#107 – Piers Steel on The Science of Motivation and Procrastination

Better Thinking

In this episode of Better Thinking, Nesh Nikolic speaks with Piers Steel about how procrastination shows up in one's life and the related forces that make it irresistible.

Piers Steel likes to think he is among the world’s foremost researchers and speakers on the science of motivation and procrastination. Well, he is a Distinguished Research Chair at the University of Calgary, where he teaches human resources and organizational dynamics at the Haskayne School of Business. His research has appeared in several outlets around the world, ranging from Psychology Today and New Scientist to Good Housekeeping and The New Yorker. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, with his wife and two sons.

Aside from being a practicing procrastinator from an early age, Piers started formally studying the phenomenon while getting his doctorate in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Minnesota. Working with Dr. Thomas Brothen, he had access to a class administered through a Computerized Personalized System of Instruction, an arrangement that allows students to progress through a course at their own pace but is well known for creating high levels of procrastination.

Also, being a computerized course meant that every stitch of work that the students completed had a time-date stamp exact to the second. It is an ideal setting for studying procrastination. On top of this, Piers also applied meta-analysis to the study of procrastination, a technique for mathematically summarizing all previous research done on the topic (some 800 previous studies). Together, these techniques provided the results for his PhD thesis “The Nature and Measurement of Procrastination.”

Episode link at https://neshnikolic.com/podcast/piers-steel

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