You keep putting off sales calls to organize your desk or surf the Internet. Or, facing a deadline, you start writing, get nowhere and decide to take a “break.” Or, maybe you’ve completed every aspect of planning a project, except one small detail, and you keep putting it off–until it’s too late.
If any of these hypotheticals resonate, you’re not alone.
According to The Procrastination Equation: How To Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Things Done, a new book by Piers Steel, Ph.d., procrastination is rampant, a mixture of human nature and deadlines that create irrational delay. Winner of the Killam Emerging Research Leader award, Steel teaches human resources and organizational dynamics at the Haskayne School of Business/University of Calgary. At least 95% of us procrastinate at least occasionally, Steel writes, citing research, and “about 15-20% of us do it consistently and problematically.”
By understanding why you procrastinate, Steel says, you can understand our own triggers that lead to self-defeating distractions and avoidance.
Steel has been studying procrastination and its impact for more than ten years—and spent the decades before that as a procrastinator himself. To beat the bad habit, Steel says, you must understand the behavior manifests in different forms. Steel found there are three types of procrastination:
1. Expecting too little: When you have low expectations, you will put off the experience of rejection. As you postpone working on the task you’re uneasy about, you diminish your odds for success, further damaging your confidence. The result can be learned helplessness and a complacent acceptance of mediocre performance.
2. Devaluing the task: When you fail to value a routine or unengaging task properly, you allow yourself to defer necessary crucial chores that are important but routine-and reinforce a dangerous tendency to ignore the basics (like paying your bills).
3. The deferred gratification problem: The rewards and goals you can achieve right now often seem far more appealing and gratifying to you than those that require you to wait. People are wired for short-term gratification, and that means you need to guard against giving into impulses to answer every email, clear every minor item off your to-do list, check on your favorite sports team, or watch that funny video on You Tube. Often, small and crucial details in the long-term are ignored till the last second, because you’re so absorbed in what you need to do today.
You can fall into one or all of these types in varying degrees. Steel delivers a plan for each aspect of the procrastination equation, including these practical strategies:
- To build overall confidence, practice “success spirals,” small steps of achievement that take you outside your comfort zone-such as trying an adventure sport, or learning a new skill through a course;
- Break down daunting tasks into smaller and smaller pieces;
- If are typically overly confident about your ability to make a deadline, create a list of the ways you habitually procrastinate, and post them where you work;
- Develop a disaster recovery plan in the event you are about to miss your deadline;
- Avoid boredom by making tasks more challenging through gaming and competition. ‘When you are competing against your colleagues, almost any task can become a race to finish first or to get the most work done,” Steel says;
- Connect low-value tasks to your most treasured goals-completing your expense report on Friday, for example, will free up your weekend to go to a movie with your significant other;
- Identify a target task that you ideally should be doing, but have been putting off; then, focus on a “tangent task” that should also be done, and is relatively more enjoyable than your target task. By completing the tangent task (say, taking the staff to lunch to prepare for a conference), you will be warmed up for the target task (writing your draft presentation for the conference);
- Lock temptations out of the way-unplug the Internet, have your spouse hide the video games, or remove the battery from your PDA and give it to a colleague;
- Work with a friend, significant other, or mentor to add disincentives to typical temptations-for example, place a bet with your spouse that requires you deliver a work product at a certain time;
- Frame your goals in specific terms so that you know precisely when you have to achieve them-use details, dates, and images;
- Break down long-term goals into short-term objectives-for particularly daunting tasks, start with a mini-goal to ease into the difficult terrain.
Are you a procrastinator? Would any of these strategies help you, or would you add some to the list?
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Herb Schaffner is president of Schaffner Media Partners, a consultancy specializing in business, finance, and public affairs publishing expertise, and is found on Twitter and Facebook. He has been a publisher and editor-in-chief at McGraw-Hill, and a senior editor at HarperCollins.
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