Procrastination...My own personal demon

I found this the other day and have seen Piers talk at numerous conferences (he is a meta-analytic genius!!!)

CNN News reports:

After 10 years of research on a project that was supposed to take only five years, a Canadian industrial psychologist found in a giant study that not only is procrastination on the rise, it makes people poorer, fatter and unhappier.Something has to be done about it, sooner rather than later, University of Calgary professor Piers Steel concludes. His 30-page study is in this month’s peer-reviewed Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association.

In 1978, only about 5 percent of the American public thought of themselves as chronic procrastinators. Now it’s 26 percent, Steel said. Men are worse than women (about 54 out of 100 chronic procrastinators are men) and the young are more like to procrastinate than the old. Chronic procrastination also affects productivity in the workplace. As to why people procrastinate, Steel thinks it is due to the various distractions of modern living, like cell phones, iPods, video games and the Internet.

Studying procrastination as a field has a benefit, said the professor. The more he knows about the problem and the causes, the less he procrastinates — even though he sheepishly acknowledges his study was completed five years late. The good thing about studying procrastination, he said: “If you take a day off from it, you can always say it’s field research.”


Check it out at: http://www.procrastinus.com/