HAVE you ever wondered why you can’t quite get round to finishing a job? Researchers have devised a mathematical formula for procrastinators to work out just how much chance they have of overcoming their weakness.

According to the new book containing the equation, procrastination is becoming more and more of a problem as computer games and personal organisers provide endless opportunities for distraction and rescheduling.

Piers Steel, a business professor at Calgary University in Canada, has pulled together hundreds of studies on the art of delay. He believes that the two contradictory views commonly held about procrastinators — that they are either extra-careful or bone idle — are both wrong. Instead, they have a vice all their own.

Famous procrastinators such as the writer Douglas Adams, who said he loved the “whoosh” of missed deadlines passing over his head, have often been seen as perfectionists. According to Steel, however, the evidence suggests that chronic procrastinators, who make up about 20% of the population, are more impulsive and erratic than other people and less conscientious about attention to detail and obligations to others.

In his forthcoming book, The Procrastination Equation: Today’s Trouble with Tomorrow, Steel warns that dozens of “procrastination workshops” that have sprung up on campuses to help students are only delaying a solution.

Those with experience of these workshops include Chloe Hodgkinson, 29, who recently completed a PhD at University College London.

She had drawn up a brilliant four-year study plan and spent almost every day in the library, but Hodgkinson was undone by online chatting, Facebook pages and endless “tea runs” for fellow students.

Suddenly, as the deadline loomed for her dissertation on great apes and African tourism, she signed up for a college-sponsored workshop on procrastination.

The session was, she admitted last week, just another form of procrastination.

“The counsellors told us it was fear of success putting us off, but I have found it’s the opposite. It was fear of failure,” said Hodgkinson, who completed her dissertation only hours before the deadline.

She is still surprised that she fell victim to the infamous “student syndrome”, defined a century ago by the writer Mark Twain as “never putting off until tomorrow what can be put off until the day after tomorrow”.

According to Steel, procrastinators believe they can complete a task and also care about it. Lazy people, by contrast, are not bothered whether they can finish the job — they just do not want to do it. Both can come up with excuses such as a dog eating the homework.

Steel, who admits he can be distracted by computer games, says procrastination is becoming a bigger issue because many more jobs are “self-structured”, with people setting their own schedules.

Some professions are more prone to time-wasting than others.

Pop musicians can get bogged down in the studio as they seek to match earlier triumphs: it took 14 years for the US band Guns N’ Roses to finish their album Chinese Democracy and U2 fans have already been waiting four years for the Irish group’s next album.

Literary procrastinators have included Proust and, perhaps the greatest of all, Tristram Shandy, the hero of Laurence Sterne’s novel. Some authors call procrastination writer’s block: Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor who was commissioned eight years ago to write his memoirs, was asked last week about its prospects. “I am still writing,” he snapped.

Additional reporting: Robin Henry

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