Catching up at the procrastination forum
“I remember when I couldn’t get anyone to talk about procrastination. Look at us now.” JOSEPH FERRARI
CHICAGO— The shuttle driver got lost on the way to the 10th Procrastination Research Conference, threatening to derail the schedule. Still by 9:20 a.m., the 60 or so attendees had already completed check-in at DePaul University, welcome remarks and the first of dozens of presentations.
As they filed toward the coffee, their badges flashed their countries of origin — Germany, Turkey, Peru, India, Israel and Australia, among others.
“I remember when I couldn’t get anyone to talk about procrastination. Look at us now,” said Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul and this year’s conference chairperson, who has published four books on procrastination.
For the last 20 years, Ferrari and his colleagues have worked to create what attendees described as a muchneeded setting for sharing and debating their research, without being made fun of.
“I’ve never been in another conference where people didn’t laugh or snicker when I announced what the title of my talk was,” said Joel Anderson, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, one of a handful of philosophers who also do research in this niche field, dominated by psychologists and behavioural economists.
It is a conference built on the idea that precisely because procrastination is problematic for so many people, it is worthy of serious investigation.
Throughout the morning, Ferrari’s wife, Sharon, stood by the registration table, prepared to morph from greeter to guard if anyone tried to violate one of the meeting’s core rules: “There’s no day-of registration,” she said. Here is what we learned about who procrastinates, where they procrastinate and how to halt the loop of perpetual delay. The true procrastinators Part of the challenge of studying procrastination is defining it.
Joseph Ferrari, the conference organizer, defines procrastination as “the purposive and frequent delay in beginning or completing a task to the point of experiencing subjective discomfort, such as anxiety or regret.” His colleague Anderson says it is “culpably unwarranted delay.” At the simplest level, most researchers agree, you know it when you’re doing it.
One out of five people, researchers have found, fall into a category they call chronic procrastinators or procs (rhymes with crocs). The proc consistently procrastinates in multiple areas of his or her life — work, personal, financial, social — in ways that attendees describe as wreaking havoc, undermining goals and producing perpetual shame. Researchers have built scales to separate the true proc from the occasional procrastinator. They assess not simply how often, but also the severity of consequences with prompts like:
I delay making decisions until it’s too late.
I am continually saying, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Putting things off until the last minute has cost me in the past year.
It is more complicated than “if you do it X number of times a week you’re a proc.” But if you procrastinate “almost every day, at least half of the time you have work tasks,” that is a solid hint that you qualify, said Julia Elen Haferkamp, a psychologist at the University of Munster in Germany.
“When it’s really procrastination, it’s more like a psychological disease,” said her colleague Stephan Forster, also a psychologist at the University of Munster.
He, and others who treat procs, spoke of broken marriages, lost jobs, deflated dreams, financial disarray and selfesteem issues.
But if 20 per cent of the population procrastinates that much, is it definitely bad? One presenter, Jean O’Callaghan, a principal lecturer at the University of Roehampton in London, offered a more positive interpretation of this group, framing them as masters of idleness.
“Maybe cultures need to learn how to do time differently and we can learn from procrastinators,” said O’Callaghan, who was the chairperson of the 2005 conference. “To think out of the box about time and what it means to have a meaningful life? To have satisfaction? To have a sense of well-being? Or to produce a thousand articles?”
But Ferrari, who has published more research articles on procrastination than anyone else in psychology, does not agree that there is any upside to procrastination. (He has even published a few studies that work toward counteracting what he calls the “myth” that procrastinators perform better under last-minute pressure.) Stopping the cycle When Bill McCown, a research psychologist and associate dean at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, attended the first procrastination conference in 1997, there were some peculiar ideas floating around about procrastination.
“At the time, it’s just due to the American lifestyle and capitalism. That was one big one,” he recalled.
The presentations at the conference showed that the field has come a long way, but there was plenty of work to be done.
Asked to summarize their advice to the procs of the world, most attendees of- fered a version of the following: Accept that changing will require learning to manage your thoughts and emotions more than figuring out how to manage your time. If it is a severe problem, consider working with a professional who understands procrastination. And for those who have ADHD, the cycle of procrastination may operate differently than for those who do not. But what does the research say? “Mostly that we need more consistent research,” said Wendelien Van Eerde, a professor at the faculty of economics and business at the University of Amsterdam, and a co-author of a meta-analysis of studies on interventions for procrastination.
Pushed further on what seemed to work best from the 16 of 989 studies that she felt comfortable comparing with one another, she offered, “CBT mostly,” referring to cognitive behavioural therapy, which focuses on changing thought patterns, “followed by time management to some degree.”
And though most attendees at the conference said that they were convinced that chronic procrastination was curable, they also acknowledged that the evidence to back up that claim was not yet there. Not all delay is procrastination The conference ends the same way every two years: Researchers select the location for the next gathering.
At first, it seemed that this year’s decision would be a breeze. There were offers to host from Israel, Turkey and Britain.
But wait, some crucial people were missing. Maybe it would be better to figure it out over email? The room grew tense. Someone suggested a “steering committee.” Another advocated for a “neutral third party.”
The shuttles were waiting. No consensus emerged. Just this once, it would have to wait.
“Oh, that’s not procrastination,” Ferrari said later. Based on his scientific definition, it counted only as “delay.”