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procrastination
Life is fragile. Don’t waste it.
8 Feb 2020
Author: Kristina Olsevska
It was Monday, 27th of January when I started to write this article. The day before brought devastating news for sports fans around the world. The great Kobe Bryant, his sweet little girl, and 7 others perished in a helicopter crash. He was 41, his daughter – 13.
Life is fragile, yet unconsciously we still think that we have enough time. So, we postpone, we delay, and we procrastinate, not even being aware of how bad the “I’ll do it later” mantra is to our health.
The negative effect of procrastination
One of the first studies to document the pernicious nature of procrastination was published in Psychological Science back in 1997. APS Fellow Dianne Tice and APS William James Fellow Roy Baumeister rated college students on an established scale of procrastination, then tracked their academic performance, stress, and general health throughout the semester. Initially there seemed to be a benefit to procrastination, as these students had lower levels of stress compared to others, presumably as a result of putting off their work to pursue more pleasurable activities. In the end, however, the costs of procrastination far outweighed the temporary benefits. Procrastinators earned lower grades than other students and reported higher cumulative amounts of stress and illness. True procrastinators didn’t just finish their work later — the quality of it suffered, as did their own well-being.
“Thus, despite its apologists and its short-term benefits, procrastination cannot be regarded as either adaptive or innocuous,” concluded Tice and Baumeister. “Procrastinators end up suffering more and performing worse than other people.”
It’s not just students who fall into the “I’ll do it later” trap. According to Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago and author of Still Procrastinating: The No Regret Guide to Getting It Done, around 20% of U.S. adults are chronic procrastinators.
These people don’t just procrastinate occasionally; it’s a major part of their lives. They wait for the night before the deadline to finish a project, they delay an important call for the next day and then for the day after that… They wait for an opportune moment, but somehow it never comes.
Unfortunately, over time chronic procrastination has not only productivity costs, but measurably destructive effects on our social relationships and our mental and physical health, including:
Why we wait?
Ishan Daftardar of ScienceABC claims, that, for starters, human brains are wired to do so. We can picture the entire process of dealing with a tedious task as a fight between two parts of the brain: a battle between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex.
The limbic system is the part of the brain involved in our behavioural and emotional responses, especially when it comes to behaviours we need for survival: eating, reproduction, caring for our young, and fight or flight responses. The prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, has been associated with central executive functions, involved in selecting relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information for the task at hand; in other words, it’s our inner “planner”.
When the limbic system dominates, which is pretty often, the result is putting off until tomorrow what could (and should) be done today.
It is futile to blame your dirty procrastination habits on heredity, star signs, or the weather. Your choice to procrastinate all comes down to one simple thing – the wiring of your brain.
Procrastination isn’t a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt etc.
“Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem,” states Dr. Tim Pychyl, professor of psychology and member of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Okay, so what can I do to stop procrastinating?
You can find a lot of tricks & tips related to this topic. Some, like Denis Waitley at Success say:
- Take five minutes to list the things “you were going to do tomorrow."
- Look at your list—and do one thing on it right now.
- Pick a time (today) to work on the list.
- Quit trying to be perfect.
- If what you’re putting off involves other people, talk to them.
- Ask yourself, What’s the worst thing that could happen if I did this today?
- Imagine how you’ll feel once you do whatever it is you’ve been postponing.
But, to be honest, I like the approach suggested by Ellen Hendriksen (Ph.D.) better. It’s more conscious.
- What if the task isn’t urgent? The remedy, according to a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is to take on a broader perspective rather than nit-picking the details. Look at everyday tasks through the lens of a bigger picture. Find your “why”.
- What if I don’t know how to start or what comes next? The key is to acknowledge that it’s totally normal to feel overwhelmed or stupid at first. Be aware that at the beginning there will be a lot of pivots, do-overs, and mess-ups, and it is totally okay.
- What if I’m afraid of failures? Remember you are not only what you achieve or don’t achieve. We tend to tie our self-worth to the performance; hence, we convince ourselves that there’s no way we can meet the standards we set for ourselves. Self-worth is not just that. There’s so much more to your worth than your accomplishments—your identity, family, passions, experiences, travels, friends, politics, taste, knowledge, challenges you’ve overcome, and, most importantly, how you treat other people.
- What if I think I’m working better under pressure? Do you really? Know it for sure. A 2017 study by three Swiss researchers found that passive procrastination (those wo are procrastinators in the traditional sense. They are paralyzed by their indecision to act and fail to complete tasks on time, usually getting easily distracted) negatively affects students’ GPAs, but active procrastinators’ (those perceived to be a "positive" type of procrastinator. They prefer to work under pressure, and they make deliberate decisions to procrastinate) grades turn out just fine. Know yourself and learn your patterns. If by delaying the tasks you think you’ll perform better, yet you still fail, well, my friend, chances are, you are not an active procrastinator, so, plan ahead!
- What if I just don’t want to do the work? A study in the European Journal of Personality might have found a solution. It showed that many college students who procrastinated did so simply because there were fun alternatives, but they did not intend to study less or later. Researchers suggest that some procrastinators are aware that they are more vulnerable to lurking temptations and therefore try to compensate for this weakness by formulating more intentions. So, basically, if you see parallels with these procrastinators and yourself, and you have upcoming Ed Sheeran concert, go for it! There is a possibility you’ll feel more “motivated” to work on your tasks after, simply because you opt for pleasure instead of work and now feel you have the responsibility to get back to work. But do so only if you know you are this kind of person.
The key takeaway from this article is to learn your patterns first! There is an excessive amount of diverse information on who, why, and how procrastinates. For some it will click; for others it won’t. Understand how your unique mind works, what’s triggering you, and build your actions around them. Don’t follow the advice that clearly doesn’t work for you.
And remember – life is fragile. Don’t wait for the right moment, it won’t come. Carpe diem!
