What a wonderful post!
I considered the benefits of meditation as a procrastination control technique and you will find it in the notes section of the book. I have practiced mindfulness meditation but no longer keep up with it. Though the mindfulness part does give you an option to reduce the power of temptations, you are quite right that it also can expand to eliminate value in general (nihilism). However, the reason I rejected it as viable solution is that it takes so long to master and this is the exact type of discipline that procrastinators will put off aquiring. Good in theory but of little practical value because people won’t take the time to put it into practice. Maybe this is why the Pali Cannon calls procrastination “moral defilement.”
As for self-rewards, I did debate whether to include them. In my original doctoral dissertation, I wrote this “However, it is uncertain whether rewards will be as effective when self-administered. Ainslie (1992) indicates that self-rewards are very susceptible to corruption, where the rules are bent to the extent that they are no longer effective. I suspect that the use of self-rewards will be negatively correlated with procrastination, but weakly.”
Consequently, I tried to express self-rewards in the book in a way that will actually work, which is called “Impulse Pairing, ” as well as acknowledge its inherent limitations, that is”But this method has its risks as well. Engaging a partner to help you finish a report or prep for an exam, for example, can degenerate into an evening-long bull-session with little learning to show for it.”
I really appreciate the level of thought that is being shown here. Impressive.
Very nice review here. Any better and I would say you needn’t bother buying the book. About the equation, it is indeed a simplification of the full model—trying to balance completeness with making sure it is understandable. As the book (and for those super keen, Temporal Motivation Theory described in my Academy of Management Review article “Integrating Theories of Motivation”), we add a constant in the denomenator to prevent the entire thing sky rocketing to infinity when delay approaches zero (in joke, one of the characters has a kid named Constance in reference to this).