III. Procrastination

The first very rough draft of the section on procrastination wasn’t too hard to write; it went quite quickly, probably because I’d been thinking (and reading) about the issue for years. But when it came time to work on it again—incorporate more research, especially the somewhat grim studies about factors that contribute to scholarly productivity—I instead reprinted my roll sheet, deleting from it the students who had dropped, adding to my sheet the dates I hadn’t included, composing and writing email to students whose attendance troubled me, and comparing students’ names with the photo roster (in a more or less futile effort to learn all their names). I then printed up the comments I’d spent writing and stapled them to the appropriate student work. I sent some urgent email related to a committee I chair, answered email (related to national service for a scholarly organization) I should have answered yesterday, and sent out extremely important email to students clarifying an assignment I’d made orally in class.

            When we think of procrastination, we don’t necessarily think of that kind of behavior—I wasn’t doing excessively fussy cleaning, arranging my pens by points on the rainbow, playing a computer game, trimming split ends, watching TV, eating cupcakes, or in any way “wasting” my time. I needed to do the things I did, and all the activities will benefit someone else. I’m not entirely sure that any of those activities were easier (or even less stressful) than working on this chapter, since it’s a complicated committee, and I overthink comments on students work, I’m bad at learning names and I know it hurts students’ feelings, and so on.

            The term “procrastination” is used to mean three very different kinds of behavior—putting something off, leaving a task till the last minute (that is, till we have the minimum amount of time necessary to complete the task before the deadline), doing something we think we do not need to do instead of something we think we need to do. Common parlance uses the term the first way, but that means that procrastination and setting priorities are synonymous, in which case procrastination is an actively good habit. I generally use the term in the second way—the practice of delaying a task till there is barely time to meet the deadline. But, even using the term that way, it isn’t necessarily a bad choice. When scholars of procrastination use the term, it most often concerns that third kind of activity: it is not that the tasks we do to procrastinate are useless or indulgent, but that we are not doing the task(s) that our long-term analysis of the situation suggests we should be doing. By the first and second definition, I wasn’t really procrastinating by working on teaching and service instead of scholarship, but by the third definition I was. And research on scholarly productivity suggests that kind of procrastination is the more serious problem.

            The situation of an “R1” (that is, Phd-granting) university with a large number of tenured faculty who are not actively publishing scholarship is very complicated. Most such universities once had a 3/2 teaching load—that is, three courses one semester and two the other—but shifted to a reduced teaching load (usually 2/2, but sometimes 2/1) on the reasonable assumption that expecting more publication out of faculty means that one has to expect less of something else. In addition, working with graduate students, especially regarding professionalization, requires time. Thus, from the perspective of many administrators (and taxpayers), faculty who teach a 2/2 and do not publish are being paid for work they aren’t doing. And, while there may be faculty who really are working less than full-time hours because they are only teaching 2/2 and aren’t engaged in scholarship, they seem to be few and far between. Far more common are the faculty who aren’t publishing, but are working long and hard—they are engaged in service and time-consuming teaching. Hancock et al’s survey found that: “the low publishing group (seven or less publications in the five years) and the high publishing group (13 or more articles) both work approximately the same number of hours per week (53.2 versus 55.5)” (“The Ombudsman” 28).

            One study (Milem et al) concludes that higher research productivity has come at the cost of informal contact with students; while they did not find a significant reduction in time spent on teaching, they did find “across all institutions, there was a statistically significant decrease in the amount of time faculty spent advising and counseling students” (467). Other studies do find that scholarship and teaching are in competition with each other for time. Hancock et al’s survey indicated that low publishing scholars allocate 40.8 percent of their time to teaching whereas the high publishing group allocates 29.1 percent (“The Ombudsman” 28).

            But, it is possible that it isn’t that the low publishing faculty publish less because they spend more time on teaching, and, therefore, reducing their teaching will increase their scholarly productivity. In fact, research suggests that the causality is very complicated. Hancock et al report that there are other factors that also correlate to high publishing:

-They rate themselves higher than do lower producers in their ability to organize and manage time;

-They assign greater importance than do lower producers to academic meetings and actually attend more;

-They exhibit greater mobility (measured by the number of institutions since receiving highest degree);

-In choosing research topics, they assign greater importance to the availability of funding and popularity than do lower producers. (28-30)

The first and last suggest that part of the difference is not the time, but how the time is used; that is, high publishing scholars think strategically about their time and their projects. That emphasis on thinking strategically turns up in other scholarship on productivity. For instance, Ito and Brotheridge conclude their study:

Not surprisingly, and in support of existing research, this study found that the amount of time that faculty spent on research activities predicted both their perceptions of their productivity levels and their reported journal publication levels. Strategic focus, a variable often discussed in interviews with prominent researchers and implied in studies relating academic background to research productivity, had a significant impact on productivity, both directly and through its interaction with seeking resources (such as grants). Strategic focus also had an impact, through its interaction with managing ideas, on the perceptual measure of research productivity. These findings support the anecdotal and common sense beliefs that strategic focus is important because it reinforces the influence of building resources and framing ideas. It was interesting that one variable that is often discussed – the need to free up time from teaching and committee work – was negatively related to objective productivity, but positively related to perceptions of productivity. This may suggest that productive researchers learn how to work within the limitations of their commitments or, perhaps, how to work more efficiently. (17)

Thus, simply reducing faculty teaching load will not necessarily increase the amount of scholarly production (although increasing teaching will almost certainly decrease faculty publication). One can imagine a variety of (overlapping) reasons that someone might not be producing as much scholarship as s/he wants:

·      S/he is producing the work, but not finding venues for it;

·      S/he, or someone for whom s/he is responsible, has a seriously inhibiting medical condition, or a set of medical problems;

·      There are no resources for scholarship generally or that kind of scholarship specifically—grants, labs, networks, money to travel to collections or conferences, mentors, colleagues who can read and comment on one’s work, and so on;

·      There is no time for it because s/he has too many personal or professional obligations, and they cannot be reduced;

·      There is no time for it because s/he has too many personal or professional obligations, but it is difficult for some reason to reduce them;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but in practice there is always something more pressing to do;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but s/he keeps spending time on other tasks instead,  tasks which might still be challenging and important, and which might be pushed to take on by family, administrators, or colleagues;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but s/he keeps spending time on other tasks instead,  tasks which are not particularly important, although they might be challenging and even rewarding (e.g., volunteer work, extraordinary housekeeping, high maintenance parenting, a beautiful garden, even a second job).

The list really could go on—my point is not to be exhaustive, but simply to point out that there are wildly different reasons and hence different solutions. Only the last two, it seems to me, are usefully characterized as procrastination, and none of them signifies any moral flaw in the scholar.

 [There. 1000 words—done for the day.]

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The first very rough draft of the section on procrastination wasn’t too hard to write; it went quite quickly, probably because I’d been thinking (and reading) about the issue for years. But when it came time to work on it again—incorporate more research, especially the somewhat grim studies about factors that contribute to scholarly productivity—I instead reprinted my roll sheet, deleting from it the students who had dropped, adding to my sheet the dates I hadn’t included, composing and writing email to students whose attendance troubled me, and comparing students’ names with the photo roster (in a more or less futile effort to learn all their names). I then printed up the comments I’d spent writing and stapled them to the appropriate student work. I sent some urgent email related to a committee I chair, answered email (related to national service for a scholarly organization) I should have answered yesterday, and sent out extremely important email to students clarifying an assignment I’d made orally in class.

            When we think of procrastination, we don’t necessarily think of that kind of behavior—I wasn’t doing excessively fussy cleaning, arranging my pens by points on the rainbow, playing a computer game, trimming split ends, watching TV, eating cupcakes, or in any way “wasting” my time. I needed to do the things I did, and all the activities will benefit someone else. I’m not entirely sure that any of those activities were easier (or even less stressful) than working on this chapter, since it’s a complicated committee, and I overthink comments on students work, I’m bad at learning names and I know it hurts students’ feelings, and so on.

            The term “procrastination” is used to mean three very different kinds of behavior—putting something off, leaving a task till the last minute (that is, till we have the minimum amount of time necessary to complete the task before the deadline), doing something we think we do not need to do instead of something we think we need to do. Common parlance uses the term the first way, but that means that procrastination and setting priorities are synonymous, in which case procrastination is an actively good habit. I generally use the term in the second way—the practice of delaying a task till there is barely time to meet the deadline. But, even using the term that way, it isn’t necessarily a bad choice. When scholars of procrastination use the term, it most often concerns that third kind of activity: it is not that the tasks we do to procrastinate are useless or indulgent, but that we are not doing the task(s) that our long-term analysis of the situation suggests we should be doing. By the first and second definition, I wasn’t really procrastinating by working on teaching and service instead of scholarship, but by the third definition I was. And research on scholarly productivity suggests that kind of procrastination is the more serious problem.

            The situation of an “R1” (that is, Phd-granting) university with a large number of tenured faculty who are not actively publishing scholarship is very complicated. Most such universities once had a 3/2 teaching load—that is, three courses one semester and two the other—but shifted to a reduced teaching load (usually 2/2, but sometimes 2/1) on the reasonable assumption that expecting more publication out of faculty means that one has to expect less of something else. In addition, working with graduate students, especially regarding professionalization, requires time. Thus, from the perspective of many administrators (and taxpayers), faculty who teach a 2/2 and do not publish are being paid for work they aren’t doing. And, while there may be faculty who really are working less than full-time hours because they are only teaching 2/2 and aren’t engaged in scholarship, they seem to be few and far between. Far more common are the faculty who aren’t publishing, but are working long and hard—they are engaged in service and time-consuming teaching. Hancock et al’s survey found that: “the low publishing group (seven or less publications in the five years) and the high publishing group (13 or more articles) both work approximately the same number of hours per week (53.2 versus 55.5)” (“The Ombudsman” 28).

            One study (Milem et al) concludes that higher research productivity has come at the cost of informal contact with students; while they did not find a significant reduction in time spent on teaching, they did find “across all institutions, there was a statistically significant decrease in the amount of time faculty spent advising and counseling students” (467). Other studies do find that scholarship and teaching are in competition with each other for time. Hancock et al’s survey indicated that low publishing scholars allocate 40.8 percent of their time to teaching whereas the high publishing group allocates 29.1 percent (“The Ombudsman” 28).

            But, it is possible that it isn’t that the low publishing faculty publish less because they spend more time on teaching, and, therefore, reducing their teaching will increase their scholarly productivity. In fact, research suggests that the causality is very complicated. Hancock et al report that there are other factors that also correlate to high publishing:

-They rate themselves higher than do lower producers in their ability to organize and manage time;

-They assign greater importance than do lower producers to academic meetings and actually attend more;

-They exhibit greater mobility (measured by the number of institutions since receiving highest degree);

-In choosing research topics, they assign greater importance to the availability of funding and popularity than do lower producers. (28-30)

The first and last suggest that part of the difference is not the time, but how the time is used; that is, high publishing scholars think strategically about their time and their projects. That emphasis on thinking strategically turns up in other scholarship on productivity. For instance, Ito and Brotheridge conclude their study:

Not surprisingly, and in support of existing research, this study found that the amount of time that faculty spent on research activities predicted both their perceptions of their productivity levels and their reported journal publication levels. Strategic focus, a variable often discussed in interviews with prominent researchers and implied in studies relating academic background to research productivity, had a significant impact on productivity, both directly and through its interaction with seeking resources (such as grants). Strategic focus also had an impact, through its interaction with managing ideas, on the perceptual measure of research productivity. These findings support the anecdotal and common sense beliefs that strategic focus is important because it reinforces the influence of building resources and framing ideas. It was interesting that one variable that is often discussed – the need to free up time from teaching and committee work – was negatively related to objective productivity, but positively related to perceptions of productivity. This may suggest that productive researchers learn how to work within the limitations of their commitments or, perhaps, how to work more efficiently. (17)

Thus, simply reducing faculty teaching load will not necessarily increase the amount of scholarly production (although increasing teaching will almost certainly decrease faculty publication). One can imagine a variety of (overlapping) reasons that someone might not be producing as much scholarship as s/he wants:

·      S/he is producing the work, but not finding venues for it;

·      S/he, or someone for whom s/he is responsible, has a seriously inhibiting medical condition, or a set of medical problems;

·      There are no resources for scholarship generally or that kind of scholarship specifically—grants, labs, networks, money to travel to collections or conferences, mentors, colleagues who can read and comment on one’s work, and so on;

·      There is no time for it because s/he has too many personal or professional obligations, and they cannot be reduced;

·      There is no time for it because s/he has too many personal or professional obligations, but it is difficult for some reason to reduce them;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but in practice there is always something more pressing to do;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but s/he keeps spending time on other tasks instead,  tasks which might still be challenging and important, and which might be pushed to take on by family, administrators, or colleagues;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but s/he keeps spending time on other tasks instead,  tasks which are not particularly important, although they might be challenging and even rewarding (e.g., volunteer work, extraordinary housekeeping, high maintenance parenting, a beautiful garden, even a second job).

The list really could go on—my point is not to be exhaustive, but simply to point out that there are wildly different reasons and hence different solutions. Only the last two, it seems to me, are usefully characterized as procrastination, and none of them signifies any moral flaw in the scholar.

 [There. 1000 words—done for the day.]

It seems to me that one of the least productive ways to think about procrastination is as some kind of sin or character flaw. The more that it is some sort of awful dark monster of the soul, the more likely it is that things associated with procrastination (such as writing a paper, chapter, or article) will become epic confrontations with one’s own darkest side. Scholarly writing is pretty dang hard at its very base; there’s no need to bring in Gilgamesh or Grendel.

Procrastination is just a trait, like being left-handed or far-sighted or curly-haired. Those are actively desirable traits sometimes, sometimes inconvenient, but generally pretty neutral. If, however, one frames them as a sign of one’s spiritual failings, then writing a test or tatting or looking in the mirror become chastening experiences that scourge the soul. And that doesn’t make it very likely one will do them. Procrastination is not a sign of laziness, not the consequence of laziness, and not even related to laziness in any way. It can be related to passivity, and it can even be a sign of depression, but calling one’s self lazy for procrastinating is a complete waste of time. 

My sense about letting panic drive the bus in the writing process is that people do it because it worked for them for many years. Similarly, people procrastinate because it has worked in the past as well or better than any other time and task management strategies we generally use. We get something out of procrastinating, and so we keep doing it. And, even if we beat ourselves up about it, or it is a secret source of guilt and anguish, we still get more out of it than it costs us. The scholars on procrastination even have a formula for this calculation because procrastination is something that provide STR (short term rewards, also sometimes written SS) whereas starting on the unpleasant task only provides LTR (long term rewards, also LL); given humans’ tendency to favor STR over LTR (which explains why people always go for tax breaks, even when it’s clear they’ll be expensive in the long-run), procrastination is in our very nature.

As I said earlier, many people who are not productive in regard to publishing scholarship are still tremendously productive people. Scholarship is fairly thoroughly in the LTR category—one can spend an entire day working on a book project and have absolutely no idea whether what one wrote will ever see publication, or if what one read will actually contribute to the larger project. But spending a day on class preparation (or program administration) will lead to visible and obvious and very gratifying results.

            Defining procrastination as a species of “weakness of will” (or akrasia) may be useful for ethicists, but doesn’t help scholars who put off chipping away at scholarship in favor of completing smaller and more obviously urgent tasks. It may be helpful for thinking about the processes involved in procrastinating beginning one’s diet, or quitting smoking, but much less so for putting off scholarship. In scholarship on procrastination, the contrast is often between something with STR and demonized benefits versus an LTR that has privileged consequences—eating a cupcake versus exercise, for instance. And, while the point is perfectly valid (that eating a cupcake always has more STR than exercising), those aren’t the sorts of choices that I see people making. Part of what makes the choice to engage in scholarship over teaching (or service) so difficult is that scholarship can seem so selfish. In a field in which a successful academic book sells 500 copies, but teaching effectively for five years can reach far more students, the selfish choice appears to be for scholarship. Choosing a cupcake over exercise is choosing what is culturally constructed as a vice over what is culturally constructed as a virtue, but choosing teaching over scholarship is almost precisely the reverse, especially (but not exclusively) for women.

The choice too often seems to be service to others (excellence in teaching or program administration) or service to one’s career (academic publishing). I think that understanding that way of framing the decision is crucial to understanding a number of statistics, especially regarding women’s tendency to get “stalled” or “hung” at the level of Associate Professor. It is not that they have gotten hung because they are lounging on the couch popping bonbons, or requesting that underpaid servants peel them grapes, or whatever fantasy of self-indulgence it is that people have about long-term Associate Professors. It is that they (we) choose activities with visible and fairly immediate consequences over ones with amorphous benefits about which we might feel ambivalent.

If that is the problem, then the solution is for people to stop feeling ambivalent about success in academia, and that’s kind of outside the realm of a book on writing, even if success at writing is dependent on wanting that success and what it entails. I will just say that success in any profession is dependent on wanting it, and on being in a relationship that supports it. Academics, because our time is flexible, are often mistaken for people whose time is free (even by ourselves). I have had so much difficulty persuading neighbors, repair persons, and my dogs that working at home is not the same as hanging out that I took to working at my office. 

There is another source of ambivalence, and it’s far more complicated. Procrastination can have a variety of rewards, and we may be ambivalent about giving up those rewards. After all, procrastination:

• makes a boring task more interesting because it introduces the possibility of failure; as Joseph Ferrari says, “Some people habitually delay tasks in order to self-impose a need to rush at the last minute. This hyperactivity can be a pleasurable experience for the person” (108).

• reduces the amount of time a task can take (this is especially useful with tasks—like grading or prepping class—that will expand to fill as much time as one gives them). • focuses attention—if we wait to start a task till we’re in a panic about it, then the panic will reduce distractions and silence the excessively critical internal voices that sometimes accompany really tough tasks. • It can reduce the number of times one has to do a boring task (if I put off filing, then I don’t have to file as many times—and it’s a lie that the filing will take just as long as if I do it on a regular basis). • Procrastination preserves the oddly narcissistic fantasy that we could do fabulous, rockstar, blow them out of the water, not a single critic level of work. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising—a lot of people who procrastinate don’t want to test whether they really are as promising as they’d like to believe; procrastination enables us to say, “Well, it would have been much better if I’d started earlier.” • It is also a way of managing the imposter syndrome—the notion that others have been fooled in their estimation of our ability; we fear that our best effort won’t match up to their expectations, so we never do our best effort. There’s a milder version of this—the final version of anything we write is never as smart, elegant, or effective as the one we imagine. So, procrastinating delays that “is this all there is” moment. • It can be the consequence of wishful thinking—that the task will magically go away, or one will get some kind of divine inspiration that makes it easier (this is also called “waiting for the grading fairy”). • It’s a project management strategy that saves the time of looking at the big picture of our responsibilities and lives; if you just deal with whatever is most urgent, and you let circumstances dictate that, then you can remain passive in regard to your own tasks, obligations, hopes, and calendar and some people are much more comfortable in that position—looking at the big picture can be too anxiety-provoking.

Much of the scholarship on procrastination involves what seems to me a circular definition of the term—procrastination is often defined as “imprudent delay, where one puts off until tomorrow what one admits would, everything considered, be better done today” (MacIntosh 69). Such a definition presumes precisely what is at stake—that the delay is imprudent—and doesn’t help one to recognize whether one’s procrastination is savvy time-management or irrational procrastination, since it presumes exactly the information one doesn’t have in the moment.

            Were the problem weakness of will, then strengthening one’s intention would solve the problem, but, at least in studies, procrastinators do not demonstrate weaker intentions than nonprocrastinators (for a review of this line of research, see Wieber and Gollwitzer 187). It seems to me that a more useful definition is to emphasize that today’s choice doesn’t look irrational in the moment, but would from a different perspective: it involves delaying an action that will lead to a long-term goal one genuinely (even passionately) wants, on the grounds that one more delay will not have a significant impact on the likelihood of achieving that long-term goal (see especially Andreou). And, as Andreou emphasizes, what makes procrastination so hard to stop in the moment is that this rationalization is, in fact, perfectly true. One can’t write an article in a day, but one might solve the photocopier crisis, or substantially improve one’s course materials, or write a report that will have significant impact on the department’s curriculum. It’s not uncommon for people who have trouble publishing to be in departments in which they are pressured by administrators to make that tradeoff (or to be in relationships in which their partner advocates that tradeoff); any single substitution of STR for LTR does not get one denied tenure, and neither one’s chair nor one’s partner wants one never to publish. In the moment, no one consciously wills failure at the long-term goal of publishing.[1]Thus, it seems to me that seeing procrastination of scholarship in favor of teaching, service, or family is not a weakness of will.

            If it is more usefully described as a miscalculation, and I think it is, then the question becomes how one calculates the tradeoff more accurately. There are two ways to frame the miscalculation. One is to say that no single choice is a bad one, but it is only cumulatively that there is damage, so the miscalculation is in the long series of choices. The other is to say that the choice always looks rational in the moment but only appears irrational in hindsight. The first way of framing the problem, while perfectly accurate, isn’t especially helpful. There is no magic number of times when the scale tips from rational to irrational (for more on this point, see especially Andreou); thus, it is difficult in the moment to persuade one’s self that one has put off scholarship as many times as is permitted, since, in fact, just one more time won’t hurt a significant amount.

            The second strategy may seem logically impossible—since one is always in the moment, by what other standard can one calculate the costs of this choice?—but it actually works. When I first started teaching, I had the bad habit of letting students talk me into delaying due dates on papers. They always had good reasons, and it was (and remains) true that they would write much better papers with another week to work on them. In the midst of the semester, I allowed the extensions, only to find myself and the students painfully trapped in a kind of logjam of assignments at the end of the semester. Since giving more time to one assignment necessarily meant there was less time for a later assignment, the students’ overall grades were no better, and we were all pretty miserable at the end. Yet, during more than one term, I gave the extensions because, during the semester, I was not (am not) good at thinking of the arc of the work as a whole; I can only think in terms of this week and next. Before the semester begins, I can think about all of the work and how to space it all out appropriately. Thus, I quickly (but not quickly enough) developed a rule that I never give an extension of more than one class meeting—it’s a rule I need for me, because of my tendency to miscalculate, and not because students are weak-willed.

            In essence, the syllabus gave me what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson call “scaffolding.” Many authors on procrastination advise some version of planning to create a new calculus; the basic notion is that one not try to make the calculations in the moment when one is trying to choose between a specific STR and scholarship. Instead, one tries to plan backwards from that moment when one might have the hindsight about how one should have spent one’s time. For graduate students, that is when they need to have filed their dissertations; for assistant professors, tenure; for associate professors, it’s the time when they want to be able to go up for promotion; for others (either people not on the tenure track or people who have the rank they want), it’s whenever they want to have the scholarship done. Then, one can estimate what that achievement looks like—how many chapters will the book (or dissertation) have? How many articles need to be done by that point? It’s relatively simple math at that point; to get X number of chapters/articles in Y number of years, how many does one have to do every year? As will be discussed, later, some people find it helpful to go from those larger timelines down to daily ones, at least for periods when one’s time needs to be relatively inflexible. Or, in Heath and Anderson’s terms, the amount of scaffolding one establishes for one’s self depends on personality, obligations, and time in the semester. Although I’ll talk more about time management strategies in the next section, here I will mention that managing one’s time is much like dieting: setting impossible goals—whether that one will never eat more than 1100 calories in a day or will work ten hour days seven days a week—just results in giving up and living on cookies and chips.

            All of this advice presumes that the issue is that one chooses not to engage in scholarship in specific moments because one miscalculates the costs (or, in George Ainslie’s terms, engages in “hyperbolic discounting”). Another possibility, however, is that one has a deep aversion to doing the scholarship. Presumably, the aversion is not to doing scholarship per se (or else one’s aversion might be an indication that being a scholar is not the best career choice) but to some aspect of your doing this scholarship. Burka and Yuen have what seems to me the best discussion of the various factors—ranging from fear of failure to fear of success—that might be operating at deep levels. While I think that Heath and Anderson’s criticism of that psychological approach has merit,[2] and their practical recommendations strike me as eminently sensible, I still strongly recommend Burka and Yuen’s book to people whose difficulty doing scholarship seems resistant to time management strategies.

            Sarah Stroud gives a hypothetical example of someone who keeps procrastinating applying for a grant:

Grant application season has rolled around once again. Amanda, who has in the past regularly failed to submit applications for research grants that many of her colleagues successfully obtain, feels that she really should apply for a grant this year. She prints out the information about what she would need to assemble and notes the main elements thereof (description of research program, CV, and so on) and—of course—the deadline for submission. She puts all of these materials in a freshly labeled file folder and places it at the top of the pile on her desk. But whenever she actually contemplates getting down to work on preparing the application—which she continues to think she should submit—her old anxieties about the adequacy of her research program and productivity flare up again, and she always find some reason to reject the idea of starting work on the grant submission process now (without adopting an alternative plan about when she will start). In the end the deadline passes without her having prepared the application, and once again Amanda has missed the chance to put in for a grant. (65)

I find this story heartbreaking, probably because the details are so perfectly apt. Of course she would neatly label the folder, and add it to a pile (I used to keep a section of my file cabinet labeled “Good Intentions”). And of course she needs to get “down” to work on the applications—why is it always “down”? When people are beating themselves up about not doing writing (or grading), they tell me, “I just need to sit down and do it” or “buckle down and do it” or variations on those themes. Why don’t people need to “sit up” and work on the project?

            There is no indication whether Amanda’s insecurities are justified, and that seems to me crucial to the example. If her work is not competitive, it would be irrational for her to apply; she shouldn’t have even wasted the paper she used to print up the applications. But if she really thought her research was that weak, she wouldn’t have bothered. Stroud presents this hypothetical example in service of argument about whether procrastination is an instance of akrasia (weakness of will) since it’s debatable whether Amanda ever actually formed the will to apply for the grant. And that seems to me a reasonable question: what does Amanda really want?

            If she wants to get grants and be a productive scholar, but she thinks there’s no point in applying because her research project isn’t competitive, then it might make sense for her to find out if that self-assessment is accurate. If it’s false, she should go ahead and apply for the grants; if it’s true, she should either improve this project or develop a new one. Her indecision about the grant, and the interrelated procrastination, isn’t an ethical failing, but indecision that results from lack of information. Getting that information is important, and that may be the part that she procrastinates (in the same way that many of us procrastinate going to the dentist for fear that we’ll have to have work done).

            Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson condemn many approaches to procrastination for being excessively “materialistic, individualistic, and voluntaristic” (see, for instance, 248). As they say, “traditional-time management advice has been mentalistic in assuming that solutions will come from individuals thinking more rationally about how best to achieve their goals” (248). While I think that rational assessment of one’s means and ends is helpful for time management, and I highly recommend Burka and Yuen (whose approach Heath and Anderson dismiss), I recognize not only the wisdom of Heath and Anderson’s recommendations, but the simple fact that their aversion is shared by others. Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin divide people into three types in regard to procrastination: time-consistent, sophisticated, and naïf. Since procrastination is generally defined as the practice of shifting one’s assessment of one’s actions over time (later one will think that one’s choices at a given time were poor), time-consistent people are ones who don’t engage in the “hyperbolic discounting” that typifies procrastination. What O’Donoghue and Rabin call “sophisticates” are people who have self-control problems (they will make decisions they will later see as having been hyperbolic discounting) and are aware of it. “Naifs” are people who procrastinate, but “are fully unaware of their self-control problems and therefore believe they will behave in the future exactly as they currently would like to behave in the future” (“Procrastination on long-term projects). That is, although they have procrastinated in the past, and may even be aware that this practice has caused them grief, they make decisions predicated on the assumption that they will not procrastinate in the future.

            In my experience, “naifs” are the most likely to get into and stay in a vicious cycle of procrastination. But because they won’t recognize that it is a problem, let alone one that is deeply entangled in their personality, they are deeply averse to the approach of Burka and Yuen (they won’t even finish the book, as far as I can tell). Instead, they sincerely believe that the problem is simply to will themselves out of procrastination, just to “sit their butts down and do the work.” The fact that this method has failed dozens of time in the past is not taken as a problem with the method, but with their willpower. O’Donoghue and Rabin conclude that naifs are more likely to incur the greatest costs from procrastination. They say:

The key intuition that drives many of our results is that a person is most prone to procrastinate on the highest-cost stage, and this intuition clearly generalizes. Hence, for many-stage projects, if the highest-cost stage comes first, naive people will either complete the project or never start, whereas if the highest-cost stage occurs later, they might start the project but never finish. Indeed, if the highest-cost stage comes last, naive people might complete every stage of a many-stage project except the last stage, and as a result may expend nearly all of the total cost required to complete the project without receiving benefits.

Because writing the dissertation, book, or article is the highest-cost stage in scholarship, naifs will procrastinate that part without being aware they will (thinking this time they can will themselves into doing the writing). There is, therefore, a tricky sell here for someone trying to work with such a person—suggesting that procrastination is a deeper issue is off the table, yet the procrastination is entangled in the very ways the person works.

            Part of the solution is for the person to change their work habits, and this is where Heath and Anderson’s argument is eminently sensible. They point out that people tend to procrastinate two kinds of tasks: ones that are boring, and ones with a distant payoff. For boring tasks, they recommend making them less boring—reframing it as a more interesting task (instead of seeing one self as “picking up crap around the house” you are “getting ready for friends to come over”), using the Mary Poppins strategy of finding the “element of fun” in every task, bundling distasteful tasks with more interesting ones, making the task mindless (by making it a habit instead of something one must choose to do), leveraging willpower in one area to gain it in another (something also recommended by Chrisoula Andreou), or “structured procrastination.”

            Andreou argues that people generally have strong willpower in some area; she describes how she used her strong willpower about spending money to strengthen her resolve to exercise. If she didn’t exercise, she didn’t get to go out to dinner on Friday. That example surprised me, as people have a tendency to try to gain willpower in one area by promising a reward from another area in which they have weak willpower—if I grade two papers I can eat a cookie. But, she is absolutely right; if I have trouble resisting cookies, I’ll eat it anyway, even if I only grade one paper. Similarly, she argues that one shouldn’t try to prevent procrastination through punishment that is more of the same—if I don’t exercise today, I will have to exercise twice as much tomorrow typically ends up with my needing to exercise for 72 hours straight.

            Structured procrastination involves tricking yourself into doing an unpleasant task by setting the goal of doing something much more unpleasant. While Heath and Anderson are persuasive that it could work for some people—you motivate yourself to do the dishes by setting the goal of cleaning the oven—it has never worked for me. I just end up with neither the dishes nor the oven cleaned.

            Heath and Anderson are more persuasive about the importance of external structures that help one avoid procrastination. “Triggers” are cues that set a process in motion or make it stop (245). Many things trigger procrastination—sitting down to the computer can trigger social networking, email, computer games; it’s harder to identify things that trigger doing one’s scholarship. But, combined with the notion of a habit, a trigger might work (such as people for whom closing the door and unplugging the phone are triggers to working). There are programs that limit access to social networking sites, and filters and timers that set time limits on browser programs or computer games.

            “Chutes” make it easy to slide into the right activity, such as by laying out ahead of time everything that one will need to get started. So, for instance, if one arranged one’s desk when leaving in the evening in such a way that starting with a particular piece of scholarship would be extremely easy—instead of Amanda putting her material in a file on her desk, she cleaned off of her desk everything except what was necessary for revising her CV, and left that out and open. “Ladders” make it harder to engage in the activities one uses for procrastination—putting away (or at least putting out of sight) the books and papers related to teaching (if that’s your procrastination apple), making it slightly harder to open distracting computer programs, and otherwise removing things that are distracting.

            Their best advice is “one way to avoid self-control failures of a particular sort is to avoid the company of those who suffer from such failures” (247). Or, in more positive form, to be productive, hang out with other people who are productive. That may seem simple, but it’s almost astonishing how easy it is to find academics who snipe about scholarship. It can wear on the soul. Get into a writing group, ideally with people in one’s field (that isn’t always possible, unless it’s a long-distance arrangement), and make sure there are beings in your life who like hearing about the progress of your work (it’s amazing how great dogs are for that purpose—cats won’t pay attention).

           

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[1] Someone might, of course, unconsciously will that failure—a topic described in more detail in Burka and Yuen. The problem of subtle forms of self-sabotage are considerable; even though better time management doesn’t solve those problems, my experience is that it makes them easier to explore.

[2] Heath and Anderson note that psychological and self-management strategies, when empirically tested, do not seem to be very effective. While I can imagine that would be true, it seems to me a flaw in the testing, and not necessarily in the methods themselves. That they are long-term solutions, and that even some form of counseling or therapy may be necessary, does not, to me, mean that they are ineffective. But they are slow. As with other kinds of personal change, there is no reason to think that short-term and long-term strategies are incompatible. If aversion to working is the consequence of deep psychological issues, then no amount of time management or external scaffolding is going to do much. But, simply sitting and working through one’s psychological problems does not get articles published.