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Procrastination Dilemma

It started off as just a Facebook break, but before you knew it you were in the middle of your third consecutive game of FIFA, making plans for later that evening, and listening to the newest Muse album.  The countless vows to finish your problem set tonig­­­ht and not check Twitter before your work was done had all been for nothing; procrastination had struck again.  Like it or not, procrastination affects every single one of us.  On May 9, 2012, The Guardian published an article entitled “Procrastination: a student’s worst enemy?” in which they highlighted a number of studies that explored the ways that procrastination affected students. From the studies included in this article, it is apparent that there is a correlation between your proximity to temptation and your decision to act upon that temptation.  While some of this behavior can be attributed to biological reasons (the level of development of a student’s brain), the constant immersion of modern-day students in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter has been proven to be linked to students’ procrastinating tendencies.

There are a number of solutions proposed in this article that aim to increase productivity and decrease the likelihood of procrastination.  For example, it is suggested to explicitly separate “work” and “play” areas, work for a predetermined amount of time and then follow-up with a reward, and to be more forgiving when you do procrastinate.  In my experience, the most powerful temptation that consistently convinces me to procrastinate is the procrastination of friends. This behavior can be effectively modeled as a prisoner’s dilemma if you were to look at an idealized system of two friends, in which each friend could either work or break.

Student A

Work

Break

Student B

Work

2,2

2,4

Break

4,2

4,4

*It is important to note that the values in this model represent the short-term payoffs for Students A and B. The long-term payoff of the students finishing their work is not considered.

As shown in this article, there is a relationship between proximity to temptation and the decision to act upon that temptation.  This is represented in the above model in (break, work) and (work, break).  If Student A is working, but Student B is breaking, then Student A has an incentive to start breaking because of the higher payoff.  The same is true if Student B is working while Student A is breaking.  Additionally, if both Student A and Student B are working, they will both have an incentive to switch to breaking.  Therefore, it follows that in this model the case where both Student A and Student B are breaking is the pure strategy Nash equilibrium, a conclusion which supports both natural intuition and evidence from this article. Although you may succeed in fighting it off for some time, procrastination will ultimately infect you too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2012/may/09/students-procrastinating-exams

– Grem

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