Willpower

situations. This explanation jibed with the conclusion of another study, by Dutch researchers working with Baumeister, showing that people with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work. The results of these habits and routines were demonstrated in yet another recent set of studies, in the United States, showing that people with high self-control consistently report less stress in their lives. They use their self-control not to get through crises but to avoid them. They give themselves enough time to finish a project; they take the car to the shop before it breaks down; they stay away from all-you-can-eat buffets. They play offense instead of defense.
    In this closing chapter we’ll review the strategy for going on offense, starting with one of the most obvious yet widely ignored rules: Don’t keep putting it off. Procrastination is an almost universal vice. Cicero called procrastinators “hateful”; Jonathan Edwards preached an entire sermon against the “sin and folly of depending on future time.” In modern surveys, 95 percent of people admit to doing it at least sometimes (we have no idea who those other 5 percent are—or whom they’re trying to kid), and the problem seems to get worse as societies modernize and temptations multiply. The psychologist Piers Steel, who has analyzed data from around the world over the past four decades, reports that there’s been a sharp increase in the ranks of dedicated ditherers—those who consider procrastination to be a defining personal characteristic. That category today includes more than 20 percent of the people surveyed internationally. In some American surveys, more than half the people consider themselves chronic procrastinators, and workers themselves estimate that they waste a quarter of their hours on the job—two hours per workday. At the typical wage, that means that each employee is being paid about $10,000 annually for time spent slacking off.
    This vice has often been blamed, by psychologists as well as ditherers, on people’s compulsion to do things perfectly. Supposedly these perfectionists are flooded with worry and anxiety whenever they try to start a project because they see it’s not living up to their ideals, so they get bogged down or just stop working. This makes sense in theory, and doubtless it’s true in some cases, but researchers have repeatedly failed to find a reliable link between procrastination and perfectionism. One reason psychologists were initially fooled into seeing a link might have been selection bias: A procrastinator with high standards would be likelier than a less ambitious ditherer to seek help for the problem, so perfectionists would show up more often in the offices of psychologists treating procrastinators. But there are plenty of other people with high standards who don’t procrastinate and do perfectly good work without pulling all-nighters.
    The trait that does seem to matter is impulsiveness, which shows up over and over in studies of procrastinators. This connection helps explain recent evidence that procrastination is more of a problem for men than it is for women, and especially for young men: Men have more hard-to-control impulses. When procrastinators are feeling anxious about a difficult job, or just bored by a mundane chore, they give in to the urge to improve their mood by doing something else. They go for the immediate reward, playing a video game instead of cleaning the kitchen or writing a term paper, and they try to ignore the long-term consequences. When thoughts of future deadlines intrude, they may even try telling themselves that it’s smart to wait until the last minute: I work best under deadline pressure! But mostly they’re kidding themselves, as Baumeister and Dianne Tice discovered.

The Deadline Test
    The procrastination experiment took place in a wonderfully targetrich environment: a university campus. College students typically admit to spending a third of their waking hours procrastinating, and who knows how much more time is actually being wasted. Tice, who taught a course in health psychology at Case Western University, identified the procrastinators in her class through a couple of means. First, at the start of the term, she had the students fill out a questionnaire about their work habits. Then she assigned a paper due on a Friday late in the term. Tice also announced that students who