What Motivates Getting Things Done: Procrastination, Emotions, and Success

Clinical psychologist Lamia (Emotions! Making Sense of Your Feelings) uses this occasionally insightful but repetitive and unsurprising study to discuss the relationship between procrastination and success. She analyzes the difference between successful people who are procrastinators—“deadline-driven” people—and non-procrastinators—“task-driven” people. Emphasizing that anxiety can be a positive motivating force, Lamia writes that task-driven people complete tasks to avoid the anxiety over having one remain unfinished. Deadline-driven people, conversely, use the anxiety they feel as a deadline approaches to get a task finished. The book hammers home these points with numerous examples. The book is at its best when addressing how being labeled a procrastinator can negatively affect children and adults, and how the two work styles interact with each other. Despite a whole chapter on the subject, failure is never meaningfully addressed. Readers will find some good advice for getting along with people with different work strategies, but the central observation about deadline- and task-driven people feels too obvious to justify a full-length book. (July)