The Procrastination Equation (6 page)

BIRD BRAINS

Animals might be our fellow procrastinators. After all, we share many other “human” personality traits with dozens of other species, from rhesus monkeys to octopi. Wild great tits, for example, exhibit varying degrees of aggressiveness and risk taking, traits that enable greater environmental exploration.
^3a
The bolder birds expose themselves to more danger but also reap the gains of better nesting places, food sources, and choice of mates.
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For another example, just ask any dog or cat owner if their pets have a unique personality; the owners will rightly insist that their furry friends differ in terms of affection, anxiousness, aggressiveness, and curiosity.
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Significantly, this list of shared traits includes impulsiveness, the cornerstone of procrastination.
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But this doesn’t necessarily translate into procrastination itself.

Whether they are meowing, barking, or chirping, animals are clearly limbic-heavy in their decision making. But that’s only half the story. You need some prefrontal cortex or its equivalent to procrastinate, for without it you can’t make plans that you later irrationally put off. Do animals have this mental capacity? Apparently some do, showing the ability to anticipate and plan for the future, especially regarding food.
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Scrub jays can anticipate being denied breakfast tomorrow and will cache food to snack on later. Rats seem to have some sense of time, being able to recall where and when feeding events occur.
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Chimpanzees can wait up to eight minutes to exchange a small cookie for a large one, showing slightly more patience than a young human child.
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Male chimps will invest in future mating opportunities by sharing meat with a female, with the hope of being favored when she comes into heat.
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Also, consider Santino, a particularly farsighted chimpanzee from the Swedish Furuvik Zoo. He will spend his morning collecting stones to hurl at annoying zoo visitors in the afternoon.
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In combination with impulsiveness, all the pieces for procrastination are there: animals can make plans for the future and, what’s more, they can impulsively put them off, despite expecting to be worse off for it.

James Mazur, a Harvard-trained psychologist, has directly demonstrated procrastination in animals. He trained pigeons to two different work schedules and then gave them a choice of which to pursue. Both schedules delivered a tasty treat at the same time, but the first started with a little work followed by a long delay, while the second started with the long delay and ended with
a lot
more work, up to four times as much. Essentially, the birds had to choose between doing a little hard work now (followed by rest and recreation) and taking it easy immediately (followed by a lot of hard work). The pigeons proved to be procrastinators, putting off their work despite having to do more of it to obtain their reward in the end.
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Like a twisted version of a Cole Porter song, birds delay doing it and even chimpanzees in the zoo delay doing it. Since most animals, including pigeons, have the capacity for procrastination, procrastination is pretty well confirmed as a fundamental part of our motivational firmament.
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The last time we all went to the same family reunion was over 286 million years ago during the Carboniferous period, before the time of the dinosaur.

Inevitably, then, having an animal as a pet is largely an exercise in dealing with this limbic-heavy decision making. Dogs, for example, naturally act in the moment and grab food that isn’t theirs, chase stray animals across busy streets, and bark or whimper incessantly by the door waiting for you to open it. It would be easier in the short run to let the dog be, but patience and long-range thinking on our part can make all the difference for a life with any four-legged friend. This is what expert dog trainers stress, like Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, or Andrea Arden, author of
Dog-Friendly Dog Training:
the primary responsibility of an owner is “to convince your dog that waiting for something—which is typically not a natural instinct for dogs—is the best option.”
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The big trick is convincing owners to do this in the first place. Teaching impulse control uses a lot of our prefrontal cortex, a resource we often don’t have a surplus of to begin with.

EVOLUTIONARY PROCRASTINATION

By all appearances, from the evidence of brain science to animal studies, the capacity to procrastinate is engrained in us. It’s even in our genetic code: several studies indicate that about half of most people’s lack of self-discipline has a genetic origin.
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This makes sense, given that DNA allows adaptive genetic mutations to be passed down through subsequent generations, a process known as “descent with modification.” Without a genetic component, the ability to procrastinate couldn’t easily be passed on.

We evolved to be procrastinators, but why? Procrastination is an irrational delay, whereby we voluntarily put off tasks until later despite expecting to be worse off for the decision. By definition, procrastination is harmful and should have been culled long ago from our gene pool rather than filling it to the brim. Are we the butt of some cosmic joke? Maybe. But there is another possibility to consider. Some traits occur as by-products of other once-more-adaptive processes. For example, belly buttons are a by-product of being born, and though they can be pretty, they don’t have any pressing purpose in themselves. Since procrastinators are above all else impulsive, the evolutionary explanation for impulsiveness is the one to focus on. Procrastination is a by-product.
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Essentially, impulsiveness is about living for the moment. Long-term desires and tomorrow’s deadlines are ignored until they become imminent—until the future becomes the now. Though today impulsiveness isn’t usually a helpful trait, evolution operates through hindsight; that is, it custom fits us to the environment we
were
in, with no anticipation or prediction. This is known as
ecological rationality,
in that what is rational depends upon the environment you operate in. It is like getting a tailored suit for your wedding day. You look magnificent in it, but try it on again twenty years later and it pinches in all the wrong places. Likewise, procrastination may be steeped within our existence because having an impulsive mindset made a lot of sense when we were hunter-gatherers. When our ancestors needed to do the basic four “F”s of survival—feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating—it would aid their cause if they also wanted to. Let’s briefly consider the last and first of these four: what we have for dinner and who we seek to spend the evening with afterward.

FAST FOOD

From our teeth, which chew it up, to our intestines, which digest it, food has played a major role in our evolution. We have evolved to love the taste of fats and sugars because, in a world where starvation and predation were constant concerns, stocking up on high-caloric foods was once an adaptive preference. When the food supply was sporadic, we would have to gorge when the going was good, focusing on energy foods rich in sugar and fat. There were no Neanderthals on self-imposed diets. Consequently, for most of human history, being “overweight” has been considered beautiful, affluent, and enviable.
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The exigencies of eating may explain how we all became so impulsive and, consequently, procrastinators.

Let’s consider two types of primates, common marmosets and cotton-top tamarins, which are almost identical except in their choice of food.
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Marmosets are gummivores, which scratch tree bark and then sip on the sap that flows. Tamarins are insectivores; they pounce on bugs whenever they can find them. Marmosets show a lot more self-control than tamarins, as they are selected for it. Sap takes a while to flow, demanding patience, whereas the hunt for jumping and scurrying bugs requires immediate action. For animals in general, the fine tuning of impulsiveness to their food source is called
optimal foraging.
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We are optimized to get the most calories in the shortest time; consequently, the longer it takes to kill, eat, and digest, the less impulsive a species typically becomes. In short, we develop the self-control we need to ensure our next meal.
^3b

Being omnivores and at the top of the food chain, humans are superstars of self-control. We have the patience to kill and eat almost anything that lives. Birds' ability to delay gratification, in comparison, hardly registers; even a ten-second wait is remarkable. Similarly, ten minutes of patience is an eternity for a chimp. For all our superior self-control, though, in today’s whirlwind, we don’t have enough. We have been favored with enough patience for a world without grocery stores or refrigerators, enough for hunting animals or gathering berries. Yet, we have a relatively small window compared to what we currently need. Procrastination results from a disconnect in our genetic inheritance, as we now pursue projects and plans that require weeks, months, and years to complete, timelines for which we are motivationally mismatched. In the forest, a bird in the hand might be worth two in the bush, but in the city, the discount rate is far more slender; invest in a bird today and tomorrow you are lucky to earn a chicken wing’s worth of interest.
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JUST SAY YES

Now on to the second example, the one you've been waiting for—sex. Evolution is steeped in sex, as those who succeed breed. Since procrastinators' impulsive nature is ingrained in their DNA, it can be passed on to their offspring and, if it lets them have more kids, the trait quickly becomes common. Just consider my family. The males on my mother’s side tend to have children later in life. My great grand-dad was Owen Owen, who people in the UK might remember from his string of similarly named though now-defunct department stores.
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Since Owen Owen was born in 1847 and I had my son Elias in 2007, each generation of my family tree is spaced forty years apart. If we were in a stork race with another family that started a new generation every twenty years (thereby reproducing twice as fast), by now there could easily be over eighty of them for every one of us. Getting an early start on baby making makes a big difference.

Sure enough, procrastinators' impulsiveness has been linked to an early start for parenthood through teen pregnancy as well as sexual promiscuity.
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The one thing that procrastinators don’t tend to put off is “getting some.” No wonder. The fun part of copulation comes immediately, while the harder part of child raising . . . well, that’s almost a year away. This state of sexual affairs also helps explain why men tend to be more impulsive and procrastinate more than women.
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Reproduction strategies favor a quality versus quantity split—that is, raising a few kids well or having lots in the hope some of them work out. Since it is easier for men to invest less in their offspring, they definitely lean toward the quantity option. As Geoffrey Miller, author of
The Mating Mind,
wrote: “Men are more motivated to have short-term sexual flings with multiple partners than women are.” Women tend to favor the quality strategy, taking a longer-term and more responsible perspective. She waits patiently for Mr. Right while he impulsively wants Ms. Right Away.

Sex also ensures a range of impulse-driven procrastination in the populace; some will procrastinate a little and others a lot. If it was always advantageous to get pregnant as soon as possible, the world would be like the Mike Judge movie
Idiocracy.
In that film, everyone who was smart and cautious held off having kids, and the intelligent were out-bred by the clueless and carefree. There is, however, no optimal level of impulsiveness to maximize the number of your descendants.
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Much depends on the resources available to raise children, for as costs increase, it is better to have smaller families.
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Other tradeoffs occur when there is an excess of men pursuing the “quantity” reproduction strategy. If too many men are focused on short-term sexual encounters, they swamp the singles bars and strain the goodwill of the available women. In this scenario, committed family men are a rarity and thus more valued. Men demonstrating loyalty would find themselves vigorously pursued, able to pick the prettiest and most compatible of spouses.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PROCRASTINATION

This evolutionary explanation of procrastination directly demonstrates why procrastination is so widespread. No matter which country or language you are reading this book in, there is a name for irrationally putting things off, from Hawaii’s
napa
to Scotland’s
maffling.
Everywhere we have looked for procrastination, we've found it—easily. Today’s age of procrastination was inevitable the moment we walked out of the trees into the savanna, learned to make fire, and began trading among tribes. Procrastination grew alongside civilization.

The history of procrastination likely began around nine thousand years ago, sprouting along with the invention of agriculture.
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Planting crops in the spring to reap them in the fall was our first artificial deadline; it was a task that civilization and survival required but not one we had evolved to perform. This is why all the earliest written records of procrastination deal with farming. Four thousand years ago, ancient Egyptians chiseled at least eight hieroglyphs to indicate delay, but one in particular also indicates neglect or forgetfulness.
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Translated as procrastination, this hieroglyph is most often associated with agricultural tasks, especially those connected with the yearly cycle of the river Nile, as it overflowed its banks and fertilized the floodplains. Similarly, the ancient Greeks struggled with procrastination, as recounted by Hesiod. Living around 700
B.C.
, Hesiod was one of the greatest poets of Greek literature, rivaled only by Homer. In Hesiod’s epic 800-line poem,
Work and Days,
he exhorts: “Do not put your work off till tomorrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.” This warning was especially important because the Greeks were in the midst of a financial crisis of such proportions that many Greek farmers put up not only their farms but also their families as collateral. Procrastination led not only to a poor credit rating, but also to seeing your sons and daughters become the exclusive property of your richer neighbors.