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Group. These clubs will give you a new set of friends, with whom you will want to socialize—likely in one of the dozens of coffee shops and pubs a short walk from any place on campus. They'll also entice you to go to one of a dozen events occurring every week, from poetry readings to tailgate parties. With all the camaraderie, alcohol, sex, and—headiest of all temptations—the freedom to enjoy them all, university can lure us into the unregulated state of bliss where the liberties of adulthood are combined with only a minority of the responsibilities. From the moment students step into the classroom, inevitable conflicts are set in motion. Even Tenzin Gyatso, better known as the 14th Dalai Lama, reported of his student days, “Only in the face of a difficult challenge or an urgent deadline would I study and work without laziness.”
    We can graph this dilemma using Eddie, Valerie, and Tom when they were back in their university days. They hang together, as they have a lot in common and all of them like to socialize rather than work. Still, there are differences among them. Valerie knows she isn’t especially bright but she has two cardinal virtues—she is levelheaded and responsible. Though she isn’t competitive, she sees the future pretty clearly, and can imagine one day graduating from college and getting her dream job. Tom is more ambitious and more confident of his abilities than either of his classmates but he is also the most impulsive. His cockiness and spontaneity arouse mixed feelings of envy and hate in many people who know him. Eddie, on the other hand, lacks desire as well as self-confidence. He was pressured by his family to go to college and he is unsure whether he can survive much less thrive academically. In fact, he doesn’t really care. At least he is comfortable being a slacker.
    One mid-September morning, Eddie, Valerie, and Tom walk into my Introduction to Motivation class, where they find that a final essay is due three months later, on December 15. The graph on the facing page charts their likely levels of motivation and when each of them will start working. Their common motivation to socialize, represented by the dotted line, starts off strong in the semester and tapers off toward the end, partly in response to a lack of opportunity and ever-increasing guilt. Valerie, being the least impulsive, is the first to start working, on November 29 (the smooth, unadorned graph line). It takes another week before Eddie or Tom bears down—a significant gap.
    In terms of the Procrastination Equation, although Tom is more confident (high expectancy) and competitive (high value) than Eddie, his impulsiveness means that most of his motivation is reserved until the end (the graph line with squares). Valerie’s motivation flows more steadily, like water from a tap, while Tom’s gushes like a fire hose when eventually turned on. Even though Tom starts working the same day as Eddie the slacker (the graph line with triangles), Tom’s motivation in the final moments should enable him to outstrip the others' best efforts.

    MY OWN RESEARCH
    Although Eddie, Valerie, and Tom are fictional, they are composite characters based on the thousands of students I have taught. As I stressed, there is no better venue for finding procrastinators than universities. Harnessing all this wasted motivation for science is the trick. It was great luck that as a graduate student I worked with Dr. Thomas Brothen. Thomas taught an introductory psychology course at the University of Minnesota’s General College, an institution designed specifically to increase the diversity of the university. Significantly, the class was administered through a Computerized Personalized System of Instruction, a nifty arrangement that allows students to pro-gress through a course at their own pace but is well known for creating high levels of procrastination. In fact, procrastination is such a problem that students are repeatedly warned throughout the