The Procrastination Equation (26 page)

⁶
Spencer, L. (1955). 10 problems that worry presidents. Harvard Business Review, 33, 75–83.

⁷
Steel, P. & König, C. J. (2006). Integrating theories of motivation. Academy of Management Review, 31, 889–913.

⁸
Lavoie, J. A. A., & Pychyl, T. A. (2001). Cyberslacking and the procrastination superhighway: A web-based survey of online procrastination, attitudes, and emotion. Social Science Computer Review, 19(4), 431–444.

Johnson, P. R., & Indvik, J. (2003). The organizational benefits of reducing cyberslacking in the workplace. Proceedings of the Academy of Organizational Culture, Communications and Conflict, 7(2), 53–59.

Malachowski, D. (2005). Wasted time at work costing companies billions. from http://salary.com

⁹
Villano, M. (September 30, 2007). It’s only a game, but it’s played at work. New York Times.

¹⁰
Lawler, R. (Monday, June 16, 2008). Cisco sees a zettaflood of IP traffic—driven by video. Contentinople, from http://www.contentinople.com/author.asp?section_id=450&doc_id=156555

¹¹
Stelter, B. (January 5, 2008). Noontime web video revitalizes lunch at desk. New York Times.

¹²
Kelly, E. P. (Spring, 2001). Electronic monitoring of employees in the workplace. National Forum. Retrieved from: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3651/is_200104/ai_n8939300

¹³
Ladurantaye, S. (April 2, 2008). Corporate crackdown targets employee surfing: Home e-mail accounts, instant messaging, gaming and video-watching websites . . . they're all on the hit list as employers increasingly restrict what content they permit employees to access. Globe & Mail.

¹⁴
This corporate “big brother” mentality can become incredibly annoying when you have a legitimate reason to access these sites. My colleague Allen Ponak is a professional labor arbitrator, whose job requires him to mediate a variety of union-management disputes, including when an employee is caught downloading porn to his computer. Part of his job—and I am led to believe he is paid for this—is to examine the content of these sites.

American Management Association (2005). Electronic monitoring & surveillance survey. New York: Author.

¹⁵
Levin, J. (May 14, 2008). Solitaire-y confinement: Why we can’t stop playing a computerized card game. Slate.

¹⁶
Phillips, J. G., & Reddie, L. (2007). Decisional style and self-reported Email use in the workplace. Computers in Human Behavior, 23(5), 2414–2428.

Song, M., Halsey, V., & Burress, T. (2007). The hamster revolution: How to manage your email before it manages you. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Thatcher, A., Wretschko, G., & Fridjhon, P. (2008). Online flow experiences, problematic Internet use and Internet procrastination. Computers in Human Behavior, 24, 2236–2254.

¹⁷
Iqbal, S. T., & Horvitz, E. (2007). Conversations amidst computing: A study of interruptions and recovery of task activity. Proceeds of User Modeling, 350–354.

¹⁸
Richtel, M. (June 14, 2008). Lost in E-mail, tech firms face self-made beast. New York Times.

¹⁹
Alboher, M. (June 10, 2008). Attention must be paid. New York Times.

²⁰
Monsell, S. (2003). Task switching. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 134–140.

Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., & Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763–797.

²¹
Akerlof, G., & Shiller, R. (2009). Animal spirits: How human psychology drives the economy, and why it matters for global capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

²²
Dunleavy, M. P. (December 2, 2006). Plan to retire but leave out Social Security. New York Times.

²³
As Avner Offer describes it, “the long-term pattern is that the overall capacity for saving has declined quite substantially since the 1960s, suggesting a declining capacity for prudence.”

Offer, A. (2006). The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950. New York: Oxford University Press.

Weber, E. (2004). Who’s afraid of a poor old-age? Risk perception in risk management decisions. In O. Mitchell & S. Utkus (Eds.), Pension design and structure: New lessons from behavioral finance (pp. 53–66). New York: Oxford University Press.

²⁴
Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies (2008). The attitudes of American workers and their employers regarding retirement security and benefits. Ninth Annual Transamerica Retirement Survey. Available at: http://www.transamericacenter.org/resources/Building-ConfidencePresentation%20TCRS%201002–0208.pdf

²⁵
Brooks, D. (2009). Usury country. Harper’s, 318 (1907), 41–48.

²⁶
Byrne, A., Blake, D., Cairns, A., & Dowd, K. (2006). There’s no time like the present: The cost of delaying retirement saving. Financial Services Review, 15(3), 213–231.

²⁷
Notably, the economist Matthew Rabin, one of the authors of Procrastination in Preparing for Retirement, has included himself among those who aren’t saving enough.

O'Donoghue, T., & Rabin, M. (1999). Procrastination in preparing for retirement. In H. J. Aaron (Ed.), Behavioral dimensions of retirement economics (pp. 125–156). New York: Brookings Institution Press.

Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies (2008). The attitudes of American workers and their employers regarding retirement security and benefits. Ninth Annual Transamerica Retirement Survey. Available at: http://www.transamericacenter.org/resources/Building-ConfidencePresentation%20TCRS%201002–0208.pdf

Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (December 2008). Pension Markets in Focus OECD Newsletter, 5, 1–20.

²⁸
Byrne, A., Blake, D., Cairns, A., & Dowd, K. (2006). There’s no time like the present: the cost of delaying retirement saving. Financial Services Review, 15(3), 213–231.

Hewitt Associates (July, 2008). Hewitt study reveals widening gap between retirement needs and employee saving behaviors. Retrieved: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080701005267&newsLang=enVenti, S. (2006). Choice, Behavior and Retirement Saving. In G. Clark, A. Munnell & M. Orszag (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Pensions and Retirement Income (Vol. 1, pp. 21–30). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

²⁹
O'Donoghue, T., & Rabin, M. (1999). Procrastination in preparing for retirement. In H. J. Aaron (Ed.), Behavioral dimensions of retirement economics (pp. 125–156). New York: Brookings Institution Press.

³⁰
Armour, P., & Daly, M. (2008). Retirement savings and decision errors: Lessons from behavioral economics. FRBSF Economic Letter, 16, 1–3.

Legorano, G. (2009). Automatic enrollment gains ground for DC plans. Global Pensions from http://www.globalpensions.com/global-pensions/news/1557589/automatic-enrollment-gains-ground-dc-plans

Mitchell, O., & Utkus, S. (2003). Lessons from behavioral finance for retirement plan design. The Wharton School: University of Pennsylvania.

Turner, J. (2006). Designing 401 (k) plans that encourage retirement savings: Lessons from behavioral finance. Benefits Quarterly, 22(4), 1–19.

³¹
Choi, J., Laibson, D., & Madrian, B. (2004). Plan design and 401 (k) savings outcomes. National Tax Journal, 57(2), 275–298.

³²
Thaler, R., & Benartzi, S. (2004). Save More Tomorrow(tm): Using behavioral economics to increase employee saving. Journal of Political Economy, 112(S1), 164–187.

³³
The debt ceiling was deemed “a meaningless strait jacket” by Robinson as early as 1959.

Austin, D. (2008). The debt limit: History and recent increases. Congressional Research Service.

Robinson, M. A. (1959). The national debt ceiling: An experiment in fiscal policy. Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institute.

³⁴
Critchfield, T. S., Haley, R., Sabo, B., Colbert, J., & Macropoulis, G. (2003). A half century of scalloping in the work habits of the United States Congress. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 36, 465–486.

Weisberg, P., & Waldrop, P. (1972). Fixed-interval work habits of Congress. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 5(1), 93–97. Also, special thanks to Tom Critchfield for personally providing me with the data.

³⁵
America’s history is particularly steeped in procrastination. During their civil war, procrastination by the General Longstreet cost the South the war when his delays prevented him securing the key positions of Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge during the Battle of Gettysburg. Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln struggled with the procrastination of General George Brinton McClellan, which ensured that the war dragged on three extra years. Regarding the procrastination that cost Colonel Rahl his life but in return put America a step closer to independence: there are a few words about this event by British ambassador Nolbert Quayle, “Only a few minutes' delay cost him [Colonel Rahl] his life, his honor, and the liberty of his soldiers. Earth’s history is strewn with the wrecks of half-finished plans and unexecuted resolutions. 'Tomorrow' is the excuse of the lazy and refuge of the incompetent.” Unfortunately for Quayle, the only record I could find of his existence is this quotation itself.

³⁶
The policy of appeasing Hitler is often characterized as delay that gave the Führer greater time to prepare for battle. Winston Churchill is best known for capturing this sentiment, saying three years prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences . . . We cannot avoid this period; we are in it now.” In the aftermath of the war, Dwight D. Eisenhower, former Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe and thirty-fourth president of the United States, found procrastination still undefeated. The Soviets were preparing themselves for a nuclear confrontation, with little being done to prevent it in Western Europe. Eisenhower’s key concern was that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was still just a paper invention, unfunded and militarily toothless. In a speech that Churchill considered to be the greatest he ever heard, at least by an American, we have Eisenhower saying: “The project faces the deadly danger of procrastination, timid measures, slow steps and cautious stages. Granted that the bars of tradition and habit are numerous and stout, the greatest bar to this, or any human enterprise, lie in the minds of men themselves. The negative is always the easy side, since it holds that nothing should be done. The negative is happy in lethargy, contemplating almost with complacent satisfaction, the difficulties of any other course.”

³⁷
Andreou, C. (2007). Environmental preservation and second-order procrastination. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 35(3), 233–248.

Caney, S. (2008). Climate change, human rights and intergenerational equity. Oxford: Magdalen College.

Hepburn, C. (2003). Hyperbolic discounting and resource collapse, Discussion-Paper No. 159. Department of Economics, University of Oxford.

Read, D. (2001). Intrapersonal dilemmas. Human Relations, 54(8), 1093–1117.

³⁸
Hurni, H., Herweg, K., Portner, B., & Liniger, H. (2008). Soil erosion and conservation in global agriculture. In A. Braimoh & P. L. G. Vlek (Eds.), Land Use and Soil Resources (pp. 41–72). New York: Springer.

Montgomery, D. (2007). Soil erosion and agricultural sustainability.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104
(33), 13268–13272.

Sample, I. (August 31, 2007). Global food crisis looms as climate change and population growth strip fertile land.
The Guardian
.

³⁹
Hightower, M. & Pierce, S. A. (2008) The energy challenge. Nature, 452, 285–286.

⁴⁰
Editorial. (March 9, 2008). Oceans at risk. New York Times.

Worm, B., Barbier, E., Beaumont, N., Duffy, J., Folke, C., Halpern, B., Jackson, J., Lotze, H., Micheli, F., & Palumbi, S. (2006). Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services. Science, 314, 787–790.

Simpson, J. (November 26, 2008). Fishing the fish stocks to extinction. Globe and Mail.

⁴¹
Lynas, M. (2007). Six degrees: Our future on a hotter planet. New York: HarperCollins.

Spratt, D., & Sutton, P. (2008). Climate Code Red: The case for emergency action. Melbourne: Scribe Publications.

⁴²
Bamberg, S. (2003). How does environmental concern influence specific environmentally related behaviors? A new answer to an old question. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23(1), 21–32.

Orr, D. W. (2004). The nature of design: Ecology, culture, and human intention. New York. Oxford University Press.

⁴³
Farrand, M. (Ed.) (1966). Records of the federal convention (Vol. 3). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

⁴⁴
Actually, drinking tea from a saucer only became a social faux pas after Washington’s and Jefferson’s time. Back then, it was quite fashionable to drink tea from a saucer, with accompanying “cup plates” to allow tea drinkers to park their mugs while saucer sipping. Frost, S. (1869). Frost’s laws and by-laws of American society. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald.

Titus, S. Tea: A Brief History. http://www.memorialhall.mass.edu/-classroom/curriculum_12th/unit3/lesson8/bkgdessay.html

⁴⁵
Cumming, L. (2008). To guide the human puppet: Behavioural economics, public policy and public service contracting: Serco Institute.

Chapter Seven

¹
Booth, D., & James, R. (2008). A literature review of self-efficacy and effective job search. Journal of Occupational Psychology, Employment and Disability, 10(1), 27–42.