Do you have high standards? Do you expect a lot from yourself, day-in and day-out? Do you love it when life is organized and orderly? Do you try to do your best at everything you do? There is a word for people like you: perfectionists. You worry over life’s details, anxious to make every event just so. And you might like to know that some believe that your perfectionism is the root cause of procrastination.

But does perfectionism really cause procrastination? Lots of people think so. It’s a neat theory you’ll often hear repeated around the water cooler. There’s just one problem with it: it’s wrong. Research shows that perfectionists actually procrastinate less than other people, not more.

According to the myth, procrastination is caused by anxiety in one of its myriad forms. Sigmund Freud, for example, thought it was due to death anxiety-we delay because we live in fear of life’s ultimate deadline. In particular, the anxiety produced by perfectionists supposedly induces procrastination. We delay because of our fear of failure, anxious about living up to sky-high standards. Shame on your aspirations to do better!

So how did anxiety and procrastination get all mixed up together? There is a relationship, just not the one you hear about. Most people are indeed apprehensive as the deadline looms, especially if they haven’t left themselves enough time. People can almost become paralyzed over the work they left themselves for tomorrow, knowing that they should act but remaining immobile with anxiety. But this is an expression of having procrastinated, not a cause of procrastination. For anxiety to cause procrastination the two have to be connected, that is, anxiety-prone people have to put things off more than others. But according to analysis of about a hundred studies involving tens of thousands of participants, anxiety produces a negligible amount of procrastination at best-and even that tiny amount disappears completely after you take into account other personality characteristics, especially impulsiveness.

As best as we can figure, task anxiety will just as likely get you to start early as to start late. That is, worrying about a deadline will make you procrastinate more if you are impulsive, the sort of person to whom avoiding a dreaded task or blocking it from your awareness makes perfect sense from a short-term perspective. If you aren’t impulsive, anxiety is a cue that you should get cracking-and, as a result, you actually start earlier. The real culprit is impulsiveness, not anxiety. (But you can’t be expected to discern this effect through personal reflection; relying only on your own experiences, you will never know that anxiety decreases procrastination for many others.)

The myth that perfectionism creates procrastination makes even less sense. What traits do you associate with procrastination? A) Being messy and disorganized or B) Being neat and orderly? If you choose option A, good for you; you are right. Perfectionists best fit description B, being neat and orderly, and unsurprisingly, they don’t tend to procrastinate. The research-from Robert Slaney, who developed the Almost Perfect Scale to measure perfectionism, to my own meta-analytical research article, The Nature of Procrastination- shows this clearly.

For example, there is a recent article by Dr. Caplan from Anadolu University entitled: “Relationship among Perfectionism, Academic Procrastination and Life Satisfaction of University Students.” Dr. Caplan takes a fine-grained approach to studying perfectionism, breaking perfectionists down into three strains: other-oriented, socially prescribed, and self-oriented. Only the last of these, self-oriented perfectionism, includes the features we typically associate with perfectionism, i.e., having high personal standards and being rather critical if you don’t meet them.

Dr. Caplan reconfirmed what has been found many times before, that “Other-oriented and socially-prescribed perfectionism traits did not predict academic procrastination” and “self-oriented perfectionism and academic procrastination are negatively correlated,” that is, an increase in one is associated with a reduction in the other. In short, perfectionists tend to procrastinate the same or less than other people, not more. Of course, there are still some people who are both procrastinators and perfectionists, but not as many as there are procrastinators who are non-perfectionists (or perhaps, imperfectionists?). Odds are, you don’t even believe that perfectionism causes dilly-dallying yourself. Across several surveys, only 7 percent of procrastinators blamed their sloppy habits on perfectionism.

So how did this myth come about? Why did we ever think the two traits were connected? The December 24th issue of the Globe & Mail provides a relevant excerpt from my book, The Procrastination Equation. Here’s a summary.

The confusion comes from an unexpected source. As noted above, procrastinators themselves do not blame their delaying on perfectionism; instead, this misinformation comes from clinicians and counselors. Perfectionists who procrastinate are more likely to seek help from such professionals, creating a self-selection phenomenon that gives the illusion that the two traits are linked. Clinicians tend to see a lot of perfectionist procrastinators because non-perfectionist procrastinators (and, for that matter, non-procrastinating perfectionists) are less likely to seek professional help. You see, perfectionists are more motivated to do something about their dilly-dallying because, by their very nature, they are more likely to feel worse about putting things off. Consequently, it is not perfectionism per se that is the problem but the discrepancy between high standards and less-than-stellar performance.

Since diagnosis typically precedes treatment, understanding the real reasons behind procrastination is critical to stopping it. If we feel certain that perfectionism causes procrastination, then our cures will confidently head off in the wrong direction. This isn’t to say perfectionism and fear of failure aren’t important in their own right-each has the potential to become crippling. It is just that they aren’t important here, with regards to procrastination. But we do know what is.

The research shows that there are three major, empirically confirmed, causes of procrastination: expectancy, value and impulsiveness. I will tackle each one individually in the upcoming weeks. During the meanwhile, I want to hear from the perfectionists out there and how much you procrastinate. You can take this short quiz on Facebook to measure your level of procrastination. Are you a garden variety dilly-dallier or do you have “tomorrow” tattooed across your back? I’m interested to know which group is the most vocal-the perfectionists who procrastinate or the ones that don’t procrastinate much at all.

So you haven’t done your Christmas shopping? I know, I know you were full of good intentions but time got away from you. Really, I understand. There wasn’t any good time to shop before now. Errands had to be done, work was demanding, and after it all, you were feeling justifiably tired. You needed to get home and have that glass of rum and eggnog. And who among us likes dealing with the Christmas line ups?

Problem is, while there wasn’t any good time to Christmas shop before, it is worse now. The length of that cashier line at Costco has gone way past amazing and has reached into insane. Fortunately, procrastination is easy to disguise. As a researcher of procrastination, I know that it is hard to be sure when exactly delay becomes procrastination. Let’s put this scientific knowledge to your good use. Here are three havens that will hide your dilly-dallying ways.

First, you exploit the thin line between “couldn’t” and “wouldn’t.” Yes, it was difficult to shop before, but you need to amp it up into impossible. It is only procrastination if you voluntarily put it off. Start laying down a cover story of being overseas, a paralytic fever, or 100 hour work weeks. Given the circumstances, you simply couldn’t get to the store. Unfortunately, if it is your spouse that you are trying to fool, the one who saw you catching all the Christmas specials on TV this week, I think we better move on to your next option.

Your second line of defence is to claim “Gee whiz, who knew?” Procrastination is about expecting to be worse off for your delays. If it couldn’t have been anticipated, then you can’t be blamed. To use your inability to effectively forecast the future as an excuse, you have to think like a lawyer. Did you know that you were going to have so little free time? Did you expect the stores to be so busy? If the answer to either of these questions is plausibly “no, not me,” I think you have a cover story. At this point, your best bet is to maintain that a last minute emergency claimed the exact time you had set aside for shopping. Who knows? It might even be true.

Your final and somewhat desperate option is to portray your procrastination inactions as self-serving and purposeful. It is only procrastination if putting off was against your own best interest and nobody can truly know that but you. You start by saying that Christmas has become too materialistic and you aren’t feeding into the commercialism. We really should cut back on the expenses anyway and besides, it is about being with family, or at least watching TV while they are in a nearby room.

If this all sounds more difficult than actually having done your Christmas shopping in the first place, that’s the nature of procrastination. As Rita Emmett said “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.” So here’s what you are going to do with less than a day to spare. Go online. Order your gifts and print out pictures of them. Put the pictures in cards under the tree. On Christmas day, tell everyone that their presents were delayed due to shipping problems, but they will arrive soon. It will work, trust me.

PS. Have you put off your Christmas shopping this year? How late did you leave it and why?

Is procrastination a good thing?

I just finished doing a TV interview on Al Jazeera’s the Riz Khan show, and that was one of the questions I and co-panelist Professor George Ainslie were asked. Dr. Ainslie’s 1992 book, Picoeconomics,, essentially kick started both the behavioral revolution that is presently happening in economics as well as my own research into procrastination. When I discovered the book in the late 1990s, I read it cover-to-cover – twice. It ultimately helped inspire my own book.

The show has a very international crowd and there were several big questions, including “Is procrastination cultural” and “What are the public policy implications?” I will tackle these latter two in later posts as they each deserves exclusive focus. (Which begs the question: by putting off everything else until later, am I now procrastinating? Answers and comments below, please?)

Dr. Samuel Johnson, who wrote the first comprehensive English dictionary, had procrastination defined as “delay” and some still maintain this definition. The Free Dictionary, for instance, maintains it is “slowness as a consequence of not getting around to it.”

However, if procrastination means simply delay, then we should be comfortable placing it along with the similar concepts of scheduling or prioritizing. But we aren’t. Consider the following two examples.

• Imagine you are a surgeon and about to put a patient under general anaesthetic. If you find out that he or she if you just ate at a buffet and went back for seconds, you should hold off on the operation. There is a real risk unconscious patients could empty their stomachs directly into their lungs, where the digestive juices start to dissolve more than their last meal.
• Or imagine you are vacationing in the Caribbean and have scheduled some sport fishing when a category five hurricane blows in. With winds in excess of 155 miles or 250 kilometres per hour and waves ten stories high, a category five is two full notches above hurricane Katrina when it devastated New Orleans. So you put your plans aside for a day or two.

Both of these examples have elements of delay, but would you characterize either of these delays that avoid dissolving or drowning as dilly-dallying? Likely not. Implicitly, like the Grinch regarding Christmas, we understand that maybe procrastination … perhaps … means a little bit more.

My fellow procrastination researcher (and uniquely accomplished dogsledder) Timothy Pychyl points out that “all procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination.” Procrastination is a very special type of postponement; unlike the delays in the examples above, procrastination is irrational. This important distinction is increasingly recognized. The American Heritage Dictionary, for example, defines procrastination as “To put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness,” while Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary calls it “To put off intentionally the doing of something that should be done.”

But it is the Oxford English Dictionary that gets closest to the irrational dark heart of the word. It defines procrastination as a postponement, “often with the sense of deferring though indecision, when early action would have been preferable,” or as “defer[ing] action, especially without good reason.”

Which is surely what Dr. Johnson meant, despite his original one-word definition. He later described procrastination as “one of the general weaknesses, which, in spite of the instruction of moralists, and the remonstrances of reason, prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind.”

(And Dr. Johnson knew of what he spoke; the good doctor put off writing his article condemning procrastination until the last possible moment, composing it in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ parlor while the errand boy waited outside to bring it to press. It appeared in the weekly periodical The Rambler in 1751.)

So is procrastination a good thing? Only by accident. If you put off something purposefully because you think it’s a good idea to delay, you’re not procrastinating. You’re scheduling or prioritizing, sometimes just to feel the motivational thrill of doing it all at the last moment. Procrastination is when you planned or felt that you should have done the thing earlier, and then delayed anyway. In short, it is putting off despite expecting to be worse off.

Now the world doesn’t always unfold according to our expectations, and sometimes Lady Luck steps in and we find that the task we have been putting off didn’t need to get done after all — a truly happy moment, like when a project gets cancelled and it turns out the boss doesn’t need that report you never got around to writing in the first place. This is “beneficial procrastination.” But because it only happens when the world operates against your own expectations, on average, procrastination is only a good strategy for the clinically insane or the perpetually deluded. The way the world is and the way you believe it to be have to be at odds. Otherwise, you are just getting lucky occasionally by procrastinating. It’s like going to Las Vegas and spinning the roulette wheel — once in a while you’ll win, but most of the time you won’t.

Still, a lot of people continue to misuse the word “procrastination” to describe useful delays, when there are plenty of other words that describe these delays better (e.g., “prudence”). And people misuse lots of other words, like “irony.” For example, in the cartoon Futurama’s Emmy- and Annie-nominated episode “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings” (which in itself is a reference to procrastination), the Robot Bender corrects everyone’s use of the word “ironic”. Whether you want to use the word “procrastination” correctly is up to you. But I do ask you this.

If you hear the munching of cookies and glugging of milk in your living room on Christmas Eve, and, after a brave decision to investigate, find a chubby and jolly old elf who has waited 365 days to deliver a sack full of brightly wrapped presents, thank him for his timeliness. He could have come earlier, but please don’t characterize his choice to delay his Yuletide travels as procrastination.