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Procrastination’s a problem - but is it unethical?
By Lauren | August 20, 2008
A month or two ago, NPR ran a very cute piece on a research study on procrastination conducted by Dr. Piers Steel of the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business. I’ve been meaning to write about it, but didn’t get to it until now. (Actually, I felt a little guilty about putting it off until I went online to research the study and discovered that Dr. Steel published his findings over eighteen months ago. Apparently NPR didn’t get around to it right away, either.)
In researching Dr. Steel’s study, I was struck by how tongue-in-cheek most of the reporting on it was. (See, it’s not just me.) Procrastination is one of those guilty pleasures that nearly all of us indulge in sometimes, and there’s undoubtedly a very real need for overworked Americans to take a break now and then. I can hardly fault stressed-out reporters for taking the opportunity to joke a little as they wrote up Steel’s research, though I wonder if it bothered Dr. Steel that his research seemed to be taken so lightly.
Maybe we should look a little more seriously at Dr. Steel’s conclusions. His ten-year study revealed that procrastionation is growing problem. He reports that, in 1978, only about 5% of Americans thought of themselves as chronic procrastinators, but that number has grown to 26%. We all know why, of course. Technology has opened up a whole new world of tempting distractions, with TVs, Blackberries, Ipods, Web surfing, video games, and cellphones all offering attractive alternatives to the daily grind. Steel estimates that the U.S. gross national product could rise by as much as $50 billion if new e-mail notifications suddenly disappeared from workers’ computers. That’s a pretty significant chunk of change.
Where procrastination can become a business ethics issue is when dawdling runs up against inflexible deadlines. Projects that get done in a hurry at the last possible moment are far more likely to contain significant errors and flaws, especially if there’s no time for peer review or other checking before they go out the door. Consequently, putting work off until tomorrow may increase the risk that the final product will be of lower quality when it finally gets done, and that a client or customer will be seriously disappointed, perhaps even enough to sue.
I don’t know about you, but that’s enough incentive for me to turn off my e-mail notification and get back to work.
Topics: Business Ethics, Risk Management, customer relations, ethics |