Decision Tips
Your procrastination score indicates a general tendency.
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
—W. Rogers
Chuck Randall was a smart guy. He had a Ph.D. in business and was a professor at a major state university. When he saw his retirement funds drop 20 percent between September and October 2008, he realized the market could go a lot lower. He thought he probably should get out of stocks, but that October turned to November and the months went by. By March 2009, Chuck hadn’t sold a single share, but his procrastination had cost him dearly. Between September 2008 and March 2009, his portfolio had lost 54 percent of its value.
Look back at Chapter 8, “Do You Procrastinate?” Are you a procrastinator? Do you have a tendency to postpone, delay, or avoid performing tasks or making decisions?1 We all can get caught up in the inertia bias. But some of us suffer this malady much more than others. In this chapter, I look at why we often have trouble making a decision and present several techniques we can practice that can help us overcome this tendency.
Procrastination is a general disposition to postpone doing things. We all suffer from it on occasion: We don’t want to begin our Christmas shopping; we avoid going to the dentist; we put off balancing our checkbook. We behave “as if sometime in the future, we will have more time, more money, and feel less tired and stressed.”2 Chronic indecision, when it relates to isolated minor issues, rarely has any long-term effect on your life. It’s when this chronic state involves ongoing daily activities (meeting work deadlines, fulfilling family obligations) or major issues in your life (career choices, marriage, developing a retirement program) that it becomes debilitating. Evidence indicates, for instance, that chronically indecisive people become depressed about the circumstances of their lives and often feel trapped because they don’t know how to change.3
What causes procrastination? There’s no simple answer to this question. Numerous factors have been suggested: fragile self-esteem, fear of making mistakes, being a perfectionist, desire to maintain control, lack of motivation, poor organization, and competing claims on time.4 Most of the evidence, however, indicates that the primary cause of procrastination is conflict.5 “When one option is better than another in all essential respects, there is no conflict and choice is easy. However, when each option has significant advantages and disadvantages, people often experience conflict that makes choice aversive and compels them to delay decision and seek additional information or options.”6
Your procrastination tendencies are minimized when you have to make decisions where there is only one obvious option or your options can be clearly rank-ordered by preferences. However, when we’re faced with multiple options that are all too similar, our tendency is to avoid making a choice and to continue gathering more information.7 This would be true even if your options contain one or more satisfactory alternatives. It’s also irrelevant if choices appear similar when they’re really not. This is because we act on perceptions rather than reality. If you perceive your options as all being basically alike, you can delay making a choice and continue to search for more information or new alternatives indefinitely.
When you’re faced with multiple options that are all too similar, the tendency is to avoid making a choice and to continue gathering more information.
Note that in the rational decision process (see Chapter 2, “The Search for Rationality,” and Chapter 3, “Why It’s Hard to Be Rational”), conflicts aren’t a problem. It’s assumed that decision makers can objectively rate and preference-rank all alternatives. In the real world, however, our options are rarely so easy to differentiate. So we experience conflict.
In addition to conflict, the task itself can be a major source of procrastination.8 We typically try to avoid tasks or decisions that we find unpleasant. We know we should see the dentist twice a year, but we put off making an appointment. Or we postpone following up on the resume we sent out in response to a job ad for fear of rejection. That long list of things we say we want to do but are pretty good at postponing—going on a diet, quitting smoking, beginning a regular workout program, paying off our credit cards—can largely be explained as due to the perception that these are all unappealing tasks, where the immediate pain seems greater than any long-term benefits.
If you tend to be a procrastinator, are you compelled to forever carry this burden? Although it’s difficult to overcome procrastination, there are a couple of things you can do. For minor decisions, it’s OK to tell yourself “don’t worry about it; just make a choice.” For example, selecting a meal from a restaurant menu, deciding what jacket to wear today, or choosing what movie to see tonight are not usually worth worrying over. With decisions of this type, the cost for making a “wrong” choice is typically minimal.9 For major decisions, consider imposing voluntary constraints on yourself.10 For instance, you can impose deadlines that, if missed, would be embarrassing or costly. This works best when your deadline is voiced publicly. When I was contemplating taking early retirement from my university position, I began publicly announcing my intention 18 months ahead of time. This public commitment helped me to make the final decision by making it embarrassing for me to delay it. Here’s another example of imposing a voluntary constraint: If you’re trying to lose weight, you can go to a restaurant that offers only soups and salads rather than, say, the Cheesecake Factory—thus eliminating many high-calorie temptations.
Other approaches to overcoming inertia include creating automatic “action” strategies and upfront commitments. For instance, setting up for automatic portfolio rebalancing of your retirement account at the time you take a new job will help keep your risks balanced.11 And by paying your personal trainer six months in advance for your twice-a-week sessions, you increase the likelihood that you’ll show up for those sessions.
Your procrastination score indicates a general tendency.
For minor decisions, just make a choice.
For major decisions, consider imposing voluntary constraints on yourself and creating automatic “action” strategies and upfront commitments.