News

A website, celebrating its first anniversary this New Year’s, may be just the help you need if you procrastinate.

StickK.com, the creation of a Yale professor, offers you this: A tool to get you to do what you said you’d do and on time.

You’ll pay if you don’t! You’ll pay what you agreed to pay if you don’t get around to finishing.

The professor says it works for academics, who promise to pay $500 to colleagues if they blow the deadline.

He says it believes this method will work for just about anyone, whether the goal is huge or small.

For people who want to make health behavior changes, this could be a new way to commit and get reinforcement.

To date, the story below says that there are 30,000 StickK.com members. Their goals run from the practical, to competitive or creative, CNN reports.

There is one flaw. How do you get the procrastinators  in your life to go look at the site?

The professor doesn’t tackle that problem.

CNN

“David Laibson knows that when he procrastinates, mere deadlines are not always enough to get him going. So, when this Harvard economics professor collaborates on a major project, he’ll sometimes promise to deliver a finished product by a certain date — or else pay his co-authors $500.

“There are a lot of behavioral economists who really do say that, and really do pay,” says Laibson, who studies the psychological factors that play into economic decisions.

“It’s not just academics who set up monetary contracts to fight procrastination. StickK.com, founded by Yale University economics professor Dean Karlan and two colleagues, helps people fulfill their goals by allowing them to risk their own money — if they don’t complete their self-described objectives, they lose the money.

“It’s a contract to make slothfulness more expensive,” said Karlan, who has personally put up to $50,000 at stake to help himself lose or maintain his weight.”( Watch CNN’s Elizabeth Landau talk more about procrastination)

Source:  CNN December 30, 2008(Update)