Why we procrastinate (on job searching and other topics)

About 95% of people admit to procrastinating. If you're in the 5% that never puts anything off, we salute you. (And wonder about your sanity.)

Wonder why we do it? Piers Steel, a psychologist, analyzed hundreds of studies on procrastination and came up with an equation that tells us how likely we are to procrastinate. Are you ready for this? ... (Not yet? Ok, you can read this later.)

Here are his variables, paraphrased by me and loosely based on a summary article in Psychology Today's October 2009 issue:

E: (Your confidence that you will succeed at a given task- or your perceived efficacy)

V: (what you perceive to be the overall value of the task)

D: How long of a delay it will be until the reward comes

I: Your level of impulsiveness/ how easily distracted you are

The equation:

E (Effectiveness) * V (Value)
_____ (divided by) _______

D(Delay in Reward) * I (Impulsiveness)

I personally think that one variable that's missing is fun, or how enjoyable we find a certain task. I didn't sort through over 500 studies on this topic but I, for one, am DEFINITELY more likely to do things that have some kind of entertainment value.

How does this relate to the job search?

1) It's easy to get depressed in a search, and think that your efforts are not going to be effective. However, if you think of the task as one step in a marathon, not a sprint, you're more likely to see it as a necessary step in a longer process. For example, you'd reframe "If I apply to this job, it's going to be like all the others, no response back" into "If I apply to this job today, I can get my weekly inquiry count up and therefore improve my odds."

2) Piers found that the most influential variable here is impulsivity. If you're easily distracted, you'll have to set up some kind of situation where you limit the number of potential distractions. For example, if you conduct a job search from home but are always jumping up to pet the cat, or swing the tennis racket, or clean something... get out of the house and do the job search from some kind of wireless cafe or bookstore. Or, if you're always on email or the internet but need to work on your resume, close every other application other than word processing.

3) I'd also shorten the timeline for rewards so it feels like your payoff will be more immediate. Since you can't control what rewards you get from the job marketplace, and it may take a while to land an actual job, you may want to set rewards for yourself: if I create 10 LinkedIn invitations this week, I will go to the bookstore and check out the new book I've been wanting. Or, if I have three networking meetings this week I'll make myself a great breakfast on Sunday.


Any other ideas for how to overcome procrastination? Any good tools, tips, etc?


Kathy Robinson
Career Coach
www.turningpointboston.com