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Inside the Intuitive System: Why We Procrastinate

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OK, enough procrastinating ... on to today's topic:


I wrote my dissertation on procrastination (yes, I got it done on time). In that study we worked with college students who identified themselves as procrastinators in doing their schoolwork. Procrastinators are an interesting example of the intention-behavior gap: They experience negative consequences like bad grades as a result of their own behavior, they are well aware that their own behavior is getting in their way, and yet they continue to waste time instead of studying. Many people become quite frustrated with themselves as a result.

One theory for why people procrastinate is that we have difficulty making distinctions between behaviors that are urgent and those that are important. An important item is one that has meaningful consequences for the future based on whether it gets done or how well it is done. For an academic like me, what’s most important is making progress on research projects. They lead to publications, new grant opportunities, and positive evaluations of my work by my peers. An urgent item, by contrast, is one that feels like it has to be done soon, whether or not it is actually important. In my daily life, meetings, phone calls, and emails are tasks that can seem urgent: A person wants to speak with me, or is expecting me to show up. The actual content of that conversation or meeting, however, may get me exactly nowhere in terms of the jobs that will actually have been important a month or a year from now.

The Intuitive System reacts strongly to a sense of urgency. That is, things that seem time-limited, that involve another person, or that provoke a strong emotion get prioritized by the Intuitive System. Some of my work responsibilities are genuinely urgent; others are not. But as the cartoon above suggests, I don’t actually get any better at sorting the important from the non-important as the number of tasks increases; instead, I actually seem to get worse at prioritizing, and spend more time on little tasks that don’t matter as much. A sense of urgency can also explain common time-wasting behaviors like surfing the Internet: There are little icons on my phone that tell me to check an app for a new message, or I wonder what news has happened while I was trying to write a paper, or I feel a need for connection with my friends and family after sitting at my computer for so long. These are all cues or social reinforcers that give the Intuitive System a sense of urgency — one that my long-delayed manuscript can’t hope to match. And completing little tasks often provides the Intuitive System with a surge of dopamine, which is reinforcing and serves to maintain the behavior. The most important tasks tend to be larger and slower by contrast, providing fewer opportunities for reward.

Fortunately for my efforts to write, the Narrative System is better at identifying importance. My long-term incentives align most strongly with getting research papers published in high-quality journals, and my Narrative System readily provides me with a story about the consequences of neglecting those incentives (its title is “publish or perish”). In fact, says my Narrative System, the optimal strategy for me to succeed in my work is to ignore as many emails and skip as many meetings as I can get away with, but not so many that I alienate my colleagues. In fact (goes the Narrative), the most rational course of action might be to show up for work only every few days and spend the rest of my time writing. In economists' language, the Narrative System is able to visualize the needs of my "future self," which does not yet exist but will by the time my next annual review comes around.

Neither the Narrative nor the Intuitive response is completely helpful in this case, but the Narrative System's priorities in this case are the ones that I would like to follow. Unfortunately, Two Minds Theory suggests that the Narrative System has no direct control over my behavior! From this we can devise a series of little strategies well-known to those who procrastinate, things like breaking large tasks into smaller ones and building in breaks or other rewards. The Intuitive System, which does control my behavior, likes those things. With the Narrative of publish-or-perish in mind, I can devise ways to trick or train my Intuitive System to accomplish the goals that I would like to achieve. Now I think it's time to stop procrastinating with this blog-writing and get back to my manuscript!

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