What got me confused when reading “Later” by James Surowiecki was when he stated on page 4, “According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002.” This made me wonder if this was an ongoing problem that many had, or if it was recently around this age. At the same time, earlier in that page Surowiecki states, “Ainslie is probably right that procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era.” Based on these pieces of text I have come to the conclusion that his point is that there has always been procrastination but the feeling of anxiety that comes with it is more recent. Something that irked me when reading this was the idea in which we fail to predict the circumstances in leaving a task for later. This was a big slap in the face because of the amount of times I unexpected things have happened but I still leave things for last minute. For instance, Surowiecki writes, “Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls ‘the planning fallacy.’” The author goes on to talk about how Jon Elster thinks people underestimate the scenarios or events that can unwillingly take place. He also goes on to give us a personal example in which things happened, while he was writing this same paper, that were out of his hands. He states, “Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life.” By doing this, the author had most definitely tied his ideas on the unexpected events or difficulties when putting off a task.
