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Procrastination
A Tougher but More Helpful Take on Procrastination?
9 steps to feeling better about yourself and your life.
Posted April 5, 2019
This Monday, I’ll be giving my fourth Public Lecture at UC Berkeley Extension. It will be about time-management and procrastination. Here is what I’m planning to say about the latter.
Ironically, today's zeitgeist encourages people to reduce self-blame for their bad behavior. So procrastination is deemed not a lack of willpower but caused by fear of failure, rejection, success, insecurity, self-doubt, and anxiety, and if the opiner is more political: capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, lookism, and so on.
Far be it for me, merely one person, to claim that a zeitgeist is wrong. But after 5,500 career and personal coaching clients, I’ve found that my procrastinating clients are more likely to procrastinate less and feel better about their life with the following:
1. Accept that while the aforementioned impediments may make it more difficult to control procrastination, ex-procrastinators force, yes force, themselves to do the tasks that should be done. Yes, if a person has moderate-to-severe mental illness, that need be addressed. But garden-variety procrastinators make more progress by forcing themselves to do what they should: No undue rumination, which makes you more likely to procrastinate the task. No rationalizing of delay, which yields momentary relief but ongoing guilt and anxiety followed by last-minute scrambling and often shoddy work.
For the successful person, starting tasks right away and getting them finished expeditiously isn’t a question. It isn’t a choice. It’s reflexive, something they do as part of being a responsible human being. Ex-procrastinators learn to be short-term uncomfortable if the long-term benefit is worth it.
2. Accept the view that, counter to the zeitgeist, contribution is nearly all: that a life's value is determined far less by how much pleasure they've had than by the contribution they've made to their sphere of influence. That means getting as much worthy work done as possible: in career, avocation, relationships, and volunteer work.
3. Keep reminding yourself that you’ll feel better and your life will be better-led, with more happiness, less guilt and shame, and probably more money, if you can eliminate procrastination as an option. Per a recent review in the New York Times, chronic procrastination imposes not only productivity costs but damages our health: "chronic stress, general psychological distress and low life satisfaction, depression and anxiety, poor health behaviors, chronic illness and even hypertension and cardiovascular disease."
4. In a given situation, decide whether you actually should do the task, whether to start now or, less often, to schedule it. If you find a given task or set of tasks routinely too difficult, for example, if your job is often too challenging, need you change jobs?
Sometimes, your procrastinating a task reflects your subconscious assessment that the opportunity cost is too great. For example, many of my clients beat themselves up for not working on their novel. But on probing, it's clear that's a wise or at least defensible decision: They're not enjoying the process and assess the probability of it getting published is too low relative to what they otherwise could be doing with that time.
5. Stop with the drugs, The zeitgeist is celebrating the “freedom” of marijuana legalization. (Big Tobacco is particularly celebrating.) But the solid research ever more supports what most people know anecdotally, for example, that, short-term, marijuana renders you lazy for hours and longer-term may decrease motivation even when not high and increases risk of depression, social anxiety, and even psychosis. See this from the National Institute for Drug Abuse. See this 2019 review in the Wall Street Journal and this 2017 metaanalysis of 200 solid studies by the National Academies of Sciences. In the latter, particularly note the mental health dangers. To see those, at that site, scroll down.
6. Make it easy to do the task. For example, eliminate distractions such as social media. Or plunk that book you need to read front-and-center on your desk. If you're procrastinating preparing your income tax, would it be more motivating if you thought of it as a game: how to be as aggressive as is consistent with the law? If you're wanting to exercise more, should you have your exercise machine in your home in front of a TV rather than have to go through all sorts of contortions to get to the gym? Or should you set up a regular hiking date?
7. If needed, reduce stress around a task, for example, with deep breaths, a walk around the block, and perhaps realizing that you can get help with your project (if only with a Google search), and almost certainly, that you can survive failure.
8. Use tactics such as the one-second task, in which you simply ask yourself, "What’s the first one-second task I must do to start the project?" Then, "What’s the next one-second task?" Often, just a few one-second tasks are enough to get you rolling. Also use the one-minute struggle. Usually, if a minute passes and you haven’t made progress on a roadblock, additional struggle won’t help: At the one-minute mark, decide if it’s worth additional struggle, or if you should ask for help, or that you can do the task without solving that stumbling block.
9. If you've procrastinated a task, forgive yourself: You get a fresh start each time.1
1. Procrastination expert Piers Steel read this article and believes this item is prerequisite to all others.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
