I have recently concluded a 12-month mourning period for my late father. Over the last twelve months, I have woken early to attend morning services at the synagogue every day and to recite the mourners’ “kaddish”.

I have also left my family eating dinner every evening to attend the evening service and say kaddish.

These trips to the synagogue have become very much a part of my daily routine. In fact, so much so, that I am currently still attending services and intend to do so for the foreseeable future. But herein lies the question … On a cold winter’s morning, when my alarm goes off and I am lying half asleep in my warm and cosy bed, will I get up to go to shul?

While I was saying kaddish, in my mind, attending shul to pray with a minyan (quorum of 10 men) was not optional but obligatory. And so, I hauled my weary body out of the cocoon of my bed. Now that I no longer “need”^[1] to pray with a minyan, will I go back to sleep for the extra hour and forty-five minutes my schedule allows?

In one of his books, Dan Ariely describes a study that he, together with Klaus Wettenbroch, undertook with 3 cohorts of his students. At the beginning of the semester he assigned his classes 3 essays to be completed during the term.

In one class, he asked the students to submit their proposed deadlines for each of the three papers. Each student would submit a proposed schedule along the lines of,

Failure to submit a paper on time would result in penalties – a 1% grade reduction per day overdue! There was no additional credit for early submission.

In a second class, Ariely assigned evenly spaced deadlines and in the third class, he assigned no deadlines at all. Class 3 were told that all 3 papers were due at the end of the semester.

So how did the students fare?

The students in the class with three firm deadlines achieved the best results. The class with no intermediate deadlines fared worst and the class who chose their own deadlines performed somewhere in the middle (it is worth bearing in mind that some students would have proposed final day deadline for all three as there was no downside for proposing a late date and submitting early).

The results are pretty much in line with expectations – students (like most of the rest of us) procrastinate! Restricting freedom (the class with the evenly spaced deadlines) is the best cure for procrastination.

The students who were offered a tool to, in essence, self-restrict their freedom by pre-committing to deadlines did better than those who with no deadlines.

While we all have problems with procrastination and self-control, there is hope that by recognising the problem and creating tools for pre-commitment, we can, to a certain extent mitigate for this.

How does this tie in with my shul problem? My desire to stay in bed may be more one of willpower and self-control than procrastination, but the underlying impulse is very similar. I’m stalling on the getting-out-of-bed process. The challenge for me is to find a tool or mechanism that restricts my freedom in order to eliminate the procrastination problem. And to find it before the onset of winter!

Any suggestions…

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[1] While it is preferable to pray with a minyan, it is possible to pray on one’s own. In this case, certain prayers and parts of the service are omitted. The mourners’ kaddish requires a minyan.