Industrial psychologist Piers Steel of the University of Calgary has developed an equation that explains the mental calculus that leads to procrastination (defined by Steel as "the voluntary delay of an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse-off for the delay").
U is the desire to complete the task; E, the expectation of success; V, the value of completing the task; I, the immediacy of the task; and D, our personal sensitivity to delay. The equation and the theory behind it is known as "temporal motivation theory."
In summarizing Steel's work, Scientific American writer David Biello explains
Insights into our procrastinating ways may help explain why humans struggle with long-term problems that require immediate solutions such as climate change and mounting public debt. And by reducing human motivation to a formula, powerful computer models can be put to work to predict our choices...
Below, you see the result of me, sitting at my desk at home, trying to correct freshmen Finals. That's me, grabbing for my camera and some trinket on my desk.
The next time I rant about students choosing to play Guitar Hero rather than read about the Middle Ages, I'll remember (hopefully) that their perception of the value of completing the task (V) is low, and to off-set that, encouraging them to do the reading, I'll need to somehow adjust the equation in their mind, perhaps by increasing the cost of not completing the task (E). This part of teaching brings me back to the Educational Psychology class that we all took for our Credentials. As much as we want students to be internally motivated, they are teenagers, and the typical teenager is more motivated by external factors - and those are parts of the equation that we do have control over.
You can see more of Piers Steel's work at Procrastinus.com. Since it is not directly connected to his employment at the University of Calgary, the site is, presumably, the result of his own procrastination. You can even have your own tendency toward procrastination measured.
