Even though that headline sounds like the title to a Robert Ludlum novel (The Aquitaine Progression, The Parsifal Mosaic, The Bourne Ultimatum, etc.,) there is a professor in Canada who has actually studied procrastination for the last 10 years and has developed a mathematical formula that determines why people procrastinate.
The professor -- who has one of the ultimate cool professor names, Professor Piers Steel -- began by studying 250 college students. The jokes, they overwhelm my poor brain and I cannot pick just one...
Anyway, Professor Steel says that procrastination is different from laziness. Lazy people don't care about the task they're not doing. Procrastinators care about the task, but they're impulsive and easily distracted by something that will be more fun, more satisfying or at the very least, less boring right now than whatever the task is.
And those procrastinators who've claimed the real reason they put stuff off is that they're such perfectionists they can't stand the idea of doing a less than perfect job? Nope, says Professor Steel. Just like the rest of the impulsive & easily distracted folks who find what they think are more interesting things to do, like play Spider Solitaire, InkBall or write stuff in a blog...well, that's enough of that right there.
He goes into greater detail in a book, The Procrastination Equation: Today's Trouble with Tomorrow. It's due out soon.
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