly in their work, we don't need conscious processing to act or make choices. If we make the same decisions or choices in the same circumstances, the process becomes routinized and signaled by the circumstances. In fact, we depend on this process as part of learning. All skills develop this

way, as less conscious attention is required for action to be carried out successfully. I depend on this unconscious process now as I type. I don't look at the keyboard, as long hours of practice at a typewriter in high school (and many years since on the computer keyboard) has provided me with an unconscious ability to process thoughts into keystrokes. I also depend on this type of automatic process on the highway every day (perhaps too often at times!). Bargh, and others (for a review see Chartrand & Bargh, 2002 referenced below), have also argued that this automatic activation is related to goal pursuit. Nonconscious goal pursuit is typical and has the same qualities as conscious goal pursuit in terms of the tendency (or not) of resuming and completing interrupted goals, the mood effects of goal pursuit (e.g., happiness on the successful pursuit), etc., even when we're not really aware of having the goal. Again, we depend on these processes. We're cognitive misers, and our brains are adapted to finding patterns, making meaning and making things automatic. This frees up the limited resources of attention for other tasks. In this sense, yes, procrastination can be a habit associated with our goal pursuit. Given that this notion of habit is the unconscious routinized behavior signaled by the circumstances (certainly the behaviorists have argued this for years), what does it take to break the procrastination habit? (as popular book titles admonish) Conscious attention and will. But wait, isn't will an illusion? It's certainly a notion that was first rejected in the early 1900's as psychology began its slow birth as a science, and it has been again rejected most vehemently as the remnants of dualistic thought. Daniel Wegner and colleagues argue that conscious will is an illusion (see references below). In short, neuroscientific evidence (by Benjamin Libet and others) demonstrates that the brain sends signals for action (a "readiness potential") before the individual is conscious of the action that is about to take place. Hence, the later conscious activation is an "effort after meaning" that explains the event in terms of the mental event and will. We can be fooled like this, and in many other ways, all of the time it seems. But all of this assumes that we define "will" with the notion that our thought is the cause of our action. This is problematic given the unconscious processes of learning that I presented above, and it sets up any notion of will to collapse under the weight of such a definition. Instead, I agree with Richard Ryan & Edward Deci who suggest instead that ". . . the exercise of will and autonomy is different from being an initial cause or stimulus to action. It rather concerns the capacity to effectively evaluate the meaning and fit of potential actions with one's overarching values, needs, and interests" (2004, p. 468). Will is bringing conscious attention to our action or potential action and taking stock of it in relation to our values, needs and interests. It is facilitated by being mindful, being aware of what is occurring in the moment (see my earlier blog on Mindfulness and procrastination). Bargh agrees, in principle, arguing that becoming aware of the automatic cognitions that trigger or prompt action can be a first step in gaining control over automatic processes. Automatic processes are habitual, efficient and adaptive, but they are not immutable.

Mindful attention is the first step to gaining control, to exercising one's will per se. Baumeister and Heatherton argue the same thing in relation to self-control processes. The self-regulatory processes provide the potential for transcending the immediate situation to make a conscious choice as opposed to enacting the habitual, unconscious choice. Transcending the momentary desire to eat dessert is possible, for example, if one takes a moment to reflect on the consumption of dessert in relation to the goal of weight control or a healthy diet. Without this transcendence, which lies at the heart of the existential definition of the will, we certainly act out automatic processes programmed by a long evolutionary history ("sweet foods are best"), personal history ("this is my comfort food") and automatic processes ("I always eat dessert"). Ah, this is a blog and not a philosophical treatise, so my treatment of these important ideas is a little "light fingered" and cursory, I know, but my comments are true to the basic ideas of the arguments. My point is, conscious will is an essence of being human. Some argue that is it THE essence, but I need not limit myself to this narrower definition in order to underscore the importance of understanding will as the application of conscious attention to my decisions, choices and actions. Certainly it can be easier to remain on automatic pilot with learned behaviors and scripts for our lives. However, for many of us, these unconscious processes get us into trouble. Any athlete knows this. Practice makes permanent, not perfect. So, to improve our performance, we have to consciously make changes to our stroke or approach, whatever the game entails. For procrastination, it's the same thing. We can, as my student noted, follow our habits. Alternatively, we can bring conscious attention to our choice to needlessly delay a task and examine this honestly in relation to our values, needs and goals. Unfortunately, conscious attention is not a panacea, because self-deception looms large. That's why I wrote "honest" examination of our choices in relation to our values. It's quite easy to rationalize our current choice, to make what existentialists call an inauthentic choice, because change of an automatic process is difficult, even scary. Our learned behaviour has served us well in a variety of ways so far, hasn't it? Again, much like changing your approach to a backhand on the tennis court or your golf swing, old habits die hard, change is difficult, and conscious attentive practice is required. That also means work, and faith in the efficacy of the change. This is part of the human condition, our existence. Not only does it take conscious attention, it takes the courage to follow your values and work for change. Where there's a will, there's a way. Corny? Perhaps, but true. Here's another, perhaps corny, way to think of it. "Two roads diverged in a wood, and II took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." Robert Frost (1874-1963).

Your guess as to what I think is the road less traveled. Habits make deep ruts in the trail, that's for sure.

Goal Orientation, Task Difficulty and Task Interest: Effects on Setting Personal Goals
How do task difficulty and interest affect our goal setting? Published on September 14, 2008 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

What factors influence the types of goals we set? Will I aim to excel or just get by? Of course, both person and situation variables interact in the process of goal setting. This recent study helps us understand a little more about 3 factors that influence goal setting. Michael Horvath, Hailey Herleman and Lee McKie (Clemson University) explored goal setting in relation to two situational variables - task difficulty and interest - as well as one personal attribute, Goal Orientation. Before we can discuss what they did, let's define a few terms. Task difficulty Perceived task difficulty refers to our beliefs about how much effort would be needed to succeed at a task. It also includes our perception of how likely we'll be successful, if at all. This perception includes both objective characteristics of the situation as well as our ability. The climb depicted in the picture above, although difficult, would be perceived differently depending on your climbing experience and ability. And, of course, task difficulty is related to our intentions to engage in the behavior. Quite frankly, I would never attempt that climb, but I don't like heights. Interest Although I've written earlier that interest is an emotion (see Lighting the fire for learning), Horvath and colleagues include both feelings as well as the perceptions of value or relevance of a topic in their definition of interest. Individuals who have an interest in a topic or task are more likely to persist, be emotionally involved and focus their attention more easily on the task. Goal orientation This individual difference or personality variable is defined as having two flavors: 1) Mastery Goal Orientation (MGO), otherwise known as a Learning Orientation, and 2) Performance Orientation (PGO), sometimes called Ego Orientation. The two orientations contrast in fundamental ways. Mastery-oriented individuals seek to develop their competence and improve their abilities. In contrast, Performance-oriented individuals seek to demonstrate their competence and/or avoid revealing their incompetence. Furthermore, some psychologists also add an approach vs. avoidance dimension to the Performance Orientation, such that Performance-Approach people seek to demonstrate competence, and, not surprisingly, Performance-Avoidance people seek to avoid revealing incompetence.

Their research As you will have predicted, each of these variables - task difficulty, task interest and the individual's Goal Orientation - may affect goal setting in different ways. The simple predictions might be that the more difficult the task, the lower the personal goal set; whereas the higher the task interest, the higher the personal goal set. The thing is, life is one big "interaction effect," and these researchers explored the interaction of these variables in their research. They had 499 undergraduate students (on average 19 years of age, 61% female) included in their final sample. The students completed a survey regarding their classes, including key questions tapping interest and difficulty. For example, "I am interested in the course material for this class" and "How difficult do you feel this course is for you?" They were also asked about their grade goal for the course on a 100-point scale. Finally, they completed a measure of Goal Orientation (e.g., "I try to avoid discovering that others are better than me." "I enjoy opportunities to extend the range of my abilities," etc.) The results The authors used Hierarchical Linear Modeling, which I will not describe here. In sum, they found that Goal Orientation affected the relationship between perceived task difficulty and goal setting in the course. As they note, "High levels of PGO or MGO buffered the effects of difficulty on goals, such that difficulty was not as related to goals for individual who were higher on these constructs. . . . Similarly we also found that MGO may also weaken the relationship between perceived class difficulty and self-set course goals, as difficulty has less of an effect on goals for individuals higher in MGO" (p. 176). The effect of interest on goal setting was not found to vary with Goal Orientation. The main effect held that more task interest results in higher goal setting, irrespective of the individual's goal orientation. The implication is that raising the interest level of a task may be an effective strategy to enhance higher goal setting across any organization, and the authors note this in the final remarks in their paper. What this means in terms of procrastination The authors close their paper with some comments on the "practical implications" of their research, and it is here that the research speaks to the issue of procrastination (although they do not address it explicitly). As I have noted previously in a review of other research, evaluation threat and threats to self increase the likelihood of procrastination. The interplay of difficult tasks with a Performance Orientation seems to result in lower goal setting. These lower goals may be well below the true potential performance of the individual. This is form of self-handicapping. Closing thoughts Performance and Mastery Orientations, while treated by many psychologists as relatively stable and enduring individual differences or traits, vary across situations. It is important to reflect on your own motivations in the various contexts in your life to identify to what extent you're working to enhance your ability and learn vs. simply demonstrating your existing competence vs. avoiding failure or demonstrating incompetence. To the extent that you realize that you are tending to a Performance Orientation, or an Avoidance rather than an Approach motive, it would

be important to develop strategies to enhance your feelings of self-efficacy - feelings that you are capable of learning. If you don't, chances are you'll self-handicap by setting a lower goal or by procrastinating on the task to provide an alternative explanation for the feared failure.

The 3 Biggest Myths About Motivation That Wont Go Away

Three popular motivational "tips" that are recipes for disaster. Published on June 17, 2011 by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. in The Science of Success

People can have remarkably keen insights into their own behavior. Then again, people can also be remarkably wrong about why they, and everyone else, do the things that they do. And some of those people turn out to be motivational speakers and authors. No doubt their intentions are very admirable - many genuinely want to help others to reach a higher level of success. But too often, they simply end up reinforcing false notions (albeit intuitively appealing ones) about how motivation works. Here are three of the most firmly entrenched motivational myths:

Just Write Down Your Goals, and Success is Guaranteed! There is a story that motivational speakers/authors love to tell about the Yale Class of 1953. (Google it. It's everywhere.) Researchers, so the story goes, asked graduating Yale seniors if they had specific goals they wanted to achieve in the future that they had written down. Twenty years later, the researchers found that the mere 3% of students who had specific, written goals were wealthier than the other 97% combined. Isn't that amazing? It would be if it were true, which it isn't. (See the 1996 Fast Company article that debunked the story here.) I wish it were that simple. To be fair, there is evidence that getting specific about what you want to achieve is really important. (Not a guaranteed road to fabulous wealth, but still important.) In other words, specificity is necessary, but it's not nearly sufficient. Writing goals down is actually neither - it can't hurt, but there's also no hard evidence that writing per se does anything to help.

Just Try to Do Your Best! Telling someone, or yourself, to just "do your best" is believed to be a great motivator. It isn't. Theoretically, it encourages without putting on too much pressure. In reality, and rather ironically, it is more-or-less permission to be mediocre.

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two renown organizational psychologists, have spent several decades studying the difference between "do your best" goals and their antithesis: specific and difficult goals. Evidence from more than 1,000 studies conducted by researchers across the globe shows that goals that not only spell out exactly what needs to be accomplished, but that also set the bar for achievement high, result in far superior performance than simply trying to "do your best." That's because more difficult goals cause you to, often unconsciously, increase your effort, focus and commitment to the goal, persist longer, and make better use of the most effective strategies.

Just Visualize Success! Advocates of "positive thinking" are particularly fond of this piece of advice. But visualizing success, particularly effortless success, is not just unhelpful - it's a great way to set yourself up for failure. Few motivational gurus understand that there's an awfully big difference between believing you will succeed, and believing you will succeed easily. Realistic optimists believe they will succeed, but also believe they have to make success happen - through things like effort, careful planning, persistence, and choosing the right strategies. They don't shy away from thinking "negative" thoughts, like what obstacles will I face? and how will I deal with them? Unrealistic optimists, on the other hand, believe that success will happen to them, if they do lots and lots of visualizing. Recent research shows that this actually (and once again, ironically) serves to drain the very energy we need to reach our goals. People who spend too much time fantasizing about the wonderful future that awaits them don't have enough gas left in the tank to actually get there. You can cultivate a more realistically optimistic outlook by combining confidence in your ability to succeed with an honest assessment of the challenges that await you. Don't visualize success - visualize the steps you will take in order to make success happen. For more (scientifically proven) tips and strategies, check out my new book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals. Follow me on Twitter too! @hghalvorson www.heidigranthalvorson.com

Education Is Not the Filling of a Pail, But the Lighting of a Fire"

Motivation, procrastination, and Yeats. Published on May 10, 2008 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

A quick search of the Internet reveals that this quote is misattributed to William Butler Yeats (Poet, 1865-1939). Despite the error in the source, this often-used quote captures what lies at the heart of authentic engagement - fire. As an educator, I've learned a great deal about pedagogical pyromania. In fact, it's my passion.

As an educator who studies procrastination, I think a lot about student engagement. Formerly a boy scout and still active with a life outdoors (for example, with my other life as a musher, I run a team of sled dogs and camp in the winter with my team - a true Canadian, eh?), I've learned a lot about lighting fires. I've put these two parts of my life together, with an understanding of how to light the fire of student learning. It's really an appropriate metaphor and a good place to start my blog today.

Although this blog entry has a focus on student learning, you'll see that at its heart, the topic is still motivation and procrastination. Fully engaged people are not usually troubled by procrastination. So, what lights that fire for them?

The fire triangle If you talk about lighting, or fighting, fires, sooner or later you'll talk about the "fire triangle" (firefighters will add the fire tetrahedron and the fire square as well, as our knowledge expands about types of fires). Focusing on the fire triangle, we can articulate the science and art of building a fire. The three elements of this triangle are fuel, heat and air. The science of building a

fire is knowing that these work together (and quite a bit about fuel itself like tinder, kindling and fuel wood). The art of building a fire is being able to regulate these under the given circumstances to get a blaze going. The "fire triangle" of motivation So, what about this fire that Yeat's writes about? What is the art and science of lighting the fire for learning? Richard Ryan & Edward Deci have their own triangle that's appropriate with their Self-Determination Theory (SDT). Their theory is based on three fundamental human needs: competence, autonomy and relatedness. Their science (and there has been lots of it) has demonstrated how each need or component contributes to motivation. The art is in addressing each component as part of the curriculum and regulating them in the students' environment to maximize interest and approach behaviors. Will & Skill In my own presentations and workshops on this topic, I address SDT, but I simplify it even further in some ways (and complicate it in others - life is like that, isn't it?). My approach is to think about autonomy and relatedness together (with other things like "Need for achievement") as an overall "Will" component, and to think about competence as a "Skill" component (that includes things like knowing strategies appropriate for the task at hand). Will and skill - you need both to light a fire for learning. This is not a new approach. I adapted and expanded this notion from work published by Wilbert McKeachie and his colleagues. A reference to McKeachie's now quite famous "Teaching Tips" is included below. Unfortunately, many educators assume that one or the other of these components - will & skill is simply the students' responsibility. For example, I often hear colleagues lament how students lack motivation. They lack the will for learning. These teachers expect that it is the students' responsibility to come into the classroom on fire for learning. Similarly, others remark that students don't know how to write the essays required in their course or how to read. They lack skills. Of course, students who don't think they can succeed at a task (lack skill) won't feel very motivated to try. It's true that ultimately the student must be the fuel for the fire, but that doesn't mean that educators don't have a role in lighting this fire. At the very least, we have to spark the students' interest. Interest - the emotion Interest is an emotion. In fact, Carroll Izard has identified interest as one of our primary emotions along with fear, joy, anger, for example. Each of these emotions is important as each has motivational properties. You'll understand this best when you think of fear. Fear motivates what we commonly call "fight or flight." Interest is an emotion that motivates approach behaviors, curiosity, learning. Without an emotional response on the part of the student, without sparking the students' interest, it's doubtful there will be a fire for learning.

In my opinion, too many educators think of higher education as a "neck up" process. Learning is all about cognitive activity. It's not about emotions (something we think of as matters of the heart, and below the neck so to speak.) Although they don't necessarily think of "filling a pail" (ok, some certainly do), they act this way creating a situation where "telling is teaching." Where's the fire here without that emotion of interest to ignite it? The fire for learning depends on educators' addressing both will and skill. We have to attend to things like helping students to: see the value of what they're learning, integrate their learning to their need for social interaction and their need for our mentoring, as well as help them develop the skills they need to succeed coupled with the courage and effort to try. This is the craft, the art, of teaching. All fires are different All fires are different. Some just seem to burst into flames and rage (wild fires in California get described this way with what I referred to earlier as the "fire square"). Other fires, while ultimately successful, have to be gently nurtured from remnants of glowing coals or from accessing the inner dry wood in what appears to be a soggy log. Lighting the fire of student engagement is no different, and each student requires a different approach (educators have all had their fair share of what seem like "soggy logs" but eventually burn brightly). The artful approach differs, while the science remains the same. All of this is my focus for the week ahead. I'll be away from my desk working with faculty at other campuses on issues of student engagement and teaching with technology; some "good talk about good teaching", as I've learned to think of it. So, there will be delay in my next posting for "Don't Delay" (sorry, I had to write that, it was just too easy ) Until then, I hope to hear back from you with stories about your own engagement in learning. What lights your fire for learning? Concluding thoughts - "kindling the gift of life" I'll end with a quote from one of my favorite educators and writers, Parker Palmer. His book, "The Courage to Teach," is simply excellent. Here's what he has to say about fire and learning in some introductory remarks he wrote for a colleague's book. "Tips, tricks and techniques are not at the heart of education - fire is. I mean finding light in the darkness, staying warm in the cold world, avoiding being burned if you can, and knowing what brings healing if you can cannot. That is the knowledge that our students really want, and that is the knowledge we owe them. Not merely the facts, not merely the theories, but a deep knowing of what it means to kindle the gift of life in ourselves, in others, and in the world" (Palmer, p. x; Foreword to O'Reilley, 1998). In education, in life, let there be fire! Have a great week.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

How planning may fail to benefit us Published on November 21, 2012 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Despite good intentions, most goals go unfulfilled. This is the opening line to a research article published this fall, and its not news to most of us. This recently published study does have some surprises in terms of why some of our best intentions fail.

As I have outlined in a number of previous blog posts, implementation intentions are one of my favorite strategies for getting things done. This form of intention, originally described by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, involves making explicit where, when and how we will achieve a goal. These are specific precommitments to act when the environmental cue (the where and when) happens. When we make implementation intentions, were more likely to exercise, stop smoking, recycle, study for an exam, and many more of those noble goals for which we strive. In study after study, researchers have shown implementation intentions to be more effective than simple goal intentions or commitment to act on a goal --- that is, until now. The thing about previous research, Amy Dalton and Stephen Spiller explain, is that the focus has been on the effectiveness of implementation intentions on the achievement of single goals. But, who has single goals? We live with many goals that we constantly juggle. Their research question was, do implementation intentions work as well for real life where we have multiple goals? Conceptually, you might expect that implementation intentions would work well when were juggling the many goals in our lives because the precommitment to act in response to an external contextual cue (e.g., In situation X, Ill do behavior Y) frees up our capacity to think through other goals. For example, once Ive made implementation intentions for my various goals, I can act more unconsciously in their pursuit. As the situations that serve as cues for action arise, I act. I can save my thinking for planning other things or for rethinking my plans when contingencies change. The thing is, Dalton and Spiller argue, is that all of this depends on commitment to our goals. Without commitment, implementation intentions simply arent effective. And, most importantly, they argue that one way that we might unintentionally weaken our commitment to any one goal is to form specific plans for other goals. In this regard, they write, . . . any activity that draws attention to the conflicts and constraints (e.g., time, attention, energy) involved in executing multiple goals could potentially undermine commitment including planning itself (p. 601). In other words, when we form specific implementation intentions for multiple goals, we anticipate greater difficulty (sometimes simply through goal conflict), and we become less

committed to our goal. Ultimately, this weakened commitment undermines the effectiveness of implementation intentions. In addition, planning for multiple goals may lead us to stray from an intended task at any moment in favor of a non-target goal. We get distracted by other goals, and we fail to shield one intention from another. Their research Dalton and Spiller conducted 3 studies. If you actually wanted the details of each of these, you would be in a graduate program or reading the journal article It will suffice to sa y that in each study, they examined the role of implementation intentions when participants had multiple goals, as opposed to the single-goal focus of previous research. Overall, what they found was that the benefits of implementation intentions found in previous research with single goals didnt extend to their multiple-goal research. In addition, their third study provided evidence that it is a process of undermining goal commitment that undermines the effectiveness of implementation intentions at the execution stage of a goal. Heres how the authors summarize their studies and findings: In study 1, implementation intentions were applied to everyday goals, such as eating healthily and tidying up, and we followed participants goal success over a 5-day work- week. Study 2 was a laboratory experiment in which implemental planning was applied to simple, computer-based goals. These two experiments used vastly different goals, procedures, and measures of goal success, but pointed to the same conclusion: the benefits of implementation intentions for a single goal do not extend to multiple goals. To address why implemental planning is unsuccessful for multiple goals, we theorized that planning draws attention to the difficulty of executing those goals, which reduces commitment to those goals relative to other attractive pursuits. By compromising commitment at the planning stage, forming implementation intentions compromises success at the execution stage. Supporting this view, study 1 established mediation by relative goal commitment, and study 3 showed that planning affects the perceived difficulty of executing multiple goals (p. 611) However . . . The authors third study also showed that participants could benefit from implemental plans if they were helped to view their goals as relatively easy to execute. When the participants werent overwhelmed by the task, the implementation intention planning didnt affect execution (interestingly, some of the earliest research on implementation intentions by Gollwitzer also showed that this form of intention was more effective for difficult tasks, so theres more research necessary to untangle these conflicting results). Implications and Bloggers thoughts on the study (A "straw man"?) The authors do address the task difficulty issue I highlighted above. They write that, When people juggle multiple goals, completing one task means neglecting or postponing others, which reduces the expected likelihood of ever achieving all goals. This sort of difficulty is hard to overcome and tends to undermine commitment. In fact, the difficulty associated with managing

multiple goals may be particularly detrimental to commitment because constraints cannot be managed by effort and willpower alone (p. 612). Of course they add that we need future research to address this. Of course we need this research, because as much as we do learn that implementation intentions may have limitations in their effectiveness (a boundary condition as the authors call it), the authors set implementation intentions up a little in their study. How so? Well, they made the context more complex by setting the more realistic assumption of multiple goals. However, they still assumed that an individual might use a simple implementation intention. In a sense, we should have expected failure. In complex situations, we require complex strategies. Each of us understands that theres not one strategy that serves as a panacea for problems in goal pursuit. As soon as we move from a consideration of a single task, we also need to move to a consideration of multiple self-regulation strategies and volitional skills. Moreover, these strategies need to be context- and temporally-sensitive. In other words, we need to know when to apply each strategy based on the type of task and where we are in the process. This is not new to many of us who study goal pursuit. For example, the work of Dr. Brian Little on Personal Projects Analysis that began in the late 1970s demonstrated both cross-project negative impact as well as cross-project facilitation. Some projects interfere with others while other projects help. These can be our own projects or the projects of significant others in our lives. It is truly a complex system. While we juggle these multiple goals, they affect each other in many ways and all of this changes over time. This work on personal-project or goal pursuit provides a much more complex analysis of the nature of the goals in which we engage, including measures of our project commitment. I hope that future research adopts this project perspective, as I know it will be fruitful in further exploring issues raised in this paper. Unfortunately, the authors of this work seem unaware of this whole area of research related to goal pursuit. Closing comment Until we do see further research, each of us must recognize how complex goal pursuit is, yet at the same time how simple, particularly in terms of how important our own commitment to goal completion is.
Do you want to be more successful in your goal pursuit? Work on task commitment. Find the meaning in your work. Affirm the values that ground each of your goals. Where theres a will, theres a way!

Strategies to Strengthen Executive Function

Developing volitional skills to reduce procrastination

Published on February 22, 2013 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

A reader of my last post agreed with the points made about self-regulation failure, but noted, when the [procrastination] habit has been 'cemented,' things are not so simple. Another reader wrote, Please tell more about how self-regulatory skills can be learned. Here are some research-based strategies to strengthen executive function.

In a blog post a couple of years ago, I focused on a study published by Laura Rabin, Joshua Fogel and Katherine Nutter-Upham (Brooklyn College of the City University of New York) relating executive function to procrastination. Their focus is well placed procrastination as selfregulation failure. They write, Procrastination is increasingly recognized as involving a failure in self-regulation such that procrastinators, relative to non-procrastinators, may have a reduced ability to resist social temptations, pleasurable activities, and immediate rewards . . . These individuals also fail to make efficient use of internal and external cues to determine when to initiate, maintain, and terminate goal-directed actions (p. 345). The characteristics the authors summarize associated with procrastination are numerous:

Reduced agency Disorganization Poor impulse and emotional control Poor planning and goal setting Reduced use of meta-cognitive skills Distractibility Poor task persistence Time and task management deficiencies

A recent reply to my blog post reflects similar problems. A reader noted, As someone who scored very low on the "conscientiousness" scale of the Big Five, I am disheartened. I believe I can learn these self-regulatory skills, but I don't know where to start. Meanwhile, my endeavors suffer. Although I have improved over time, I can't seem to shake the tendency to procrastinate, even on projects that interest me. Performance anxiety, and a lack of ability to focus, plague me. I have found that some projects present less of a challenge than others, and I am trying to work my way into a professional position that would involve those kinds of projects. Yet, in general, I procrastinate everything. It is an exhausting way to live.

This quote and the research by Rabin and her colleagues reveal a common underlying selfregulatory system commonly referred to as executive function associated primarily with the pre-frontal cortex. Executive function consists of numerous self-regulatory processes such as:

novel problem solving, modification of behavior in response to new information, planning and generating of strategies for complex actions.

Although there is limited previous research that implicates the frontal system network in the selfregulatory failure of procrastination, no previous research had examined which aspects of executive function were most strongly related to procrastination. This is the gap that Rabin and her colleagues have begun to fill with their neuropsychological research. One of the reasons I like this paper so much is that the authors wrote a very good discussion section where they consider a number of implications of their findings. Specifically, they discuss the implications for remediation of problematic delay. Heres a list of the key ideas. Each is of interest for those individuals who are seeking to procrastinate less. I use many if not all of these strategies with my own students who struggle with needless, voluntary delay on their work. Each is also a part of my own personal work as I continue to develop the habits that I want in my life. To keep the blog post manageable, I have added links to other relevant posts as appropriate. In relation to the Initiate, Plan/Organize, Organization of Materials components of executive function, possible strategies to increase executive function and decrease procrastination include:

set proximal sub-goals along with reasonable expectations about the amount of effort required to complete a given task use contracts for periodic work completion work towards mastery of subgoals before moving on to other goals

In relation to the Inhibit, Self-Monitor, Working Memory, and Task Monitor aspects of executive function, strategies include:

Focus on giving in to feel good by first developing an awareness of this process and its subversive effects on achievement. Keep aware of the fact that we procrastinate for the shortterm gain of task avoidance feel good now, pay later. This will help present self make different choices about future self. Use strategies like distraction-inhibiting implementation intentions to shield one intention from a competing intention or to manage intrusive negative emotions associated with an aversive task.

Other volitional skills or competencies to develop include:

control immediate impulses through the establishment of fixed daily routines (specific times for learning and leisure activities) as well as more effective time management. In other words, we need to do the hard work of establishing new habits. Block access to short-term temptations (pre-empt that which tempts remove distractions from the study area, shut off social media, etc.) Focus on the value of achievement motivation by setting more difficult goals and learning to enjoy performance for its own sake. Sometimes we put off tasks because were bored, not challenged enough. Use peer monitoring with accountability and consequences for not meeting deadlines

The trouble with lists The problem with a list of strategies is that its tempting to try and use them all. Ive found that this simply wont work, at least not at first. An analogy with sports is that we might have 6 things that could be improved in our performance (e.g., tennis or golf stroke, running stride), but trying to change all of these at once will usually make us unable to do anything at all, and it is impossible to focus on all of the strategies at once. The key to effective coaching is to identify a keystone strategy that might be the first to master. As a former tennis coach, I found that this was often as simple as keeping my student's attention on get the racket back sooner or follow the ball with your racket (i.e., better follow through). I could spend hours feeding balls to a student coaching him or her to get the racket back. It takes this repetitive supported (scaffolded) practice before a new technique or strategy will become a muscle memory or habit in the individuals stroke. The same is true for change in other areas of our lives. As you read and re-read the list above, think about the ONE thing you will do differently. This will need to be a conscious, effortful process for some time as you establish a new habit around this strategy. When you own it, then you can move on to another strategy. In short, change comes slowly, but change will happen if you commit yourself to the process. A final caution Of course, I too see the irony here as we try to bootstrap more effective executive function with processes related to executive function. I say this because its all too easy to use this as an excuse not to try and try again. We all have existing executive function skills that we can leverage to our advantage. What is required is daily commitment and some sweat equity. I dont know anyone who doesnt require this. This is part of the human condition.

I'll Feel More Like It Tomorrow

Zen and the art of procrastination-habit busting. Published on March 31, 2012 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

"Tomorrow - A mystical land where 98% of all human productivity, motivation and achievement is stored." (Unknown) Ah, tomorrow, what promise it holds . . . at least that's what we want to believe. Below is something I've heard from research participants in studies we've conducted when they talk about their procrastination. Are you familiar with this way of thinking? "It can be just about any task. Theres no particular characteristic of the task except perhaps that I dont feel like doing it, at least not right now. I had intended to do it now; it was my intention a few days ago. Thats the thing about my good intentions, they seem like a real plan then. But, the time comes for action, and I find myself sorting through my email inbox, tidying my desk, alphabetizing a playlist on my iPod, channel surfing, anything really. Its not like I wont get the task done. Eventually, I do. Im up late or sometimes really early, pulling it off so to speak. Sometimes, I even get a rush from it; a rush from finally getting it done, that monkey off my back. The thing is, I dont like living this way, but I cant seem to change. I dont understand it. I only work under pressure, living deadline to deadline. Why cant I just do it?" As a psychologist who has specialized in the study procrastination for the past 15 years, I have heard this and similar stories often. We seem to become our own worst enemy at times, and this fascinates me. Why do we procrastinate? The answer to this question has occupied my blog for the past three years, so I cant provide a complete answer to this question in one blog post, Today, I want to focus just on that one thought: Tomorrow, Ill feel more like doing it tomorrow! Its probably true for many of us that we will get the task done tomorrow. For some, its because a good nights sleep restored reserves of willpower and we actually do feel more energy for the task at hand, no matter how aversive. Thats one thing about our future self, it may have qualities that differ from our present self. Present self is tired, fed up and not up to the task. Future self, well, he or she has a fresh start, right? In terms of renewed willpower and self-regulatory energy,

that may be true. If we use that restored willpower strategically and tackle the task first thing, we may in fact get it done as intended, albeit a day later than originally intended. For others, the task will get done not from some exercise of renewed will, but from adrenalinefilled panic. Sure, its motivating, but its not the most autonomous sense of our own being. If we find ourselves acting like this often (aka chronic procrastination), it can also lead to deep feelings of self doubt. Why in the world do I always wait until the last minute to get anything done? Again, there are many answers to this question. Let me focus on two. First, task avoidance has probably become a habit. When we faced aversive tasks in the past, we avoided them to seek short-term mood repair. In other words, our avoidance was rewarded. We felt better, at least for the moment, when we pushed the task off (to tomorrow). This is known as negative reinforcement. The negative stimulusthat aversive task and the feelings the task stimulated within uswas removed, and this is rewarding. Rewards, as we learned from behaviorist psychology, reinforce behavior, and behavior that is reinforced is repeated. A habit is formed. The next time we face an aversive task, we avoid it, and we do this again and again until there is no time left. At that last minute when were left with the task, we may regret it, but thats the nature of bad habits. We regret them when their effects bite us, but until they do, theyre quite unconscious in nature. We dont think about it consciously, we just act from habit. The prepotent response is to procrastinate. This is the procrastination habit. Its a bad habit, a self-defeating habit. The second reason some people offer up for their chronic last-minute efforts is that they like the arousal. Just as often as I hear, Ill feel more like doing it tomorrow, I also hear I work better under pressure. Actually, in our research, we have heard these statements when procrastination was occurring, but not at the last minute when the work was finally getting done. At the last minute when people were finally working on the previously avoided task, we more often heard statements like, this isnt so bad, I actually like this, I wish I had more time to do a good job. In any case, as Ive written previously, our research also indicates that arousal-based personality traits are not highly correlated with procrastination, and they account for very little variance in scores on measures of trait procrastination. In sum, arousal doesnt seem to be strongly associated with procrastination, and it is more likely that we say we like working under pressure, because the habit we have formed has left us only working under pressure. We explain this behavior, to ourselves and others, not as a bad habit, but as a conscious choice. Given that experiments have shown that we make more errors under pressure, we dont really work better under pressure. We work under pressure because we habitually and needlessly delay our tasks, and its the only kind of motivation that seems to work for us.

So, whats the bottom line here? As depicted in the internal dialogue where I began this post, few chronic procrastinators are really happy with their chronic delay, even when they pull it off. In fact, many people who procrastinate confide in me that they are fed up with this delay and confused about why they continue with such a maladaptive way of being. There are three main points I think we can take away from all of this.
1. We procrastinate in order to feel good now. Its short-term mood repair that is immediately reinforcing and this sets up a long-term habit. 2. Once we have a habit, we dont even stop to think about what were going to do. Its unconscious. When we face an aversive task, something that is boring, frustrating, low on enjoyment or something we dont know how to do, we put it off. Thats the procrastination habit. 3. Breaking the procrastination habit requires that we first recognize the short-term gains that were seeking with the avoidance, and how specious this reward is in our lives. Once we bring that into conscious awareness, we then need to do the hard work of habit breaking. We have to act against the prepotent response of avoidance, put aside the negative emotions, and just get started as we had intended.

It is a precipitous moment in which even a little action will begin the self-change which we seek. Just get started. Dont over think it. Just pick a place within the task, anything, and get started. Progress fuels well-being, well-being fuels motivation, and there is habit-breaking power in this process. Habit-busting takes mindful, conscious effort, strategic use of energy and it takes time. Its a habit after all. If we take it one moment at a time, one intention or task at a time, well soon build a new habit, the habit of the possible self who just gets stuff done. Maybe I should have just entitled this post, the Zen of Procrastination. If you get that, you get the notion that mindful practice is key here. Is your dinner done? Then wash your dishes. Dont make it more than it is, thats enlightenment, and freedom from the procrastination habit.

I Don't Feel Like It, And That's OK

Why sometimes delay is the best idea. Published on April 3, 2012 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Some tasks take much more time and energy than we ever expect. A break, some task delay, and dare I say iteven some old-fashioned procrastinationmay be the best thing to do. Life is an uncertain thing. I'm not speaking only of the fact that we don't know how much of life we'll get to enjoy or endure. I mean that day to day, we face a lot of uncertainty about what lies ahead, what we'll actually do, and how any of it will go. Even with experience, most of our tasks, projects and the general "doings" of our lives require probabilistic guesses at how much time we'll need and what we'll actually have to do to successfully reach our goals. My post is about a

personal example of this process and what it might mean to our understanding of delay and procrastination. I'm writing this post for two reasons, or at least two things prompted these reflections today. First, after a recent conference keynote presentation that I made, a colleague in the audience asked if there was any gray area between necessary delay and that needless, self-defeating delay we know as procrastination. Second, I just crawled out from under our dishwasher for the hundredth time hoping that this time I got the repair done correctly. Let me explain how these two temporally separated events relate to each other. At the conference, when I was asked about the gray area between delay and procrastination, the questioner was picking up on a distinction that I always make: "all procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination." I seem to keep these two things distinct from each other. Are they, really? My response was that only the actor or agent can know for sure. For example, I said, "If you delay but feel some sense of guilt or remorse, I think it's more likely procrastination." Even though I acknowledged it as a subjective process, I still maintained a distinction between necessary and needless delay. Recent lived experience has made me question this simple answer.

My dishwasher developed a leak. There is a small drainage hose close to the ground that mice like to chew on if they find their way into our house in the winter (common for our country home). A mouse has been at it again this winter.

I have repaired this hose before as pictured here, because the first repair allowed for a simple substitution of material (the copper pipe in place of the original rubber tubing). This past winter, when holes were made in the elbows themselves, I attempted further repairs, because the hose is no longer available as a part for repair (it is an odd hose with different diameter ends on each of the terminal elbows). These sorts of jobs are quite deceiving. At first glance and given my previous successful repair, I thought that this might take 30 minutes. A flooded basement from an unsuccessful attempt taught

me otherwise. I had to re-group and re-think how to do this correctly. In a sense, delay was necessary to think. It wasn't "needless" per se, but I did find some short-term mood repair in being able to walk away from that frustrating job (the space under the dishwasher is punishingly small, and tools, while necessary for the job, are difficult to use). I left the tools on the counter. Days went by. Yes, days. First, I tried to find the part online. As I noted above, the search resulted in the depressing news: "No longer available." Then, I searched local hardware stores for novel, creative solutions with odd pieces of rubber hose and connectors. That search was in vain. Throughout all of this, the tools on the counter served as a constant reminder of the job undone. I think we live with these unfinished tasks throughout our lives, and this one was beginning to get on my nerves. So, today, fed up with the tools next to the sink, I decided to work on my original repair again. I felt a renewed commitment to the task, even renewed faith in my approach, if not even a little more energy. Something more than "thinking" had gone on with the delay, that much was clear. But what? I don't have empirical evidence to present to you, unless you're willing to take my introspective case study as such. I'm certainly not arguing it's evidence of this sort, but I do think there is something important in the experience, or I wouldn't bother writing here. I think I was living in the gray area which my colleague at the conference might have been thinking about. I was frustrated when my second repair attempt was a complete wash out (pardon the pun with the flood that resulted, please). However, it wasn't just the frustration that prompted my delay. I really did need to think about other options. I was hoping that I could find a new hose. I didn't waste time on that. I went online and then to a few stores as soon as I could. When I learned that this wasn't an option, then I think I started to walk along the edge of, if not right into, the gray area between delay and procrastination. The whole thing was making me nuts. The hose was no longer available as a part for order, and without it, I couldn't run my dishwasher. The uncertainty and the aversiveness of the task was moving me further from delay and more deeply into procrastination. I really wanted to avoid the task. I was frustrated and feeling somewhat incompetent (my kids think that "daddy can fix anything"). We rarely use the dishwasher for more than an extra drying rack for dishes we wash by hand, so a sense of urgency to get the machine working again wasn't my motivator. The job undone and those darn tools on the counter were bugging me, and so was the assault on my feelings of competence. This morning, I just thought, "Ok, let's put the tools away," but with that came an "eureka" moment where I thought of a different approach to repair my existing (albeit previouslyrepaired) hose. So, the delay may have paid off with the incubation of new ideas, and the procrastination may have given me some mood repair. On top of all that, as I said, I even felt a renewed engagement and willingness to get back on the floor, arms stuck up under the machine and struggling to get my fingers to make the required movements.

Delay...procrastination. Perhaps there is an uneasy gray area in between. Definitions on paper are easy and allow us to draw "bright lines" of distinction, but psychologically perhaps the distinction is not so clear. Perhaps I needed two kinds of delay. One was the conscious choice to delay in order to seek out alternative solutions. The other form of delay was a more unconscious process of task avoidance. I didn't feel like working on that task further (particularly because I didn't know how to proceed). So, I procrastinated in order to repair my defeated sense of self (or at least repair my mood) and to renew my stores of willpower to face the task again. In any case, the delay was not chronic, the repair was not that urgent or important, and the job is done. Isn't that the story ending that makes it all OK?

Do You Do What You Say You'll Do?

Why hyperbolic discounting doesn't explain procrastination Published on May 27, 2011 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

To what extent do you keep your promises to yourself even if later on you don't feel like doing what you had promised yourself to do? A recent study reveals the predictive power of say-do correspondence in relation to procrastination.

Colleagues from Grant MacEwan College (Edmonton, Alberta) published a paper that reveals something interesting about procrastinators. They're not really very different than nonprocrastinators in how they discount future rewards. Actually, this isn't really new to procrastination researchers. A decade ago, a colleague and friend, Henri Schouwenburg (retired, University of Groningen, The Netherlands), noted that a certain amount of procrastination belongs to what we understand as normal behavior. In other words, we all seem to submit assignments close to the deadline. In the study by Andrew Howell and colleagues, they found the same thing in a student sample. These students submitted seven small assignments over the course of the term near the deadline. The pattern of submission models that which Skinner would have expected; Action near the reward. Behavioral economists call this hyperbolic or temporal discounting. We discount future rewards and only act when the reward is near. When we graph this pattern of behavior, we get a hyperbolic curve (depicted in the diagram above).

Hyperbolic or temporal discounting was first offered up as an explanation of procrastination by Schouwenburg & Groenewoud in 2001, although my students and I had addressed the notion of temporal discounting and specious rewards in some of our earlier work as well. Schouwenburg proposed a "procrastination equation" of y = c/(1 + kx) + constant. In the study by Howell et al., they defined the terms as: y'' is the number of students submitting their assignments, c'' is the number of submissions when x = 0, k'' is the rate of acceleration of c'', and x'' is number of hours prior to the submission deadline. Not surprisingly, Howell and colleagues found that this function accounted for approximately 89% of the variance in the students' submissions. In other words, the hyperbolic discounting function models the delay of assignment submissions. Most interesting is that when these researchers separated those students who scored high on selfreport measures of procrastination from those who scored low, the submissions of the "low procrastination" group was still modeled by the discounting function (explaining 69% of the variation). Again, as Schouwenberg astutely noted some time ago, a certain amount of procrastination is normal. Actually, I think Schouewenberg doesn't actually say that correctly. It's not that a certain amount of "procrastination" is normal, but that delay is. Although we all might delay tasks, particularly relatively simple tasks that are not that important (as were the assignments assessed in this study), fewer of us actually procrastinate. That is, fewer of us engage in that particular kind of delay known as procrastination, which means voluntarily delaying action on an intention despite knowing that we may be worse off for the delay. The key point is that whereas a hyperbolic function may model our delay very well, it doesn't ultimately explain procrastination at all. Fortunately, Howell et al.'s study does offer a clear idea of just what does explain procrastination - a lack of a say-do correspondence. The results of their study revealed that the 3 measures of procrastination they used all correlated significantly with the say-do correspondence. Say-do correspondence is captured by items like, "To what extent do you keep your promises to yourself even if later on you don't feel like doing what you had promised yourself to do?" As the authors write, "This suggests that those who report a tendency to procrastinate also have a generalized tendency not to do what they said they will do" (p. 1727). In other words, procrastination is a problem of self-regulation or a problem of bridging the intention-action gap. As I've written in a previous blog post, it is in this gap that the self must operate, and the self who does not do what he or she intends is, by definition, a procrastinator. Interestingly, the say-do correspondence did not correlate with the behavioral measure of postponement (late assignment submissions), and the authors speculate that this is because some students promise themselves to do the assignment just hours before it's due. They call this planned postponement "pseudo-procrastination" and argue that this would detract from an overall association between the observed submission delay (modeled as the hyperbolic discounting function) and say-do correspondence.

I think this is where the authors, and many other researchers, miss the point. Well, two points, actually. First, planned postponement is not "pseudo" procrastination. It's not procrastination at all. It's delay, and I would argue it could be considered not only rationale but sagacious. Small, easy assignments might be best completed just before the deadline when there are many other things to do first. Planned delay is not procrastination. Second, and most important, there is no reason to believe that say-do correspondence should be associated with hyperbolic discounting, because we all delay. Remember, as Schouwenburg noted, a certain amount of delay is normal. The message from this study for me is clear. Where hyperbolic discounting or temporal discounting as a "procrastination equation" may model how we all delay task engagement, procrastination itself is not explained by this discounting. Procrastination is the intention-action gap that must be bridged by the self with self-regulatory strategies captured by such things as this "say-do correspondence." I think the authors of this study offer us a great deal by demonstrating the clear relation of selfregulation as say-do correspondence with procrastination. Do you do what you say you'll do? If not, it's an issue of self-regulatory failure, and something that must be understood in terms of this irreducible notion of self, not some external contingencies that will somehow (even magically) cause you to act without the exertion of will.

Crossing the Gap

What does it mean to be rational? Published on April 23, 2011 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Typically, psychologists define procrastination as a gap between intention and action. Have you experienced that gap? Did it look more like the Grand Canyon? How do you get across this gap?

For the most part, my blog has been a summary of psychological studies that speak to the gap between intention and action; an irrational state that we call procrastination. Yet, as much as it's common for psychologists to say that procrastination is an intention-action gap, we don't say much about the gap itself or about the nature of our irrationality. Fortunately, the philosopher John Searle has lots to say about this gap and rationality. In his book, Rationality in Action (2001, MIT Press), he explains that this gap is absolutely necessary for us to understand what rationality is and what it does. He writes, ". . . . unless I presuppose that there is a gap, I cannot get started with the process of rational decision making." (p. 13). There isn't always a gap. We're not always rational. Take the example of a drug addict with the overpowering need for the drug. There isn't a gap between the desires-beliefs and the action. The addict desires the heroin, sees a substance that he believes is heroin and ingests it. The desire and belief are sufficient to determine action. However, as Searle explains, this is hardly the model of rationality. There are many other actions that we can understand this way. Compulsive behaviors and deeply ingrained habits are not what we might call voluntary action or rational. My focus is on voluntary action, as we define procrastination as the voluntary delay of an intended act despite knowing that there is a potential for negative consequences. In other words, I voluntarily delay my action despite knowing I'll probably be worse off. This is the self-defeating choice of procrastination.

When we consider our everyday voluntary action, we have to presuppose that our antecedent desires and beliefs are not causally sufficient to determine action. We must deliberate on our choices and decide what to do. We all experience this daily. It may even be an experience in relation to reading this blog. You may read the studies and the strategies offered by various psychologists. You may desire the happiness or well-being espoused in each blog. You may believe that the strategies are effective. However, these desires and beliefs don't lead you to act on them. This is the gap. Searle writes, ". . . the gap is that feature of our conscious decision making and acting where we sense alternative future decisions and actions as causally open to us" (p. 62). He continues by explaining that there is a gap when our beliefs, desires or other reasons for action are not experienced as causally sufficient to form an intention or when a prior intention does not actually lead to an intentional action. So, what we believe or our desires or even our reasons for actions won't cause our action. They are not sufficient to cause intentional action. This is the gap. I think we all wished that our beliefs, desires, commitments, obligations and other reasons were causally sufficient to motivate voluntary action in our lives. The thing is, they're not (and if they were, it might remove what we think of as "voluntary"). We certainly know this in our lived experience. We have good reasons to do a task, we may believe that completing this task now will be one more step towards a longer-term desire (finish my degree, get a better job, improve my relationship), but still we don't do it. What in the world is wrong with us? Why this weakness of will? Searle writes that ". . . no matter how perfectly you structure the antecedents of your action, weakness of will is always possible. . . . Weakness of will arises simply from the fact that at any point the gap provides an indefinitely large range of choices open to me and some of them will seem attractive even if I have already made up my mind to refuse them . . .the causes still do not set sufficient conditions, and this opens the way for weakness of will" (p. 25). What fills this darn gap? If it's not simply setting up the "right" reasons, how can I make a prior intention and stick to it while avoiding temptation? Practical reason It's practical reason, the focus of Searle's writing in this book, that has the task of finding some way to adjudicate between our various reasons, desires, possibilities. And, this practical reason is the self deliberating and choosing. Yes, there is this irreducible notion of self in Searle's reasoning. It's the self that experiences this apparent freedom of choice in the possible. I could do this, I could do that, I could do this other thing . . . the gap. "This gap has a traditional name. It is called the freedom of will'" (p. 13). At the heart of this is a very special notion of agency. We are agentic. We are special entities, unlike many other animals with whom we share a great deal biologically, in that we consciously try to do things. It is this self that "operates in the gap on the basis of reasons to make decisions

and perform actions, it is the locus of responsibility" (p. 89). It is us, as free agents, acting rationally to make a decision, because it is this rationality that must make a difference beyond what we would do by instinct or in an unconscious response to a stimulus. Our agency, our free choice, our deliberation are adaptive to us. We deliberate. Once we have assembled our reasons, our desires, our beliefs, we have to deliberate to reach a decision. "Most of the difficulty of rational deliberation is to decide what you really want, and what you really want to do. You cannot assume that the set of wants is well ordered prior to deliberation" (p. 125). We deliberate in the gap. Yes, our rationality operates in this gap. In the face of irrationality we deliberate and choose. "The scope of that choice is the gap in question. . . Nothing fills the gap: you make up your mind to do something, or you just haul off and do what you are going to do, or you carry out the decision you previously made, or you keep going, or you fail to keep going, in some project that you have undertaken" (p. 17). This is human rationality. As Searle writes, "The subject matter of rationality is not formal argument structures much less is it marginal utility and indifference curves. The central topic of discussion in a theory of rationality is the activity of human beings . . . selves, engaged in the process of reasoning. . . the subject matter of the philosophy of rationality is the activity of reasoning, a goal-directed activity of conscious selves (pp. 95-96). This perspective on rationality is also the focus of a psychology of procrastination. It's the psychology of the gap, of understanding how it is we deliberate and carry out the intention we previously made. So, let's not run from the gap. It is where our rationality operates. It is a basic element of being human, and we risk losing our own freedom and responsibility if we try to deny the gap believing that if we can only find the right reason, the maximum utility, that we'll act then without even trying. As Mark White might say, perhaps you have to just try a little harder!

A Hierarchy of Excuses: The Pathetic Path of Least Resistance

Our excuses match our distress, but it's all bad faith. Published on March 18, 2011 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Recent research indicates that the degree of our cognitive dissonance relates to what kind of tactic we choose to reduce the dissonance discomfort. The rank ordering of our strategies and excuses is interesting, but it's only another example of how we live in bad faith.

One of our doctoral students is preparing her job talk for upcoming interviews as she seeks to secure an academic appointment. I had the pleasure of hearing about her research before her defense. I know she'll be successful, she's one of our superstars. Because this is all a "work-inprogress" for her, I'll keep this post anonymous in terms of her identity. Part of her dissertation research involved experimental work manipulating research participants' distress by the level of cognitive dissonance they experience. She manipulated how much their attitudes differed from their behaviors, and this difference created a dissonance which was experienced emotionally as distress in various ways. We don't like dissonance and emotional distress. We use various strategies to reduce it. I've written about his before in fact. We use strategies like rationalizing our choice, denying responsibility for our choice, distracting ourselves from the choice we made, or actually changing our behavior to better match our attitude. The final strategy of behavioral change, although I'd prefer not to call this approach a strategy at all because it is so different from the other choices, is the "best," because it means our lives match our beliefs. We make actions to realign ourselves with our values and beliefs. In doing this, we choose to be the people we want to be. I'll come back to this. The key finding I want to focus on in this entry is that there is a clear preference structure across participants in terms of these approaches to reducing dissonance. From most preferred to least, these are:

Rationalize away the behavior (e.g., It doesn't matter what I do, it's just a drop in the bucket"), Deny responsibility for our behavior (e.g., It's not my role to do this"), Distract ourselves from the dissonance itself (e.g., "I've got other things to think about right now), and, finally (and only under the highest levels of distress/dissonance, Change our behavior (e.g., "I will take the time right now to address this issue").

I'm sure you're not surprised by these results. We use these strategies and more everyday. The contribution that this study is making is that it's an experimental demonstration of how this works, a cause-and-effect piece of research. Although not particularly surprising given the long history of research on cognitive dissonance, I do find the results disturbing. I think it underscores an issue about our way of being in the world that is, quite frankly, pathetic. We live in bad faith. Our values and beliefs don't align with our actions, and rather than using this tension to signal the need for change, we take the path of least resistance and excuse ourselves. Quite reasonably, experimental psychology as a social science simply describes and catalogues these aspects of our psychological functioning. No value is attached to the outcome. It's simply an empirical finding about how we deal with behavior-attitude discrepancies. However, the moral lesson is there. We're sad excuse makers. These excuses, "strategies for reducing cognitive dissonance," are really just lies we tell to ourselves, and this is the most pathetic part of it. Why lie to ourselves? Why not just own up to the discrepancy and recognize who we really are by the choices we're making? I think it's because we don't want to face who we really are with these choices. We'd prefer to believe something very positive about ourselves (a proenvironmental attitude for example), so when we act opposite to it (failing to make a proenvironmental behavioral choice), we don't want to face that this choice now defines us. Instead, we strategically reduce the dissonance by lying to ourselves. This is living in bad faith. Living a lie. No authentic engagement in our lives. We don't have be like this. It's a matter of choice. The descriptive is not prescriptive, and the normative trend need not be what we do the next time we experience the dissonance created by a behavior-attitude discrepancy. Too often we think that the statistically significant differences between group means in our data, no matter how small the experimental effect size, actually applies to each of us as individuals. It doesn't, and it doesn't have to. Each of us can make the choice to more authentically engage in our lives by taking responsibility for our choices. At the very least, we could openly admit that there is a discrepancy and that we're simply too lazy or indifferent to actually do anything. Instead, we focus on short-term mood repair, we give in to feel good, and make an excuse. Seen like this, I think you might agree that this is a particular kind of pathos. Choice. We can't escape it, and psychological research doesn't prove that we're destined to reduce dissonance with excuses. The findings just indicate what's typical. My point is that what's typical is an aspect of human pathos, not the human agency upon which the best parts of our lives are built.

So, the next time I feel the discomfort of my actions being different from my values or beliefs, I'll recall this study (and others like it). Some participants in the study did choose to change their actions rather than take the path of least resistance (with rationalizations, denial or distractions). I'll make the choice for change, no more excuses. At least then I'll know where I stand in my own life; not just another member of the herd.

External Supports for Your Willpower

How can we be more strategic with our willpower? Published on January 29, 2011 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Typically, we think of the self-controlled person as one with tremendous willpower, incredible internal resources of self-discipline. The thing is, this individual's success may be more a matter of strategy than the traditional notion of strength. We can and do offload the burden of willpower to the environment to scaffold our success.

I recently did an iProcrastinate Podcast with one of the authors of an excellent chapter from the book The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination. The chapter is entitled Procrastination and the Extended Will. The authors are Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson. I spoke with Professor Anderson, Joel, at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He explained how we have some mistaken assumptions about willpower. It's not solely an internal, personal resource. Context matters too. Willpower is distributed. Extended Will and Distributed Willpower The gist of the notion of extended will is that human rationality is heavily scaffolded. That is, our environment works to support our actions or to hinder them. As Heath and Anderson write in their chapter, "People are able to get on because they offload' an enormous amount of practical reasoning onto their environment" (p. 233). As an example they note that "The most common

form of offloading that we perform is to transfer segments of our working memory onto the environment. We write things down" (p. 235). We all realize this when we stop and think about it. This is particularly true for more difficult mental tasks such as complex mathematical calculations. It's rare that we would do these calculations "in our heads." In sum, we can do more with the scaffolding provided by tools like writing. This is known most generally as the "extended mind." To over-simplify the argument made by Heath and Anderson, they maintain that we can think of will in a similar manner. Certainly we can and do just "buckle down" at times to accomplish tasks by exerting self-control or will. However, more often than not, ". . . what looks like sheer willpower is the result of more or less well-orchestrated attempts by individuals to arrange their lives in such a way as to economize on willpower, by avoiding situations that call for its exercise. We refer to this as distributed willpower, since it involves individuals creating more than one locus of self-control" (p. 241). There are many strategies that we use every day that reflect these notions of an extended will and distributed willpower. We can reframe aversive tasks so they seem less repulsive, thereby minimizing are desire to procrastinate. For example, we can try to find something interesting in a task that at first seems a bore. Heath and Anderson remind us how common this is by noting that this is a Mary Poppins strategy ("For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. Find the fun and, snap, the job's a game" [p. 242]). In fact, many strategies that I have offered up previously in my Don't Delay blog are captured in this notion such as creating implementation intentions to support a goal or breaking down a task into more manageable, doable short-term jobs. The key thing is that willpower is not simply an internal process, and we need to keep this in focus in order to be more strategic and successful. A very concrete example may help to make this clearer. Example It won't be very long until the start of the annual Iditarod sled-dog race (the first Saturday in March). In fact, the start of the Yukon Quest race is only a week away. My example comes from the practical problems faced by mushers who must find incredible self-control to stay on task (running their dog teams on schedule) despite sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion and very challenging circumstances. Environmental strategies typical of extended will are crucial to success. In a recent podcast with Mushing Magazine, the young champion musher Dallas Seavey, explained how he uses a series of strategies to scaffold his willpower. Exhausted by the grueling pace of the race and lack of sleep, it is difficult for a musher to take a short nap, wake on schedule and keep moving forward with his or her dog team. While dogs eat, get massaged and sleep, the musher is busy tending to dog care, equipment and preparing for the next leg of the journey. A "cat nap" (pardon the pun) is the most that competitive mushers get at most checkpoints. The challenge is to have the willpower to get up on schedule.

Of course, few, if any, mushers can do this with internal self-control alone. True to Heath's and Anderson's argument, these mushers have to be strategic and scaffold their will. Here's how Dallas Seavey does it: 1. He puts two alarm clocks in his hat (where he will hear them) before he gets into his sleeping bag. When these alarms ring, he never shuts them off. He only presses the snooze button so they will ring again 7 or 8 minutes later. Why? Because he knows it's too easy to be sitting down putting on his boots only to slump back asleep. He shuts them off when he's driving his team out of the checkpoint. 2. He has practiced the checkpoint routine repeatedly in preparation for the race so that his actions become "muscle memory" as he puts it. When the alarms go off, he begins to stuff his sleeping bag away (it's also very much like Gollwitzer's implementation intention, "If the alarm goes off, then I stuff my sleeping bag and get moving). The "trigger" for action is set with the alarm, and no thinking is required. The pre-decision has been made. 3. He can also draw on social support, asking checkpoint volunteers to wake him at a particular time, giving them what Heath and Anderson call a "license to nag." This doesn't mean that Dallas lacks personal self-control or willpower. Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact. He's was a champion wrestler; he knows what hard work and training are and the self-discipline required. In fact, that is why he's such a perfect example of how everyone requires this scaffolding, even those of us who are already gifted with self-determination, strong goals and internal resources of self-control. The key to success, it seems, is in being strategic with this careful scaffolding known as the extended will. In fact, as Heath and Anderson write, "Getting things done becomes then a decided nonmentalistic matter of turning amorphous responsibilities into a much less intimidating pile of widgets to be cranked'" (p. 249). Dallas has learned this important strategy, among others. Pack the sleeping bag, bootie the dogs, pack the sled . . . . widgets to be cranked, not decisions to be made. The decision to act was made, and the environment has been orchestrated to support these actions with as low a threshold for engagement as possible. So, what are your goals? How can you strategically "offload" willpower to the environment to distribute your willpower and scaffold your success? We all do it. I think if we focus on it more explicitly we could all do it much better, strategically minimizing distractions and lowering the threshold for acting on our intentions in a timely manner to achieve our goals.

Leveraging as a Strategy to Defeat Needless Delay

How to leverage self-control to beat procrastination. Published on December 10, 2010 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

A lever is a powerful tool. The simple machine involves the strategic use of force at a distance from a fixed point (fulcrum) to gain mechanical advantage for lift. As depicted in the image, it would seem we can lift the world. Well, there's truth in this notion. We can leverage self-control to lift the weight of the world off our shoulders.

We can certainly create what feels like the "weight of the world on our shoulders" when we procrastinate. Emotionally we feel it as guilt. Our needless delay undermines our perception of self, we suffer from a lack of motivation and believe that "we'll never get it done now." We need some sort of internal mechanical advantage to lift such a heavy psychological burden off our backs. Fortunately, the philosopher Chrisoula Andreou from the University of Utah offers us some insight into how to construct this lever. She helps us recognize that although we may fail to have self-control in one area of our lives, perhaps the lack of self-control or willpower to act on our intention to exercise, we probably do have self-control in other areas of our lives. Professor Andreou argues that we can leverage our self-control from one area of our lives to our advantage in an area of our lives where we aren't meeting our own expectations. In her own life, she got herself to keep her exercise intentions by making her Friday dinner out (something she looks forward to) contingent on exercise that week. No exercise, no dinner. The thing is, although she couldn't seem to force herself to get to the gym, she knew she was able to withhold dinner if she failed to exercise. She did have self-control here, and, as she writes, ". . . this did the trick, and I finally started working out" (p. 206). The result was that she leveraged her self-control around this reward to get her to act on her intentions. I talk about this at greater length in an iProcrastinate Podcast episode. The key thing for now is trying to identify the potential levers in our own lives. I've been doing something similar for years without realizing that it was the same sort of leveraging of selfcontrol. I have great self-control when it comes to making effort to care for others. Not so much when it comes to taking care of myself. What I've found is that my dutifulness in caring for my dog-sled team (11 happy huskies who want me away from my desk and outside with them) leads me to self-care, as I do get outside for some fresh air, exercise and stress release. It's not the same as withholding a reward as in the example above, but it's a similar notion of leveraging selfcontrol in one area of my life to my benefit in another. Where I wasn't able to convince myself to get out and exercise, I was successful at getting out for some exercise when I used self-control to meet the needs of my dogs.

Being strategic is always important in the challenging process of self-change. Leveraging selfcontrol from one area of our lives to help in another where we have less is a useful strategy for helping to defeat procrastination.

More Effective Goal Intentions: Think Width and Consistency

Avoiding temptations with well-framed goals. Published on November 28, 2010 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

How can we more effectively avoid short-term temptations to achieve long-term goals? Two leading researchers argue that framing our goals with "width" and "consistency" makes a big difference. Ayelet Fishbach (University of Chicago) and Benjamin Converse (University of Virginia) argue that the necessary first step to overcoming temptation is to identify a conflict between potential temptations and higher-order (often longer-term) goals. Of course, the notion of a temptation is always relative to current goals. Temptation in this regard is a moving target. What was a temptation today can be a goal tomorrow. The key first step is to actually recognize competing intentions that serve to undermine current goal pursuit. These are the temptations that we need to use self-control, along with other strategies (e.g., implementation intentions), to overcome. One of the problems with temptations is that they can seem relatively harmless. It seems so reasonable and seductive to conclude that not running "just today" won't harm our long-term health goals, and that eating that jelly donut won't ruin our weight-loss goal. We all know this type of thinking from personal experience, and I've written about this before from the perspective of intransitive preference structures. Fishbach and Converse offer up two perspective-taking strategies that facilitate the identification of conflict with these temptations (what they call epsilon-cost temptations - those single instances of consumption that would have negative consequences and are pervasive in our lives). In short, a series of studies conducted by Fishbach and her colleagues have underscored the importance of "width" and "consistency" in terms of framing competing action intentions. Width means framing an action opportunity in relation to future opportunities. If we consider an action opportunity in isolation, then the present moment seems special or unique. As such, identifying a conflict with long-term goals is less likely. It leads to the impression that "this one jelly donut won't undermine my diet" sort of thing. Expanding our frame of reference to include other opportunities to act is more likely to make the potential for conflict salient. If we think, "yes, a jelly donut this morning won't kill me, but tomorrow and the day after I'll be in the same situation," we're more likely to see how this apparently single opportunity for action isn't unique or potentially harmless at all. This is similar to what I've presented before in relation to the

planning fallacy. Too often we think of action as singular events and fail to take into account distributed information about similar past events. Although width is a necessary condition for helping to identify competing actions as temptations that may undermine our goals, it is not sufficient. In addition, Fishbach and Converse note that conflict identification also requires consistency. We must expect that the decision we make now will play out in the future. Again, action opportunities are not unique, and our decisions must carry with them the potential for consistency. We'll act the same way in the future. When we take a decision, we must see in it the potential for setting a precedent: Jelly donut today, jelly donut tomorrow; not run today, not run tomorrow. How we frame the many competing action intentions that arise throughout our day is very important. Fishbach and Converse offer up some specific cognitive strategies for success both in framing current choices in relation to future opportunities (width) and in the potential for our choice today to set a precedent for tomorrow (consistency). At its heart, I also think this speaks very directly to taking an honest and agentic perspective on our lives. Self-deception is part of the problem of procrastination. Too often we fail to frame our action opportunities in relation to the future opportunities or in relation to future choices because we don't want to face up to the agency that our lives demand. It's easier to "give in to feel good" and reduce the dissonance by forgetting our long-term goals (at least for the moment). Does this mean we never eat a jelly donut or never miss a workout? Absolutely not! There are unique opportunities that present exceptions and don't create goal-defeating precedents in our lives. For example, a family visit with distant relatives may include treats not usually part of our diet. A particularly beautiful winter day may be embraced with a "carpe diem" attitude of a day on the slopes or trails. Life is for living, but agentic choice involves honest assessment of width and consistency in our decision making. How will you frame your goals today? An important aspect of successful goal pursuit is to think past "today" both in terms of the nature of the opportunity for action and the precedent you may be setting with your decisions. It's seductive to make the excuse that today is unique and tomorrow I won't "give in" again. Blogger's Note: If you're seriously interested in understanding self-regulation, then I highly recommend the second edition of the Handbook of Self-Regulation: Research, Theory and Application edited by Kathleen Vohs and Roy Baumeister (2011, New York: The Guildford Press). This blog post was based on content taken from Chapter 13: "Identifying and Battling Temptation" by Ayelet Fishbach (University of Chicago) and Benjamin Converse (University of Virginia).

Are Your Goals Value Congruent?

Make it personally meaningful and procrastinate less Published on April 7, 2010 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

If our goals are not well aligned with our values or our sense of self, we're more likely to procrastinate. Value congruence and self-identity are part of our sense of the overall personal meaning of our goals. Our latest research indicates that low meaning is related to higher procrastination. I'm off to the annual convention of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology later this week. It's the first time I'll be attending. An invitation from a colleague in the Netherlands to join him and two esteemed colleagues from the U.S. and Canada drew me to the symposium. Our symposium is entitled, "Why do we put things off? Self-regulation, task characteristics and procrastination." My contribution with co-author Matthew Dann is about the task characteristics related to procrastination. Matt conducted this research as part of his M.A. thesis. He collected data about students' personal goals. Participants provided a list of 8 personal goals, and for each they appraised these goals on a fairly long list of psychologically relevant dimensions, including: importance, enjoyment, difficulty, visibility, control, initiation, stress, time adequacy, outcome, self-identity, others' view of importance, value congruency, positive and negative impact on other projects, progress, challenge, absorption, boredom, frustration, capability, uncertainty, and (of course) procrastination. Basically, they rated each goal/project on each dimension on a scale from 0 (none at all) to 10 (completely). When you get a picture of someone's project system with his or her appraisals on all of these dimensions, you get a very interesting and revealing snapshot of his or her life. For example, it's easy to see which projects: are creating stress, challenge and frustrate the individual, provide an opportunity to relax, etc. In fact, previous research has provided clear evidence that these project dimensions are very good predictors of our well-being. Project systems that are personally meaningful and manageable, projects for which we feel competent and are supported by the community while being relatively low in stress are related to enhanced well being. The key question that we asked in the research we're presenting was, "What are the project-dimension profiles of approach and avoidance goals?" I've written about approach and avoidance goals before, so I won't get into that again here. What I will emphasize is that Matt's research did demonstrate that avoidance goals are related to more procrastination, but the surprise for us was that we can experience more procrastination on our approach goals when they lack meaning. Approach Goals and Project Meaning My previous blog entry on Matt's research highlighted the potential pitfalls of avoidance goals. My focus here is on our approach goals; those goals or projects that we construe as approaching success, not avoiding failure. When we looked specifically at these approach goals, we did find

that procrastination varied, and that this variability was related to the variability in project meaning. For those approach goals participants appraised as lower on value congruence or self-identity, they also appraised these goals as slightly higher on procrastination. Even though these were goals that we don't typically think might be prone to procrastination, when they lack personal meaning for us as evidenced by lower scores on value congruence and self-identity, we are more likely to put off the timely pursuit of these goals. Concluding thoughts I really like to watch people participate in this type of research project. When they take time to list their goals or personal projects and appraise each on these various dimensions, they typically tell me that they learned a great deal about themselves in the process. I know this is true in my introductory personality classes when we consider projects and goals as a unit of analysis. It makes sense to people to think about what they're doing in their lives. What this research project added to the literature is further emphasis on the central role that personal meaning plays in our goal pursuit. I noted earlier that project meaning is related to enhanced well-being. To the extent that our goals are seen as less meaningful, less related to our values and self-identity, we also know now that we're more likely to needlessly put off our task engagement. Given that previous research that I have discussed has also shown us that progress on our goals is very important to our well-being, this may well be an indirect route that meaning affects well-being. Why meaning plays this role was not addressed in our research, but I speculate it has something to do with whether or not we have a commitment to the goal. Without a commitment, we're less likely to act in a timely fashion. Project meaning - it involves an "examined life." Have you thought about your own project list? Are your goals meaningful to you? Are they value congruent and typical of who you are? Do you feel deeply committed to these projects? If not, it may be time to think about why you're pursuing these goals.

Focus on the Positive Outcome of Goals

What can you do to strengthen your goal intentions? Published on January 29, 2010 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Strategies, like implementation intentions, that are meant to enhance our goal pursuit are only really effective when we already have strong goal intentions. Here's an example of strengthening an exercise intention.

I've written at length about the use of implementation intentions to achieve our goals. Implementation intentions provide the "when, where and how" of the action that we'll enact to achieve a goal. The thing is, the same research that demonstrates the efficacy of implementation intentions at supporting our goal pursuit also underscores an important pre-condition for success: For implementation intentions to have the desired effect, Strong goal intentions must be made first. I think anyone who has tried various techniques to battle their procrastination knows this. Tips and techniques to get us moving fall short if we don't first have a strong goal intention. A strong goal intention is one where we've made a deep commitment to the goal because we really see the value of the goal. It matters to us (in contrast to goals we adopt because we feel we ought to and we falsely internalize as our own). An example - exercise goal intentions Most of the people I know have an exercise goal in their lives of some form. Mine is (are) perennial! We all seem to have exercise goals to enhance fitness, health, appearance, energy levels or provide stress relief. It's pretty obvious that exercise has a lot of benefits. One approach to strengthening a goal intention is to elaborate on these positive outcomes of regular exercise. The short list above is a beginning. It's important to take the time to list these for yourself personally. After elaborating the positive outcomes of exercise, contrast these benefits to the possible obstacles of your exercise goal: I'm always too tired after work, there's not enough time in a day, I don't like exercising, etc. Of course, implementation intentions about how you can overcome these obstacles can be formed as you go. (For more about this process of forming implementation intentions that reduce potential distractions and obstacles, see my previous post.) This mental contrasting procedure has been shown to increase exercise immediately, and this increase held up over a two-year period. Mental contrasting - it can become another technique in your personal "toolkit" for overcoming procrastination and succeeding at your goal pursuit.

Implementation Intentions Facilitate Action Control

One of the most effective anti-procrastination strategies I know. Published on January 21, 2010 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

This post is a response to Overcoming Procrastination: Four Potential Problems During Goal Pursuit by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D.

I'm often asked what someone should do to reduce procrastination. One of my most common answers is, "It's not enough to have a goal intention, you need to have an implementation intention too." Today, I explain what an implementation intention is and how it works to overcome four common problems in goal pursuit. As I explained in my last post, I've been reading an early copy of The thief of time: Philosophical essays on procrastination to be published by Oxford Press in April this year. I'm picking up where I left off with a focus on implementation intentions by summarizing the main ideas presented by Frank Wieber and Peter Gollwitzer in their chapter, "Overcoming Procrastination through Planning." They propose "implementation intentions as an easily applicable planning strategy that can help overcome procrastination by automating action control" (p. 190). I agree. Implementation intentions are not a panacea for problems with procrastination, but they are a good tool for change. Implementation intentions support goal intentions. I might have a goal intention of "flossing my teeth regularly" (one of my most common examples, as readers and listeners of my iProcrastinate Podcasts know). An implementation intention supports this goal intention by setting out in advance when/where and how I will achieve this goal. In this case, it might be "When I put the toothpaste on my toothbrush in the evening (something which is a habit for me), I will then stop and get out the floss first." Essentially what I've done in making this implementation intention is to put the cue for behavior (putting the paste on my toothbrush) into the environment, so it serves as a stimulus for my behavior. I don't have to think about or remind myself about my goal. The moment I put the paste on my brush, my behavior is cued. In time, this should become as automatic as my teeth brushing is already. (Note: I do think there are many problems here still, and I know this from lived experience, because I can fall into a intransitive preference loop around this behavior, always putting it off one more day, but I'll save the details of this criticism for another day.) The issue here really is one of a predecision. As Wieber and Gollwitzer write, "the control over the initiation of the . . . behavior is delegated to the specified situation . . . without requiring a second conscious decision." (p. 190). And, they note in a few places that the most effective

form for an implementation intention is the "if . . . then" format. If I have the toothpaste in my hand, I will get out the floss to floss my teeth first. Over more than a decade of research, Gollwitzer and his colleagues have amassed a great deal of evidence to demonstrate that implementation intentions have a medium-to-large effect size on goal achievement (over and above having a goal intention itself - although having a strong goal intention and commitment to the goal is an essential ingredient in the success of an implementation intention). I provided an example of this research in my previous post, A strategy for change. The key issue for my blog today is how implementation intentions address each of the challenges that I summarized yesterday from the chapter authored by Wieber and Gollwitzer. As before, I'll number each of the potential problems in goal pursuit and briefly summarize how implementation intentions work to circumvent the problem. 1. Problems with initiating goal action Implementation intentions can help you with my most often-offered strategy of, "just get started." In fact, studies indicate that implementation intentions on getting started can even help when we have an initial reluctance to get started on an aversive task and would rather simply, "give in to feel good." My favorite example from the chapter was a study that involved making implementation intentions to get started on weekly math homework (for a period of a month). The math homework was tedious, but those participants who were randomly assigned to the "if -then" format of implementation intentions started their homework within 1.5 hours of their intended start time (as opposed to 8.0 hours for the more vaguely stated implementation intentions). Other studies involving health goals (e.g., starting regular physical activity, breast self-exams) or environmentally-responsible behavior (e.g., purchasing organic food) also demonstrated the efficacy of implementation intentions for acting on the goal. In short, you're more likely to get started when you put the stimulus for action into the environment. 2. Staying on track Wieber and Gollwitzer note that four studies have investigated the effects of implementation intentions on resisting tempation. Taken together, these studies demonstrated that participants who formed temptation-inhibiting implementation intentions outperformed the groups who did not. And, this effect was independent of the participants' motivation to achieve the goal and to ignore distractions. Implementation intentions have effects over and above motivation to succeed. This is important. Interestingly, the fourth example they provide is a study of six-yearolds. Again, the results showed that implementation intentions (of the if-then format) even helped six-year-olds to not procrastinate. (You can bet I'll make this more a focus at home, as I had not read this study previously.) 3. Disengaging from ineffective strategies Implementation intentions can be used to help us switch to a different means for our goal pursuit or even a different goal. In an example of this kind of implementation used in research, Wieber and Gollwitzer note that participants had been asked to form implementations like, "If I receive disappointing feedback, then I'll switch my strategy." This kind of implementation intention facilitated the disengagement that can be problematic in our goal pursuit. That said, I would

think that an even more effective implementation intention might be to have a "Plan B" more carefully specified, as this would reduce the uncertainty of what "switching a strategy" might mean. Uncertainty is a key correlate of procrastination, so anything we can do to reduce it when planning through implementation intentions can't hurt. 4. Preventing willpower burn out (self-regulation depletion) As you may recall from my previous posts about the metaphor used by Roy Baumeister and colleagues, willpower is like a muscle, and there are things we can do to bolster our selfregulatory resources. Implementation intentions can be added to this list of willpower boosters. A couple of studies have now demonstrated that the automatic nature of the effects of implementation intentions counters the effects of ego- or self-regulatory depletion. For example, when participants in this type of study have to control their emotions during a humorous movie (suppressing their laughter), they are usually less capable of doing a subsequent experimental task that requires self-regulatory strength such as solving a series of anagrams. However, for participants randomly assigned to an "if-then" implementation intention manipulation (who prepared by saying to themselves, "If I solve an anagram, then I will immediately start to work on the next one"), this depletion effect was eliminated (they solved as many anagrams as the group who were not depleted beforehand). This is an interesting result with clear implications for how we can strengthen our flagging willpower at the end of a long day. For example, an implementation intention may well be the thing that gets you to exercise in the evening even though you usually feel much too tired to begin. Closing Comments I've heard back from many of the readers of Don't Delay as well as listeners of my iProcrastinate Podcasts that they wanted to learn more about implementation intentions. Well, there you have it. And, if you want even more, I recommend that you read the chapter in the upcoming book The thief of time: Philosophical essays on procrastination . Whether you decide to read more or not, it's time to make your own implementation intention for an important goal intention in your life. What "if-then" intention will you work with today?

A Panda's Lessons About Goal Setting

A lesson from the big fat panda Published on March 18, 2009 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Master Shifu to Po, "You actually thought you could learn to do a full split in one night? It takes years to develop one's flexibility, and years longer to apply it in combat." Goal setting - without realistic goals, we're set up for failure before we start. Actually, Po, the big fat panda who became the Dragon Warrior in "Kung Fu Panda," did know his skills weren't up to advanced practice. He even wanted to start at "level zero" when he first began his training, but suffered the bumps and bruises of not being allowed to do so. Poor Po. However, Po had one main attribute that brought success (besides his deep kindness), and that was his attitude. "A real warrior never quits; I will never quit Master!" - and he didn't. We can learn a couple of important lessons from Po and Master Shifu related to our own goal pursuit. Lesson 1: Structuring our tasks It's such common advice to people who complain about their procrastination - break down your tasks into smaller, more manageable sub-tasks. These should be as concrete as possible. I think it's a skill that receives less attention than it should. If you can really break down a task effectively, you can take "baby steps" to reach your goal. You can achieve your goal over time, like a marathon, not an "all-nighter sprint." This is particularly relevant for students writing theses and major research papers. These are marathon tasks, not sprint races. Many tasks in life are like this. Perhaps with our own goals of this type, we should hear Master Shifu's voice, "You actually thought you could write a whole research essay in one night? It takes days to do the research, and days more to work through a good draft." (With graduate theses, perhaps I could have left Master Shifu's quote as it was - it can take years!) Why is this so important? Earlier research that one of my doctoral students, Allan Blunt, completed showed that tasks that aren't structured well are aversive to us. If we don't know how to manage the task, and structure it in a way that leads us to believe we know what to do, we find we're more likely to put it off. Interestingly, Allan's research showed that in the planning or "intention" phase of a goal, whether it was aversive to us or not was related to how meaningful a goal was. More specifically, goals that were seen as important and enjoyable were more likely to be rated low on aversiveness. Of

course, with a meaningful goal, we'd be quick to set an intention to pursue the goal, however this intention may not lead to action if, at the action phase, this goal was not structured well. Lesson 2: Persistence at getting started After each fight, especially early in his training when Po was really taking a beating, he simply got back up and did it again. Sometimes he did so with great enthusiasm, "That was awesome, let's do it again!" . . . "Yeah, bring it on!" Just getting started over and over again is such a simple, yet effective route to successful goal pursuit. Before you know it, a habit has formed. You might even find that you're waking before the alarm that's set for that 5 a.m. run, anticipating the endorphin high and positive effects on your well-being (rather than focusing on the comfort of the bed and the perceived negative attributes of the dark morning awaiting - only time and commitment develops this change in focus as a practice in your life). There are certainly other issues with respect to goal setting. One is our tendency to be overly optimistic in our planning - something known as the "planning fallacy." I'll come back to this soon.

Self-regulation Failure (Part 4): 8 Tips to Strengthen Willpower

What can you do to maximize your self-regulatory strength? Published on March 3, 2009 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Effective self-regulation is crucial to our personal success and well-being in so many ways. What can you do to maximize your self-regulatory strength?

Ecclesiastes (12:12) wrote, "And further . . . take note of this: of the making of books there is no end, and much learning is a weariness to the flesh." It stands to reason, by the time you get to Part 4 of self-regulation failure, you may well be thinking the same thing and feeling this weariness too. So, here are some quick tips based on the research literature of things that seem to boost our selfregulatory strength and success. 1. The "willpower is like a muscle" metaphor seems to be a good fit, as the capacity for selfregulation can be increased with regular exercise. Even two weeks of self-regulatory exercise has

improved research participants' self-regulatory stamina. So, take on some small self-regulatory task and stick to it. This can be as simple as deliberately maintaining good posture, to engaging in a regular exercise program. The key element seems to be exercising your self-discipline. You don't need to start big, just be consistent and mindful of your focus. 2. Sleep and rest seem to restore the ability to self-regulate. If you seem to be at the end of your rope, unable to cope and unwilling to do the next task, first ask yourself if you're getting enough sleep? 3. A corollary to sleep and rest is that self-regulation later in the day is less effective. Be as strategic as possible, and don't look to exercise feats of willpower later in the day. 4. A boost of positive emotion has been shown to eliminate self-regulatory impairment. Find things, people, events that make you feel good to replenish your willpower strength. 5. Make an implementation intention as a plan for action. This takes a specific form: "In situation X, I will do behavior Y to achieve my goal Z"; or "If this happens, then I'll do this" (anticipating possible obstacles to your goal pursuit). The effect of these intentions is to put the stimulus for action into the environment and make the control of behavior a nonconscious process. 6. Self-regulation appears to depend on available blood glucose. Even a single act of selfregulation has been shown to reduce the amount of available glucose in the bloodstream, impairing later self-regulatory attempts. Interestingly, just a drink of sugar-sweetened lemonade eliminated this self-regulatory depletion in experiments. The message from this research, don't get hypoglycemic, your self-regulation will suffer. Keep a piece of fruit handy (complex carbohydrate) to restore blood glucose. 7. Be aware that social situations can require more self-regulation and effort than you may think. For example, if you're typically an introverted person but you have to act extraverted, or you have to suppress your desired reaction (scream at your boss) in favor of what is deemed more socially acceptable (acquiesce again to unreasonable demands), you will deplete your willpower for subsequent action. These social interactions may even make it more likely that you'll say or do something you'll regret in subsequent interactions. Getting along with others requires selfregulation, so you'll need to think about points 1-6 to be best prepared to deal with demanding social situations. 8. Finally, as I wrote in Part 3, so much of our ability to self-regulate depends on our motivation. Even on an empty stomach, exhausted from not enough sleep and pushed to the limit for self-regulation, we can muster the willpower to continue to act appropriately. Any parent knows this is true. It's difficult, but it can be done, particularly if we focus on our values and goals to keep perspective on more than just the present moment. In doing this, we can transcend the immediate (and temporary) feelings we're having to keep from giving in to feel good which lies at the heart of so much self-regulatory failure.

Self-regulation Failure (Part 3): What's Motivation Got to do with It?

Are you motivated enough? Published on February 27, 2009 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Tired, self-regulatory control depleted from an exhausting day that demanded non-stop self-control, we may give up and give in. Like a tired muscle, our willpower seems unable to do any more. However, with the right incentive we can exert our physical strength even with tired muscles. And, so it is with our willpower . . . it's about motivation, isn't it?

In my earlier posts (see Self-Regulation Failure Part 1 and Part 2), I summarized research that has established how our self-regulatory strength is like a muscle. When we exert self-regulatory effort on one task, there seems to be less available for subsequent tasks. The thing is, subsequent research demonstrated that we could strengthen our willpower or selfregulatory ability by regular focus on self-regulation. More interestingly, even a boost of positive emotions or a focus on our values and goals through a self-affirmation process diminished the self-regulatory exhaustion. What isn't clear is if positive emotions or a focus on values actually replenishes the depleted willpower resources or if it simply motivates us to make the effort despite the relative depletion.

The role of motivation You'll recall that the basic paradigm for this research consists of an experiment where participants in the experimental group are required to self-regulate on a first task (e.g., resist a plate of cookies while hungry or suppress their emotional reaction while viewing a film), and this results in poorer self-regulatory performance on subsequent task. Interestingly, these selfregulatory impairments are eliminated or reduced when participants are highly motivated to selfregulate on the second task. For example, when participants are paid for doing well on the second task or they are convinced that their performance will have social benefits, they perform well despite the apparent selfregulatory exhaustion from the first task. The key thing about these findings is that it indicates that self-regulatory depletion may be reducing motivation. Given that depleted self-regulatory strength may leave us feeling like we won't succeed, "we're too tired to try," it may be that the reduced expectancy of success undermines our willingness to exert effort. It's not that we're so impaired that we can't respond. It's that we "don't feel like." Sound familiar? "I'll feel more like it tomorrow." This is a common phrase we use to rationalize our procrastination. Perhaps it simply captures our perceptions of self-regulatory strength at the moment. Of course, it's a perception, and, I argue, at least partly an illusion. It's about our motivation, not about the reality of not being ability to muster the self-regulatory effort Unwilling perhaps, not unable. From this perspective, what we see is that we may fail to self-regulate because we acquiesce. In the case of procrastination, we find resisting the urge to do something else (an alternative intention) impossible to resist, so we give up and give in. Of course, during this internal selfregulatory struggle, we must restrain this impulse to leave the task at hand, our intended goal, in favor of the competing goal (one that is usual specious to our values and long-term goals). Strategy for change We all feel depleted throughout the day. We all have moments where we think, "I'm exhausted, I just can't do anymore" or "I'll feel more like this tomorrow." This is true, this is how we're feeling at the moment, however our success depends on us moving past these momentary feelings of depletion. Given the role of motivation in self-regulatory failure, it is crucial to acknowledge the role of higher-order thought in this process, particularly the ability to transcend the feelings at the moment (mindfulness helps here) in order to focus on our overall goals and values. In the absence of cues to signal the need for self-regulation, we may give in to feel good, and stop trying. It's exactly when we say to ourselves "I'll feel more like it tomorrow," that we have to stop, take a breath and think about why we intended to do the task today. Why is it important to us? What benefit is there in making the effort now? How will this help us achieve our goal?

From there, if we can just muster the volitional strength for one more step, that is to just get started, we will find that we had more self-regulatory strength in reserve than we realized. Our perception can fool us at times, and this self-deception can really be our own worst enemy.

Self-regulation Failure (Part 2): Willpower is Like a Muscle

Procrastination: Why willpower fails us. Published on February 23, 2009 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

That's some bicep. If only our willpower looked so well developed. Given that recent research portrays willpower like a muscle, and one easily exhausted it seems, we may need to learn more about "willpower bodybuilding" or other strategies to bolster our self-regulatory strength and reduce our procrastination.

Roy Baumeister, his colleagues (e.g., Matthew Gailliot, Todd Heatherton, Mark Muraven, Kathleen Vohs) and his students have been focused on the investigation of self-regulation strength for the past 10 years, and their research has spawned related projects such as the one conducted by my colleague Dr. Joseph Ferrari (DePaul University). Although there have been many studies done, they share a common design. In the typical experiment, research participants are randomly assigned to two groups. Both groups expect that they will participate in two tasks, but there is an important difference between the groups in terms of the self-regulation demanded of them. Task 1 The experimental group is required to exercise a great deal of self-control in the first task, whereas the control group is simply asked to do the task. For example, both groups may be asked to watch a funny film, but the experimental group is required to suppress their emotional expression while the control group is given no specific instructions about how to react. In another case, the experimental group may be required to persist at a very boring task (e.g., doing

a very long sequence of simple arithmetic problems), whereas the control group does a task of equal length but does not require self-regulation to overcome boredom. A final example of this design is one where both groups arrive hungry, but the experimental group is instructed to eat radishes while resisting a tempting plate of cookies, whereas the control group is allowed to eat the cookies or the radishes (you guess which is more popular). In each of these experiments, the experimental group exercises self-regulation, while the control group does not. Task 2 Once this first task is completed, both groups are then asked to complete a second task that involves self-regulation. Both groups need to self-regulate their behavior to achieve success, and the key outcome measure is how persistent each group is. For example, typical second tasks include things like: complex figure tracing, solving complex anagrams, drinking an unpleasant (but not harmful) "sports drink," and, my favorite, resisting drinking free beer (even though a driving test is expected to follow). The main idea is that this second task requires self-regulation, and the hypothesis is that the experimental group will perform more poorly (not persist as long) because they have already exhausted their ability to self-regulate. The results The findings of these studies consistently demonstrate that the experimental group performs at a lower level than the control group. Given the difference in the self-regulatory demands on Task 1, the researchers conclude that the experimental group has exhausted self-regulatory strength, at least temporarily, and therefore are unable to muster the self-regulation required for the second task. In one practical example of this, one study showed that after coping with a stressful day at work, people were less likely to exercise and more likely to do something more passive like watching television. Willpower is like a muscle Based on these studies, Baumeister and colleagues have concluded that willpower is like a muscle. It can be fatigued with use, so that it can not perform indefinitely. Actual physical depletion Some very recent research has indicated that one of the physical correlates of this self-regulatory depletion is the depletion of blood glucose, and a drink of juice replenishes both the glucose levels and the ability to self-regulate. These are interesting findings that have clear implications for our self-regulatory goals. Implications Self-regulation comes with a cost, and we can only self-regulate so much at any one time. Although willpower is one of those "invisible" sorts of concepts (unlike muscles which seem to reveal strength more visibly by size), it still has limits. Of course, drawing on this metaphor that willpower is like a muscle, it would make sense that we should be able to develop this muscle's strength. There are a number of studies that indicate just that. For example, as Matthew Gailloit has summarized (see reference below), there is evidence that even 2-weeks of self-regulation through continuously maintaining good posture improved

performance in the kind of experiments discussed above. This little bit of self-regulatory exercise seems to strengthen the willpower muscle. In fact, other studies provided evidence that physical exercise programs led to decreased smoking, alcohol, caffeine and junk food consumption, and even reduced impulsive spending, watching television and the tendency to leave dishes dirty in the sink! You can learn more about strengthening willpower by listening to this archived NPR broadcast (and if you look at the bottom of the list you'll find an older interview with me about procrastination as well). What interests me most are the studies that show how simple things like getting better sleep or boosting positive emotions reduced the effects of self-regulation depletion. In addition, heightening motivation to self-regulate has also been shown to be effective. Next time, I'll reflect a little more about what this motivation issue might mean.

The Simple Reason Why Some of Your Plans Work, and Others Backfire
Why some plans make bad habits even stronger. Published on January 4, 2011 by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. in The Science of Success

Regular readers of my blog, and of my new book SUCCEED, know that I am a big fan of planning. If-then planning, in particular, is a really powerful way to help you achieve any goal. Well over 100 studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will take specific steps to reach your goal (e.g., "If I am hungry and want a snack, then I will choose a healthy option like fruit or veggies,") can double or triple your chances for success. Making an if-then plan to stick to your New Year's resolutions, or reach your 2011 goals, is probably the most effective single thing you can do to ensure your success. But once you've decided to make an if-then plan, the next thing you need to do is figure out what goes in it. According to new research, you need to be very careful about what goes in your plan, because one particular type of if-then plan can backfire - leaving you doing more of whatever you were trying to avoid doing in the first place. Researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands looked at three types of if-then plans. Replacement plans do just what the name suggests - replace a bad habit with a good one. If you are trying to do a better job controlling your temper and stop yourself from flying off the handle, you might create an if-then replacement plan like "If I am starting to feel angry, then I will take three deep breaths to calm down." By using deep breathing as a replacement for giving in to your anger, your bad habit gets worn away over time until it disappears completely.

Ignore if-then plans are focused on blocking out unwanted feelings - like cravings, performance anxiety, or self-doubts. ("If I have the urge to smoke, then I will ignore it.") In this case, you are simply planning to tune out unwanted impulses and thoughts, in order to diminish their effect on you. Finally, negation if-then plans involve spelling out the actions you won't be taking in the future. With these plans, if you have a habit you want to break, you simply plan not to engage in that habit. ("If I am at the mall, then I won't buy anything.") This is, in a sense, the most straightforward and head-on way of addressing a bad habit, and probably the one we most often end up using. All three types of if-then plans were put to the test, with surprising and consistent results. The researchers found that negation if-then plans were not only far less effective compared to other plans, but that they sometimes resulted in a rebound effect, leading people to do more of the forbidden behavior than before. Just as research on thought suppression (e.g., "Don't think about white bears!") has shown that constantly monitoring for a thought makes it more active in your mind, negation if-then plans keep the focus on the suppressed behavior. Ironically, by simply planning not to engage in a bad habit, the habit gets strengthened rather than broken. Remember that when it comes to reaching your 2011 goals, you need to plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Ask yourself, What will I do instead? The answer to this simple question could mean the difference between another year of broken New Year's resolutions and the real, lasting change you been looking for.

How Positive Thinking and Vision Boards Set You Up To Fail

The trouble with the Law of Attraction. Published on July 22, 2011 by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. in The Science of Success

I wish I could make the universe deliver wonderful things to my doorstep just by imagining them. I can't--and neither can you, no matter what anyone tells you. There is not a single piece of hard evidence that "visualizing success," and doing nothing else, will do a damn thing for you. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that it will leave you even worse off than when you started. Scientifically-speaking, focusing all of your thoughts on an ideal future reliably leads to lower achievement. In other words, you are less likely to achieve your goals when all you do is imagine that you already have achieved them.

"Negative" thinking, on the other hand, has gotten a bad rap. This is mostly because the people who advocate "positive" thinking lump all the "negative" thoughts together in one big unpleasant pile, not realizing that some kinds of negative thoughts are actually necessary and motivating. There is a big difference between "I am a loser and can't do this" (a bad, self-defeating negative thought), and "This won't be easy, and I'm going to have to work hard" (a very good negative thought that actually predicts greater success). In fact, study after study shows that people who think not only about their dreams, but about the obstacles that lie in the way of realizing their dreams - who visualize the steps they will take to make success happen, rather than just the success itself - vastly outperform those who sit back and wait for the universe to reward them for all their positive thinking. Whether it's starting a relationship with your secret crush, landing a job, recovering from major surgery, or losing weight, research shows that if you don't keep it real you're going to be really screwed. A new set of studies by NYU psychologists Heather Barry Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen offers insight into why this kind of thinking isn't just useless, but actually sets you up for failure. These researchers found that people who imagined an uncertain and challenging future reported feeling significantly more energized, and accomplished much more, than those who idealized their future. The purely "positive" thinkers' lower energy levels even showed up in objective, physiological measurements. (Ironically, these studies showed that the more important it was to the participant that the dream come true, the more idealizing sapped their motivation!) Kappes and Oettingen argue that when we focus solely on imagining the future of our dreams, our minds enjoy and indulge in those images as if they are real. They might be reachable, realistic dreams or impossible, unrealistic ones, but none of that matters because we don't bother to think about the odds of getting there or the hurdles that will have to be overcome. We're too busy enjoying the fantasy. Admittedly, there are some people that might experience a benefit from visualizing a positive future or a vision board. People who are depressed, or have very low self-confidence, are more likely to think about obstacles, and only obstacles. They may need to be reminded that a positive future is possible, and a vision board when used hand-in-hand with some realistic thinking and planning, can be an effective tool. Believe me when I tell you that I truly wish the Law of Attraction would work. I also happen to wish that Hogwarts were a real place, and that Antonio Banderas were my next-door neighbor. But wishing will not make it so, and that's exactly my point.

Resisting Temptation: Short-term Gain & Long-term Pain of External Control

I can resist everything except temptation. Published on September 30, 2008 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

We all get tempted away from the task at hand. Who resists this temptation? Does external control help us resist temptation? How well we resist temptation and the effects of external control depend on aspects of our personality.

Nicola Baumann and Julius Kuhl (University of Osnabrck) explored self-regulation and temptation resistance in a novel experimental study published in the Journal of Personality. Their study of self-regulation combined motivational and personality approaches in psychology to predict resistance to temptation. To understand their study, the results and what we could learn from this, I first need to define some key terms. External control vs. Autonomy Previously in this blog , I have written about the research of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, and their work on Self-Determination Theory. Baumann and Kuhl draw on this theory, particularly the notion that autonomy is a fundamental human need. In short, autonomy-supportive conditions are assumed to help us satisfy this basic need, whereas conditions that involve external control undermine this need for autonomous independence and our well-being. In fact, a great deal of research has shown that externally controlled events decrease performance on complex and creative tasks, and, more generally, lead people to take on tasks or regulations without accepting them as their own (something called introjection). As such, external control may have two effects. On the one hand, it may help individuals suppress their own needs at the moment to get a task done, on the other, it may undermine the development of self-regulatory abilities as the individual relies too much on external pressure to effect self-regulation. The question is, are there individual differences that might affect this? Personality Systems Interaction: State- vs. action-orientation To address the potential for individual differences, the authors considered a personality trait

known as state- vs. action orientation. Decision-related State Orientation (SOD) "describes the inability to self-generate positive affect that is needed to act quickly upon one's decisions, whereas Decision-related Action Orientation (AOD) is characterized by self-motivation and initiative" (p. 446). You can see why these two individual differences were chosen as possible moderators of the effect of external control. Given these definitions, we might expect that people who score high on State Orientation (SOD) would rely on external control to make up for their lack of initiative. Indeed, research has shown that state-oriented students without external motivation carried out fewer leisure activities than they had planned - no get up and go, to get up and go! (Note: If you want to read more about state and action orientation, see my previous blog on some research we conducted relating this individual difference to procrastination. Their Study This is a very interesting and complex experimental study that involved participants completing a computer-based task in which speed and accuracy earned them money as a reward. At the same time, there was a distracting task (an amusing on-screen event where two monkeys had a climbing competition, and if the "bad" monkey won it took money out of the participants' accumulated funds, whereas a "good" monkey win resulted in a net increase in money). As with many studies I summarize here on the blog, the details, although important in terms of the science, cannot be summarized here (I think you'd just stop reading!). Suffice it to say that the experimental design allowed these researchers to test the two "types" of personalities (i.e., action vs state oriented individuals) in two conditions (i.e., external control directions vs. autonomypromoting directions for the task) while they dealt with the temptation of a distracting event. I think it's important to summarize their hypotheses. In the authors' words: "The degree to which external control helps one to stick to a boring task despite tempting distracters was expected to depend on a person's action control disposition. Action-oriented individuals use positive self-motivating strategies to realize their intentions (I am capable of finding the pleasant aspects of an initially unpleasant activity'). They prefer an autonomyoriented mode of volition (self-regulation) defined as a democratic' consideration of many different needs and preferences . . . these individuals do not depend on external sources of regulation (e.g., encouragement by an interaction partner or instructions exerting control) because they can self-regulate their feelings and actions. Conversely, state-oriented individuals have difficulty acting upon their decisions. Due to their inability to self-generate positive affect, they often use negative self-motivating strategies (In order to motivate myself, I imagine what would happen if I didn't finish the task on time') and self-suppressive modes of self-regulation . . . Presumably, self-suppression helps resist temptation because this mode shuts off any competing action tendencies emanating from the self" (pp. 447-448). One way to generate self-suppression is to have external demands for control. In this case, they predicted that state-oriented individuals would more effectively resist distractions if they were in an externally controlled condition. What they found Consistent with their hypothesis, state-oriented participants in the externally controlled condition

did not demonstrate a decrease in their task performance due to the distracter, however these individuals did have a significant decrease in task speed when in the autonomy-supportive condition. In short, the state-oriented participants relied on and benefited from the external control conditions and were distracted (could not resist temptation) when this external control was absent. For action-oriented participants, resistance to the temptation to watch the monkey race was not affected by the instruction condition. Their self-regulatory abilities maintained their performance irrespective of the context, however state-oriented individuals showed deficits in self-regulation when external control was not provided to support their task focus. What this means There are two very important issues raised in these findings. First, given that state-oriented participants were able to resist temptation under conditions of external control but had poor resistance in autonomy-supportive conditions, it is important to consider this individual difference when expecting someone to exercise self-control. Stateorientation is an individual difference that is a liability to self-regulation. When self-regulatory abilities are low, situational factors become more important. In this case, state-oriented individuals need external sources of regulation to overcome their deficits in selfmotivation. Baumann and Kuhl argue that this finding may be explained by self-suppression. As long as the situation maintains the external control, no competing action tendency can emanate from the self (these are suppressed). Of course, when self-suppression is removed, competing tendencies within the individual may take the person off task again, because there is a lack of internal mechanisms to self-regulate.
Second, although there is a short-term benefit to external control for state-oriented individuals, the results also indicate that there may be a long-term cost associated with external control and selfsuppression. As the authors note, "Although state-oriented participants profited from control when trying to resist a motivationally relevant distracter, they experienced negative consequences of control in the long run . . . introducing a task in an authoritative [controlling] manner resulted in selfsuppression that outlasted task completion" (pp. 466-467; emphasis added). In other words, even when the participants were allowed to stop, the state-oriented participants were unable to refocus on self-generated goals and desires. In contrast to action-oriented participants, the state-oriented participants did not behave according to their emotional preferences, in fact, they seem to lose access to their personal preferences because they suppressed these as a strategy to self-regulate.

Closing thoughts Interestingly, Baumann and Kuhl close their paper by noting that their results support the assumption of Self-Determination Theory about external control having negative consequences in the long run. They take this further by noting that the self-suppression mechanism used by state-oriented individuals in the presence of external control actually leads to alienation from personal preferences. This alienation is a psychological cost factor associated with the short-term benefits of external-control facilitated self-control.

Alienation from one's own preferences speaks to an earlier blog topic, one that I have emphasized as being extremely important for understanding procrastination. Alienation from self in this regard may be regarded as a form of "bad faith." However, in this case it's not that we're actively trying to deceive ourselves and escape our freedom to choose. Instead, our overreliance on external control to maintain self-control actually alienates us from our sense of self, our emotional preferences and self-generated goals. The ultimate issue seems to be one of seeking autonomously motivated goals in our lives, even though we may need to draw on external control at times when self-regulation leaves us short. For some, those defined by high scores on state-orientation for example, this will be a long-term process of change, as they'll be working against a personality disposition that represents a liability to self-regulation. It doesn't mean that self-regulation is impossible, it's just more difficult, and may require the use of more conscious strategies to effect autonomous control and action. In the end, if we choose the short-term gain of relying solely on external control, whether this be as individuals or as parents or teachers trying to influence and motivate children, we may be only setting ourselves up for some long-term pain.

No Time to Delay
Not all delay is procrastination. Published on March 24, 2008 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don't Delay

Trust me. It's tempting to go to bed right now and put this off. It's been a long day. The kids are in bed, horses fed, dogs settled, and I'm sleepy. But, I can't do it. I can't leave that note, "There are no posts in this blog yet" under my blog category. . . can't, won't, haven't. The thing is, even if I had left this until tomorrow, it would NOT have been procrastination. In fact, it may have been a sagacious delay. I've only had this blog account for 4 hours. Although all procrastination is delay, not all delay is procrastination. Understanding the difference is a good place to start.

We all delay. Everyone does. How could we not delay when our lives are full of competing priorities, long to-do lists and, well, just more interesting possibilities than the task at hand. It can be wise to delay a task. It can be wise because we may need more information to proceed. It may be wise because the delay may allow you to muster additional resources. I could go on, but I think you see the point here. Delay happens. So, if delay is ok, what about procrastination? Aren't these the same? No. Procrastination is a needless, often irrational, voluntary delay of an intended action (or task) even when we know that this delay will most probably compromise our performance or task completion itself.

Procrastination is not a delay based on priorities. Procrastination is delaying an important task in favor of some alternative task that we really know is not as important, needn't be done right now, but seems more attractive, more rewarding. Procrastination means that we have an intention to act. We often have a very explicit intention like, "I'll start that first thing Monday morning." The "that" in this case is something we regard as important. We know we're already "cutting it close" by putting it off until Monday, but even on Monday we avoid the task. Instead, we find ourselves reorganizing our iPod playlists, cleaning the desk (or even the fridge!) and moving from one task to another while guilt peaks through our best efforts to distract ourselves. Why do we do this? What is the nature of this self-defeating behavior? What is it in us and the situation that undermines our "best intentions" like this? That is what we'll write about together a little at a time, weaving our own stories with research findings and insights from psychology more generally. Tonight, I just wanted to get started. In fact, "just get started" is my personal mantra for beating the procrastination habit. I think of it as "priming the pump." But, this gets me ahead of my story and our writing together. We've started. I've introduced the distinction between delay and procrastination. Our conversation has begun. It's your turn. No time to delay.

Planning for the Futurein the Present

Dont Miss Today While Dreaming About Tomorrow Published on March 3, 2013 by Marietta McCarty in Life Saving Philosophy

Thoughtful planning for the future is essential, and the damage done when we fail to take a hard look at the possible consequences of today's actions is familiar to us all. Financial planners have jobs for good reason! Personal and national debt point out the harm caused by an alarming lack of anticipation. Bullying, gossip, greed, procrastination, and unchecked anger guarantee harmful results. Philosophers from Epicurus and Aristotle in ancient Greece to John Stuart Mill in nineteenth century England proclaim the absolute necessity of contemplating future consequences. But! Plans and goals can constrict us if we are not careful, however. The concept of flexibility enlivened a philosophy group recently and they tossed around my definition as I listened in: Flexibility is the ongoing practice of moving with life. Just as the sails of a sailboat catch the wind as the vessel glides smoothly through the water, accepting change as an inevitable aspect of being alive allows us to flow more easily with lifes movement. If I know deep down that the world renews itself in every moment, I learn to expect change as a natural part of life. Serendipity keeps me on my toes. Several people gave examples of their burdensome worries about the futureothers spoke of the benefits of agility in switching predetermined courses.

Two individuals came immediately to mind. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his portrayal of the unhappiest man always scares me! Living in a future world that does not exist, and lamenting or longing for a past that has indeed passed, this sad person never shows upthe present moment, the only one that is real, is missed completely. Mark her or him absent from their lives. On a happier note, my former student Erin, who came to introduce herself before our first class in Eastern Thinking, asked what I expected of herand I asked what she expected of me. I want you to be present, she stated. Erin had goals which she achieved both academically and professionally. How? By being open to opportunities, to changing circumstances, to chance, and by living life fully right smack in the middle of the moment.

Positive Fantasies Can Reduce Future Effort

The dangers of thinking positively about the future Published on February 20, 2013 by Art Markman, Ph.D. in Ulterior Motives

It is important to visualize what is going to happen in the future. When you are making plans to accomplish a goal, it is valuable to think through all of the things that can go wrong. That simulation of the future can help you to figure out what you are going to do to overcome the obstacles that may keep you from achieving your aims.

Sometimes when we think about the future, we focus on our eventual success as well. We may think about how good it will feel to succeed and what rewards we might get from completing a difficult task. What role do these positive fantasies play? Research by Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues has shown that thinking about the benefits of success can actually make you less likely to achieve your goals. They can reduce the amount of effort that you want to put into achieving your aims. A nice demonstration of this effect comes from a paper by Heather Kappes, Eesha Sharma and Gabriele Oettingen published in the January, 2013 issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology. In one study, participants read about a charity that was addressing a health crisis in Sierra Leone. Many people in that country do not have access to pain medications that they need. College students read an article about this crisis and then were told about a charity that was

helping to bring pain medications to this country. Some participants were asked to form a positive fantasy by thinking about the most positive thing that would happen if that crisis was resolved. Other participants were asked to give a factual description of the crisis after it was resolved. Afterward, participants were asked to donate money to the charity. They were either asked to give a small donation ($1) or a large donation ($25, which is a lot of money for the typical undergraduate). Participants who were asked to give $1 were quite likely to donate regardless of the condition they were in, and those who were encouraged to think positively were actually somewhat more likely to give than those who were not. Participants who were asked to give $25 were much less likely to give overall. In this case, though, participants who thought positively almost never donated, while about 25% of those who gave a factual description were willing to donate. Another study found a similar effect with participants who were asked to volunteer their time to a cause rather than donating money. In this study, participants who engaged in a positive fantasy were unlikely to give their time when they were asked for a lot of effort compared to those who were asked to think factually about a charity. A third study demonstrated that this effect was a result of thinking positively and not an effect of the factual description in the control group. In this study, the control group did a boring task for a few minutes rather than giving a factual description. Once again, people asked to volunteer a lot of time were unwilling to do it if they had created a positive fantasy, but if they did a boring task for a few minutes, they were more willing to volunteer a lot of time to help a charity. These studies are a nice demonstration of the potential danger of positive fantasies. If we spend a lot of time envisioning our success, we may begin to feel some of the satisfaction that comes with actually achieving a goal. It is hard to motivate yourself to work hard to succeed when you are already feeling some of the rewards of that success. Ultimately, it is better to focus on the difficulties that lie ahead when faced with a difficult task. It may not be pleasant to think about the problems you will face, but it will make you more likely to get past those barriers.

The Limits of Self-Control

Want to quit smoking? Pick up a chocolate habit. Published on July 9, 2009 by Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D. in The Science of Willpower

Want to quit smoking? Try picking up a chocolate habit.

Or at least, give yourself permission to indulgence in whatever foods you find most tempting. A new study by UC San Francisco researchers Dikla Shmueli and Judith Prochaska shows why it's a bad idea to try to change too many health behaviors at once. 101 smokers were invited into the laboratory for a study on food temptation. They were told that the study was a challenge of sorts--researchers were interested in whether or not participants could resist a range of snacks, from raw radishes to freshly baked brownies. Participants were then put in a room alone with a randomly-assigned food (healthy vegetables or more tempting baked goods). Their assignment: do not eat the treat! The researchers made sure participants got the full effect of the temptation. For five minutes, they sat and stared at the treat. Every fifteen seconds or so, a chime rang, indicating that the participant should get closer to the plate, lift it up, and smell the food. They were also asked to really think about the food and their desire to eat it. Short of licking the chocolate frosting, this is about as strong a sensory temptation as the researchers could have set-up. After this test of willpower, participants were given a ten-minute break so the experimenter could set up the next phase of the study. Participant could wait in the lobby or go outside during the break. What the researchers really wanted to know: Would resting sweets make smokers light up during a 10-minute study break? After the break, the researchers used a Smokerlyzer to test the participant's breath for evidence of smoking. The results: Participants who had resisted dessert were more likely to smoke during the break (53%) than those who had resisted the less appetizing radishes (34%). Why? It could be that a craving is a craving, and if you don't give in to one, you'll be doubly attracted to the next. Or perhaps resisting temptation is a form of stress, and stress triggers the need to smoke. The researchers cite Roy Baumeister's theory on the limits of self-control as a likely explanation. You only have so much self-control before your willpower is exhausted. When your willpower is weakened by resisiting one temptation, you're more likely to succumb to the next. These findings are consistent with other research on trying to quit smoking. Smoking cessation interventions that include nutritional counseling or dieting plans have higher failure rates than

programs that only focus on quitting smoking. While trying to overhaul your lifestyle all it once may sound appealing, it isn't sustainable, especially in the early stages when cravings for cigarettes and food are at their worst. The bottom line: when you're trying to make a difficult change, save your strength for what matters most. If both a cigarette and candy bar are calling your name, let the candy bar sweet talk you into indulgence. You can kick that habit later. Or maybe not-last I heard, there was a new study showing that chocolate is good for you. Plus, gaining a few pounds might help you live longer.

Ending Procrastination
Twenty percent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. They don't pay their bills on time and leave Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve. This is a learned behavior and therefore can be unlearned.
By Hara Estroff Marano, published on October 01, 2003 - last reviewed on November 25, 2009

Maybe you tell yourself you perform better under pressure. Or that the work you do when you're not feeling in the mood to work isn't very good. Or you think that you can't do anything well unless you're feeling at the top of your form. Uh-oh, you've got the earmarks of a procrastinator. Of course, you've got lots of company. Twenty percent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. These are people who don't pay their bills on time, who miss opportunities for buying tickets to concerts, who leave Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve. Let's not even talk about income taxes! College seems to bring out the procrastination in people. In the college setting, up to 70 percent of students identify themselves as procrastinators. Of course, it won't help you get things done any faster to know that procrastination isn't good for your health. But putting things off creates higher levels of stress and sends all those stress hormones coursing through your body, wearing it out faster. And it puts you at risk for poor health because you're just as likely to delay seeking treatment for medical problems as you are to delay everything else. Procrastination actually weakens your immune system. It keeps you awake at night. And it doesn't do a thing for your relationships either. It makes loved ones resentful, because it shifts the burden of responsibilities onto them. Procrastinators are made and not born. That's both the good news and the bad news. Good because it's a learned response, and what's learned can be unlearned. The bad news is that while it's possible to change, it takes a lot of psychic energy and you don't necessarily feel transformed internally.

You should know that some people who think of themselves as procrastinators really aren't. In a world of unending deadlines, they just put too many things on their "To Do" list. They're not avoiding tasks, the mark of a bona fide procrastinator; they're getting things done, just not as many as they would like. It's easy to tell whether you're a real procrastinator. According to Joseph Ferrari, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at De Paul University in Chicago, real procrastinators tell themselves five lies: They overestimate the time they have left to perform tasks. They underestimate the time it takes to complete tasks. They overestimate how motivated they will feel the next day, the next week, the next month -whenever they are putting things off to. They mistakenly think that succeeding at a task requires that they feel like doing it. They mistakenly believe that working when not in the mood is suboptimal. Procrastinators also actively look for distractions, especially ones that don't take heavy-duty commitment on their part. Checking e-mail is just about tailor-made for this purpose. The dirty little secret is that procrastinators distract themselves as a way of regulating their own emotions, such as fear of failure. So face it. Some tasks are never going to be thigh-slappers no matter how long they marinate on your desk. You've got to do them now. How to tackle procrastination? Dr. Ferrari recommends these strategies for reducing procrastination: 1. Make a list of everything you have to do. 2. Write a statement of intention. 3. Set realistic goals. 4. Break it down into specific tasks. 5. Make your task meaningful. 6. Promise yourself a reward. 7. Eliminate tasks you never plan to do. Be honest!

8. Estimate the amount of time you think it will take you to complete a task. Then increase the amount by 100%.

Escape Artists
Procrastination reflects our brain's hunger to feel good now rather than reap future rewards. But at the end of the day, it's really about choice: You have to decide exactly who it is that you intend to be.
By Steven Kotler, published on September 01, 2009 - last reviewed on February 15, 2012

On the surface, Robert Capp is a true success. He's a publishing executive at the top of his field. In his 38 years, he's overseen everything from major magazines to major Internet sites. In his free time, he runs a charity that helps war veterans adjust to life after traumatic injury. But every day, Capp fights a battle he rarely wins.

"As soon as I have something important to do," he says, "I get really into my head about it. I don't do it, just can't do it. Anxiety starts to build. If I have to arrange a meeting, just making the phone call to set it up becomes impossible. All sorts of weird excuses start popping into my brain. If the meeting is with someone important I start thinking, 'Who am I to be calling this guy, he's really important and I'm not, why would he possibly want to waste time speaking to me?' It's truly awful." For Capp, this awful feeling has been one of the more defining features of his life. "Procrastination has affected every part of my life for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I was always hiding from responsibility. By the time I was a teenager, I discovered drugs and alcohol and these were the perfect tools to foster my procrastination. Why do something I should be doing when there were drugs to take?" His addiction lasted over 10 years. "But even when I got sober, the urge to delay didn't get better. It nearly destroyed my marriage. It's impossible to be in a relationship with a chronic

procrastinator. It feels crazy to a partner, who can't help but think, 'Here's this rational, intelligent person, so how can this keep happening? It doesn't make any sense.'"

For Capp, it's worse at work. "Several months ago my boss sent me a memo listing things that were wrong with my performance. There were eight items on his list and all eight had to do with my procrastination problems." Capp lost his jobalthough he landed a coveted position on a new Web site.

"Everyone procrastinates," observes DePaul University psychologist Joseph Ferrari. However, "not everyone is a procrastinator." Still, a large and growing proportion of the population can lay claim to this problem. In a 1978 survey, 5 percent of the population defined themselves as procrastinators. Ferrari recently completed two large studies of the behavior. "We found that between 20 and 25 percent of the population are procrastinators." Psychologists define procrastination as a gap between intention and action. Chronic procrastinators like Robert Capp feel bad about their decisions to delaywhich helps distinguish procrastination from laziness. Laziness involves a lack of desire; with procrastination, the desire to start that project is there, but it consistently loses out to our appetite for delay. And this is no ordinary delay. Procrastination is considered a needless, often irrational delay of some important task in favor of a less important, but seemingly more rewarding, task. And that accompanying negative feelingthe gnawing guilt, the building anxietyis one way we know we're not doing what we're supposed to do. Researchers now believe that procrastination reflects the triumph of impulsivity over the lure of future rewards. We're terrible at processing time. Because our brains were built largely when survival hinged on mastering immediate conditions, we engage in temporal discountingthat is, we misjudge the importance of a task when it lies even a short distance in the future, so we see distant rewards as smaller than they really are. And our impulsivity never had it so good: Modern life furnishes an abundance of endlessly reinforcing demands for our attention, such as the streams of tweets you subscribe to. However much procrastination reflects a mismatch between our stone-age brains and the highly sophisticated environments those same brains have created, it reaches deep into our being. "It is always about choice," observes Canadian psychologist Timothy Pychyl. And that makes

procrastination quintessentially an existential problem. "We're given a certain amount of time and we have to use it," he says. "It's the acts of omission that lead to our biggest regrets in life. Where do we choose to invest ourselves?" Procrastination, he contends, bumps right up against our commitment "to who it is we are trying to be in life." Even indecision and inaction are really decision and action, Pychyl notes. "Your indecision, your inaction, becomes your choice, your actperhaps your whole life." Unless, of course, you take deliberate steps to counteract your worst tendencies.

Up Against Impulse Control

Despite the plethora of modern distractions, procrastination has been a problem for about as long as humans have been keeping track of such things. Both the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita mention its dangers. Shakespeare made it Hamlet's folly. Four million years ago, when our hominid brains first emerged, there were not 500 channels beckoning us. The time suck known as Facebook had yet to exert its pull. But since then, our external world has lapped our internal processing capacity. The result is an array of impulse control issues. Procrastination, many psychologists believe, is a correlate of overeating, overspending, gambling addiction, and pornography addiction. We're increasingly short on ability to resist temptation.
Like overspending and overeating, procrastination has serious consequences in many domains of our lives. At work, it undermines teamwork and threatens both job performance and job security. At home, since it also plays havoc with basic trust, procrastination adds significant stress to relationships. And economics: A 2002 survey done by H&R Block found that tax dawdling resulted in $473 million in overpayments.

As with many problems that arise from the fundamental human condition, procrastination has not been easy to fix. For nearly 40 years, psychologists have tried to identify the core foible. Some think perfectionism is the problem; others find anxiety at its heart. There are those who suspect teenage rebellion against overbearing parents and those who see it as a self-handicapping predicament resulting from a fear of failure. Since plenty of procrastinators claim to do their best work under pressure, thrill-seeking has been fingered as well. Most researchers favor one idea over another, but so much competing data has left little room for agreement on theories.

The Need for a New Tack

University of Calgary psychologist Piers Steel decided to try a different tack when he faced the divergent findings on procrastination. "There were 70 different studies that looked at perfectionism. Some found a strong correlation with procrastination; others found none at all. It was a topic ripe for meta-analysis." So starting in 1996, Steel spent 10 years pulling together studies published and unpublished, analyzing almost everything he could find on the topic, from peer-reviewed journal articles to

nearly forgotten doctoral dissertations. He reviewed 553 studies in all. He applied formulas to add weight to those studies with larger research groups and stronger research designs. And when he was done, he concluded that the roots of procrastination emerge not from any one source, but from four interlinked variables: a person's expectancy for succeeding at a given task (E); the value of the task (V); a person's need for immediate gratification/their sensitivity to its delay (D); impulsiveness (I). Expectancy of success is essentially a measure of confidence. The more confident you are, the less likely you are to put off a task. Task value is a combination of two factors: how much fun this particular job is and what it means to you and your life. The more fun, the more meaning, the less procrastination. The need for instant gratification looks at both how much time will pass before you are rewarded for doing the job and how badly you need a reward for its completion. You're more likely to finish a report due next week if it results in immediate promotion. But if that promotion must wait until a year-end review that is still six months away, the urge to tarry increases. Finally, impulsiveness measures how easily distracted you are. The more readily you succumb to distraction, the greater the chance you'll procrastinate. Steel combined all of these variables into what he has dubbed "the procrastination equation." It goes like this: Utility (which measures how likely you are to procrastinate on any given task) = E x V/ I x D. Expressed in words: How likely one is to delay depends on one's confidence multiplied by the importance/fun of a given task, divided by how badly you need the reward (for finishing) multiplied by how easily distracted you are. According to Jeffrey Vancouver, associate professor of psychology at Ohio University, who studies motivation and goal-setting, "what's really cutting edge here is that Steel has made our understanding of procrastination dynamic; he's added in the critical variable of time. This allows us to really see how deadlines play into our desire to achieve certain goals."

Masters of the Immediate

The introduction of time into the discussion helps illuminate the biggest variable to emerge from the data: the relationship between impulsivity and procrastination. "The largest number in the equation is always going to be impulsivity," Steel says. "There's a huge correlation between procrastination and impulsivity. And that has to do with evolutionspecifically with the fact that it's a slow process." Procrastination reflects the difficulty of coping with some aspects of modern society with hunter-gatherer brains because our forebears lived in a world without delay. "Back then," Steel points out, "food was hard to come by, meat kept for three days, and danger lurked around every corner. It was a very immediate environment. We learned to value the now much more than the later in order to survive."

Steel finds support for his belief in what's known as construal theory, which helps explain how the visual cortex processes information. "We visualize imminent events more concretely," he says. "But distant events are much more nondescript. We inherently see them as fuzzy." Built for immediate reward, our brains stumble over planning for the future and forecasting how we will feel in the long term, where many of our goals reside. Under these circumstances, a third piece of chocolate cake now trumps a trim figure 10 years down the road. E-mail, voice mail, video-on-demand, Web surfing, and the like"you couldn't design a worse working environment if you tried," insists Steel. Indeed, says Pychyl, Steel's focus on impulsivity adds an important dimension to understanding procrastination: "We misjudge the importance of a task because it's still not due until the future." But he believes there's still something essential missing from the procrastination equation.
"Why is it that even when Robert Capp has something right in his face he is unable to proceed? That is the story of our inability to regulate our emotions," argues Pychyl.

He points to Capp's overwhelming feeling of failure, the "awful feeling" of being an impostor. Capp's 10 years of drugs amounted to a form of self-medication. But "he's not talking about selfmedicating to be less impulsive; he's self-medicating to deal with the emotions he's unable to deal with successfully on his own." What needs to be added to the equation, says Pychyl, is giving in to feeling good. "Our selfregulation fails because we're not able to manage our emotions. We give in to feel good" right now. "When I sit down at my computer and I'm overwhelmed with fear or any other emotion, I can surf the Web or walk away from it, which is procrastination," says Pychyl. He doesn't doubt that people use technology to procrastinate. "We do know that 50 percent of the time people are online they're procrastinating. But we don't know whether, in fact, they wouldn't just use something else." Steel would have us help ourselves by reconfiguring our immediate world to fit our brains, at least when we need to work. It's not just a matter of shutting off your e-mail. Go that extra step and remove the icon entirely from your desktop, he advises. "Remove the icon so you don't have to see it. Then make sure the 'new mail' tone is turned off. If you see it or hear it, you're going to check it, so you have to remove it completely." And while you're at it, disable instant messaging and turn off phone ringers. And when you're getting your next phone, choose one without lights so you can't see when a new call is coming in. It's necessary to protect your better self. The solution to procrastination, argues Pychyl, centers around deploying some skills of emotion management. Beyond getting that report done on time, they're what help us to become who we're meaning to be.

Ending ProcrastinationRight Now!

Tips that keep you one step ahead of procrastination.

By Timothy Pychyl, published on September 01, 2009 - last reviewed on June 06, 2012

It takes deliberate strategies to avoid becoming our own worst enemy by procrastinating on our intended actions. Here are some tips, all based on research, that will keep you one step ahead of procrastination. Each tip follows on its predecessor, so you can use them in sequence to build your own tactical defense against procrastination.

1) Time travel: How to counteract the irrationality of human nature.

As Piers Steel makes clear in temporal motivation theory and Dan Gilbert shows in his work on affective forecasting, we are not merely irrational but predictably so. We discount future rewards as less important than a task at hand, particularly if it's a more pleasant activity, and we really aren't very good at predicting how we'll feel in the future. "Time travel" can help here. That is, we need to use concrete mental images of the future more often and more accurately, to represent the future as though it were happening in the present. For example, a person who is procrastinating on saving for retirement might imagine as vividly as possible living on his or her potential retirement savings. To make a future image like this more concrete and accurate, it may be important to set out some numbers for a budget and take into account the reality of the need for and increasing expense of health care in old age. Planning shouldn't be an abstract notion of "doing it tomorrow." Think about the task in the real context of the day, and think carefully about how these tasks make you feel. This strategy will help you prepare for tip #2.

2) Don't give in to feeling good: Short-term gain, long-term pain.

When self-regulation fails, it's often because short-term emotional repair takes precedence over our long-term goals. For example, a task at hand makes us feel anxious or overwhelmed, so we "give in to feel good," seeking immediate emotional relief, and we walk away, leaving the task for tomorrow. Here's where emotional intelligence is so important to procrastinating less. Learn to recognize that we can have negative emotions without acting on them. Stay put for a minutedon't walk away. Don't give in to "I'll feel more like it tomorrow." Acknowledge the negative emotions, but get started anyway. Progress on a goal provides the motivation for another step forward. Just get started; the negative emotions will pass.

3) Reduce uncertainty and distractions.

Planning is one thing; action is another. In fact, what can make a task aversive to us when we're simply making an intention or planning is how meaningful a goal is. The less meaningful the goal, the less likely we'll want to do the task. However, when it's time to act, aversive tasks those we're most likely to procrastinate onare those for which we're uncertain how to proceed. We're most likely to procrastinate on tasks that lack structure. This means that in addition to making your task concrete (see tip #1), it's important to reduce the uncertainty about how to proceedand, when it's time to act, to reduce available distractions as well. Shut off your e-mail, isolate yourself as much as you can, and make sure the environment around you is working to strengthen your willpower and focus, not to undermine your efforts. Speaking of willpower

4) Willpower: How to make the most of the willpower muscle.

A great deal of recent research clearly indicates that willpower is like a muscle. You can exhaust it more quickly than you might imagine and, when you do, you lose your ability to self-regulate your behavior. One immediate method to strengthen your resolve in order to keep you on task is to remind yourself of your values. This process of self-affirmation bolsters our flagging reserves of willpower. Another self-regulatory boost can come from mindfulness meditation. Attention is the first step in self-regulation, so learning to keep focused attention will help you procrastinate less by strengthening self-regulation.