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The Procrastination Equation: How To Stop Putting Things Off And Start Getting Stuff Done (2010)

by Piers Steel(Favorite Author)

3.74 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0307357163 (ISBN13: 9780307357168)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Random House Canada

review 1: Page 97Whether your procrastination lies in the Success, Self-development, or Intimacy cluster determines the price you pay for procrastination, as these three areas translate into three major costs: your wealth, health and happiness. Naturally, those who put off the Success cluster and its career or financial aspects will be less wealthy. Those who procrastinate on Self-development will experience poorer health, both of body and spirit. And though happiness is affected by the previous two clusters, Success and Self-development, it has the strongest ties to Intimacy. In a different meta-analysis that I conducted,based on close to 1,200 studies, I established that the biggest predictors of happiness are traits leading to fulfilling interpersonal relationships - great we... morealth and good health mean less without someone to share them with. Wherever your procrastination lies, the more you do it, the greater the cost. Page 128-129...the most pressing issue facing all governments is environmental depletion and destruction. We are in the midst of several ongoing ecological disasters, all projected to peak at the same time: 2050......Across the board, governments are putting off the issue until it is too late. To begin with, the soil beneath our feat is eroding and depleting. With about 40 per cent of agricultural land already damaged or infertile, what will happen in 2050 when the little remaining arable land must feed over nine billion people? It is also doubtful whether there will be enough fresh water to grow the necessary crops; the projection is that 75 per cent of countries will be experiencing extreme water shortages by that same date. The sea tells an almost identical story. Approximately 40 per cent of oceans are already fouled and overfished, with species disappearing around the world. But it won't get really bad until 205, when the last of the wild fisheries are projected to collapse. .....these environmental disasters make the debate over global warming almost superfluous. With so many catastrophes projected, the consensus is grim....However, if climate projections hold true, we can expet about a three-degree increase in temperature by 2050. No matter what country you are in, there won't be any place that will truly benefit from this change. Entire ecosystems, like the Amazon rainforest, are expected to collapse, about a third of all animals and plants will become extinct, and billions of famine refugees will fight to determine who starves to death first.....Government bodies have been alerted to this possible future for a long time. In 1992, 1,700 of the world's leading scientists, including most Nobel Prize winners, signed the 'World Scientists' Warning to Humanity', which stated in the most explicit terms: 'A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.' For even longer, we have known what to do about it. Unfortunately, we are procrastinating about translating this knowledge into action.
review 2: Fabulous book on the psychology of procrastination, and tips for how to overcome it. This book explores how we're hard-wired to procrastinate, ways modern society exacerbates the problem, and the economic costs of it.I was worried the "equation" part of it would prove to be a pseudoscientific attempt to make it sound like he's quantified procrastination. I was pleasantly surprised that it is merely a helpful tool for understanding motivation:Expectancy x Value---------------------Impulsiveness x DelayThose four components together determine how likely we will be to act on something. Understanding this means that you can increase motivation for desired behaviors and decrease motivation for undesired behaviors by tweaking each of the variables. The rest of the book explores each of them in detail, with ideas for how each can be tweaked.The only thing I don't like about this book is that the writing is incredibly cheesy. It often reads like those lame training videos employees are forced to watch: "Meet Tom. Tom has trouble with procrastination. Time-sensitive Tom can avoid procrastinating by ..." That's silly. Drop the lifeless characters with generic names and just say what you want to say. This was forgivable until the end, when he rewards the reader with a sequel to these characters' stories, complete with their sexual escapades. Please.Seriously though, read this book if you struggle with procrastination. There's no better book for it. less

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