Procrastination and Human Factors

Pies Steel, a human resources professor at the Univ. of Calgary's Haskayne School of Business, 95% of us procrastinate at times, with 15% to 20% being chronic offenders.

Three factors make us procrastinate:

1. Lack of confidence about finishing the job
2. Boredom with the task
3. Human tendency to go for immediate reward over long-term gain. A common ploy for avoiding work at the office is reading each email, or IM, as it comes in.

How to overcome procrastination? Professor Steel believe the key is cut off distractions from the working environment. In his words, "millions of people-hours are spent making distractions as succulent as possible ... there are so many ways we could do something else ... convenient access to inferior choices is decidedly inconvenient."