Procrastination at its Best - SIOP

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package that won the award. ... to package psychological science in a way .... analysis. Personality and Individual Diff
Procrastination at its Best Piers Steel University of Calgary The Cannes Creativity Festival is the “Oscars” of creative communications. Each year, over 12,000 people from 94 countries come to celebrate and compete for the titles of best and most provocative media entries. In 2013, Droga5, one of the world’s top three advertising agencies, brought back the Titanium Lion award for best integrative piece. This is the story of how procrastination and I-O psychology became a key part of the package that won the award. You can see Droga5’s award winning campaign for Prudential at Bring Your Challenges, with your guide Professor Dan Gilbert of Harvard (of the internationally bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness fame). Applying elements of behavioral economics and psychology, they help people overcome the problems with planning for their financial future. Yours truly, Dr. Piers Steel, makes an entrance in Challenge 2, “I’ll do it later.” Yes, that’s my area of expertise, procrastination, evinced by the Psychological Bulletin article, “The Nature of Procrastination” (Steel, 2007), winner of APA’s George A. Miller award, and then later the popular nonfiction book The Procrastination Equation (Steel, 2010). For the latter of these, I did my best to package psychological science in a way that is attractive to the everyday audience. Details regarding my work are available on my website, http://procrastinus.com/.

The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist

Droga5 wanted two pieces. First, design an evocative way to show productive procrastination. Productive procrastination is where you put off until later with the goal of getting more done, which technically isn’t procrastination (i.e., which is an irrational delay), but it’s a common term and we are going to go with it. Here, I get to be featured in a video, which we filmed in New Jersey: Episode Two: Your Brain Is to Blame. If you watch it, you will see a classic ego depletion study (e.g., Hagger, Wood, Stiff, & Chatzisarantis, 2010). The design behind it is reviewed in this SIOP article by Clif Boutelle. Basically, we had 24 people do excruciatingly boring tasks (e.g., count all the es in a postmodernist essay). We then divided them into two groups; half had to continue working while we allowed half to recharge in various ways. Some got to rest, some got to web surf, some got to play with puppies. Of note, the puppy room was the big hit and half the film crew played with them after the experiment was over, including myself. My own university has one now. The experiment worked! It was a very near thing. My statistical power analyses indicated that we should have about double the sample size at least to be dependable, but production costs had the final say. When only a third of the ego depletion group decided to put off, I was euphemistically nervous, as was everyone else. We didn’t know what the recharged group would do, but they all chose to stay and work. The piece worked (yah science!). 107

We drove back to Manhattan; I had way, way too many Manhattans to celebrate; and my flight back home early (so terribly, terribly early) the next day was a harsh reminder that I’m no longer in my 20s. The other piece was a measure of procrastination, which should have been easy because I had already two published measures. Putting the “create” back into creative, what Droga5 really wanted was something else, a typology of procrastination, as in “What kind of procrastinator are you?” This I didn’t have. Step 1 was to see what everyone else did. This is where my recent review of procrastination (i.e., that Psychological Bulletin article) comes in handy. There were a dozen pieces pointing to different types of procrastination, such as McCown, Johnson, and Petzel’s (1989) “Procrastination, a Principal Components Analysis” and Gueorguieva’s (2011) PhD dissertation, “Procrastination a Measurement of Types.” Though no single study covers them all, at least two suggested at least one of the following six types: People Pleaser (agrees to untenable tasks to avoid confrontation), The Worrier (puts off tasks due to anxiety), The Unmotivated (simply lacks motivation to move forward), The Big Dreamer (puts off tasks as soon as they become boring), The Buzzer Breaker (who puts off tasks strategically to maximize performance), and The Distracted (who is constantly interrupted at work). I put together descriptions and sample items and thought I was about done. The next steps should have been a tried-and-true standard test development process. Again, this wasn’t what Droga5 wanted as a survey because it wasn’t the creative work that’s going to win awards. 108

Going back to the drawing board, there are parallels between the tree-like dendrograms generated by typology analyses and ipsative test development (where people have to make a choice between two alternatives). Ipsative questions can consequently act like gates at each split of the dendogram tree and, on the basis of this insight, I developed the mockup in Figure 1. The person starts along a path and the questions they take depend on the answers before. We used this as a prototype for the final version, which you can find at http://www.bringyourchallenges.com/ill-do-it-later#procrastinator. The part of putting the test questions into the narrative, “A Day in the Life of a Procrastinator,” was from the people at Droga5, which is charming and brilliant. The questions are organized around choice points that a person might experience as they make their way through a typical day. Of note, if you take a close look at the nightstand in the opening question, you’ll see a copy of my book The Procrastination Equation, a nice plug courtesy of Droga5. Working with a world-class creative team is challenging, inspiring, and makes you really want to bring your best, to represent. It also opens the possibility of what assessment can be, beyond a series of survey items, all answered on a 1 to 5 scale. By adding an artistic element to the personality assessment, the very act of taking a test can be itself entertaining, aside from the results themselves. Indeed, our science can be made into art. One day, this needs to written up for a scholarly journal to compare the results from a standard survey or vanilla test to this one with flair. But, as you might have guessed, I’ve been putting it off. April 2015, Volume 52, Number 4

References Gueorguieva, J. M. (2011). Procrastination a measurement of types. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago. Hagger, M. S., Wood, C., Stiff, C., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. (2010). Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(4), 495-525. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist

McCown, W., Johnson, J., & Petzel, T. (1989). Procrastination, a principal components analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 10(2), 197-202. Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65-94. Steel, P. (2010). The procrastination equation. New York: Harper-Collins. 109

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April 2015, Volume 52, Number 4