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Biting the bullet
7 December 2022
Why we procrastinate and how to overcome this.
Why do we find it hard to get round to doing certain tasks or deadlines? Procrastination doesn’t just afflict some unlucky people people and leave others blissfully unscathed – even the most efficient, organised people delay doing certain things until the consequences become impossible to ignore. Here are six reflections, drawn from neuroscience, behavioural science and motivation theory, about our tendency to avoid getting on with the job and some tips to help us knuckle down more successfully.
1. Know your brain.
To speed up its processing power and apply learning from one task to another, our brains rely on shortcuts, known as heuristics, and biases. The optimism bias, for example, leads us to be over-optimistic when we are forecasting and planning, with the result that we typically underestimate and underscope activities. One simple way to counter this bias is to double your time estimate when planning your work (and enjoy the free time if you finish early).
We also tend to think of time as elastic rather than finite, and behavioural science research shows we value our time today more than our time tomorrow. So we’re more reluctant to commit to doing something today and more relaxed about saying yes to committing our time tomorrow. Consequently we often put tasks off until ‘later’ … and often end up with an unrealistic load when tomorrow does swing around.
Ignoring tasks actually costs us mental energy and depletes the finite amount of willpower we wake up with each morning. Every time you spot the task on your to-do list or around your house, your brain thinks about it, weighs up the pros and cons of doing it now vs later, and makes a decision. Multiply that by several times during a day and you’re consuming valuable brain effort and time. It’s more cognitively efficient to tackle the less palatable or harder tasks first, known as ‘eating the frog’, which has the added benefit of helping you feel less weighed down and more productive for the rest of the day.
2. Uncover the emotion.
When someone is struggling with procrastination, I ask them what emotion they are feeling about the task or decision they are putting off. Resentment? Boredom? Frustration? Lack of confidence? It can be hard to pin this down because we may not be paying much (or any) attention to the underlying emotion, but keep exploring this until the answer emerges.
Identifying the emotion can give us some clues about what’s really going on and shed some light on why we’re procastinating. With this clearer view, from here we can decide whether we want to do anything about it and if so, what the possible courses of action might be.
3. Spot your motivation.
In the theory of self-determination researched and developed by Deci and Ryan (see their figure 1) different types of motivation lie along a continuum which stretches from amotivation, where we are just going through the motions, to extrinsic motivation, where we are responding to an external demand or reward, and on to intrinsic motivation, where our motivation comes from within us.
Some good questions to ask ourselves, or others we may be coaching or managing, are: ‘do you have to do this or are you choosing to do it?’ ‘what does completing this task/decision mean to you? And to others?’ or ‘how important is this task/decision to you personally and why?’.
4. Get constructively critical.
When we’re reluctant to get on with a task or decision, sometimes this is to do with rational factors at play, rather than emotional ones. For example, the purpose or process relating to this task isn’t clear or the timing is poorly planned. Standing back and looking critically at the objective, deadline, resourcing and any interconnected tasks or decisions can help you to identify ambiguities or inefficiencies that no-one else is paying attention to.
By asking ‘what outcome are we trying to achieve?’, ‘am I the right person to do this work?’, and ‘what’s really driving the timescales?, you can uncover any hidden assumptions and agree on ways to simplify, delegate or – joy! - even eliminate the task.
5. Assess the environment.
Sometimes it’s the landscape around us that presents us with barriers to getting on with the job - these barriers can be physical, virtual or people-related. Physical barriers may be visual or aural distractions that prevent us from concentrating on the task or lacking the right tools for the job; likewise virtual barriers may be connectivity issues, digital distractions or clunky interfaces and user experiences. People-related barriers might include lack of access at the necessary time to the people you need to collaborate with or involve in decisions.
With barriers it can help to map out or write down everything you need to accomplish this task successfully, looking at it from all angles, then tackle each barrier in turn (or look for an alternative approach if you can’t). This works just as well if you’re trying to get a small child (or a teenager) out of the house on time in the morning, as parenting expert Anita Cleare once advised me – map the route through the house to the door, get your child to line up everything they need to take with them and move all potential distractions out of the way or out of sight.
6. Tweak your habit(s).
Once you’ve identified where you tend to procastinate and why, you can start to work on your own behaviours. We rely heavily on habits, consciously and unconsciously, to manage our day and our work: habits are typically comprised of a cue or trigger, then the activity or routine, followed by the reward. By looking closely at the cue, we can identify ways to change the activity or routine so that we’re more likely to get it done in good time. For example, if you always end up sorting and submitting your expense receipts at the last possible moment, then rather than using the submission deadline as the cue, make your new cue the moment when you incur the expense, so you build a new habit and mental association around doing the two things (purchasing and filing) in quick succession.
Notice too the reward that each habit results in: what’s the pay-off to you when you complete the task/take the decision? How does it make you feel? Here’s a reward-based example: I’ve been reading a book a week during 2022 and have realised that when I take 15-20 minutes to read during the day, I feel more refreshed physically and mentally and remember the content more (my ‘reward’) compared to when I leave all the reading until bedtime (when I invariably fall asleep after one page and forget what I've read).
If you’ve got a regular reflective practice going already, then use one of those reflective sessions to consider these questions more comprehensively. If you don’t and you’re looking for some speedy answers, you don’t need to work through all six reflections above every time you’re procrastinating; you’ll probably have a immediate sense of which one(s) might be most useful to you to focus on. Or share the list with a colleague, direct report or your team and find out what insights flash for them – a quick chat about this can often shed light on our procrastination problem too. Good luck, let me know what works for you and if you want more personalised support then join my group coaching programme or ask me about my 1:1 coaching packages. A last word of advice: if procrastination is really holding you back right now, don’t make a mental note to come back to this at some unspecified time. Tackle it today.
1. Know your brain.
To speed up its processing power and apply learning from one task to another, our brains rely on shortcuts, known as heuristics, and biases. The optimism bias, for example, leads us to be over-optimistic when we are forecasting and planning, with the result that we typically underestimate and underscope activities. One simple way to counter this bias is to double your time estimate when planning your work (and enjoy the free time if you finish early).
We also tend to think of time as elastic rather than finite, and behavioural science research shows we value our time today more than our time tomorrow. So we’re more reluctant to commit to doing something today and more relaxed about saying yes to committing our time tomorrow. Consequently we often put tasks off until ‘later’ … and often end up with an unrealistic load when tomorrow does swing around.
Ignoring tasks actually costs us mental energy and depletes the finite amount of willpower we wake up with each morning. Every time you spot the task on your to-do list or around your house, your brain thinks about it, weighs up the pros and cons of doing it now vs later, and makes a decision. Multiply that by several times during a day and you’re consuming valuable brain effort and time. It’s more cognitively efficient to tackle the less palatable or harder tasks first, known as ‘eating the frog’, which has the added benefit of helping you feel less weighed down and more productive for the rest of the day.
2. Uncover the emotion.
When someone is struggling with procrastination, I ask them what emotion they are feeling about the task or decision they are putting off. Resentment? Boredom? Frustration? Lack of confidence? It can be hard to pin this down because we may not be paying much (or any) attention to the underlying emotion, but keep exploring this until the answer emerges.
Identifying the emotion can give us some clues about what’s really going on and shed some light on why we’re procastinating. With this clearer view, from here we can decide whether we want to do anything about it and if so, what the possible courses of action might be.
3. Spot your motivation.
In the theory of self-determination researched and developed by Deci and Ryan (see their figure 1) different types of motivation lie along a continuum which stretches from amotivation, where we are just going through the motions, to extrinsic motivation, where we are responding to an external demand or reward, and on to intrinsic motivation, where our motivation comes from within us.
Some good questions to ask ourselves, or others we may be coaching or managing, are: ‘do you have to do this or are you choosing to do it?’ ‘what does completing this task/decision mean to you? And to others?’ or ‘how important is this task/decision to you personally and why?’.
4. Get constructively critical.
When we’re reluctant to get on with a task or decision, sometimes this is to do with rational factors at play, rather than emotional ones. For example, the purpose or process relating to this task isn’t clear or the timing is poorly planned. Standing back and looking critically at the objective, deadline, resourcing and any interconnected tasks or decisions can help you to identify ambiguities or inefficiencies that no-one else is paying attention to.
By asking ‘what outcome are we trying to achieve?’, ‘am I the right person to do this work?’, and ‘what’s really driving the timescales?, you can uncover any hidden assumptions and agree on ways to simplify, delegate or – joy! - even eliminate the task.
5. Assess the environment.
Sometimes it’s the landscape around us that presents us with barriers to getting on with the job - these barriers can be physical, virtual or people-related. Physical barriers may be visual or aural distractions that prevent us from concentrating on the task or lacking the right tools for the job; likewise virtual barriers may be connectivity issues, digital distractions or clunky interfaces and user experiences. People-related barriers might include lack of access at the necessary time to the people you need to collaborate with or involve in decisions.
With barriers it can help to map out or write down everything you need to accomplish this task successfully, looking at it from all angles, then tackle each barrier in turn (or look for an alternative approach if you can’t). This works just as well if you’re trying to get a small child (or a teenager) out of the house on time in the morning, as parenting expert Anita Cleare once advised me – map the route through the house to the door, get your child to line up everything they need to take with them and move all potential distractions out of the way or out of sight.
6. Tweak your habit(s).
Once you’ve identified where you tend to procastinate and why, you can start to work on your own behaviours. We rely heavily on habits, consciously and unconsciously, to manage our day and our work: habits are typically comprised of a cue or trigger, then the activity or routine, followed by the reward. By looking closely at the cue, we can identify ways to change the activity or routine so that we’re more likely to get it done in good time. For example, if you always end up sorting and submitting your expense receipts at the last possible moment, then rather than using the submission deadline as the cue, make your new cue the moment when you incur the expense, so you build a new habit and mental association around doing the two things (purchasing and filing) in quick succession.
Notice too the reward that each habit results in: what’s the pay-off to you when you complete the task/take the decision? How does it make you feel? Here’s a reward-based example: I’ve been reading a book a week during 2022 and have realised that when I take 15-20 minutes to read during the day, I feel more refreshed physically and mentally and remember the content more (my ‘reward’) compared to when I leave all the reading until bedtime (when I invariably fall asleep after one page and forget what I've read).
If you’ve got a regular reflective practice going already, then use one of those reflective sessions to consider these questions more comprehensively. If you don’t and you’re looking for some speedy answers, you don’t need to work through all six reflections above every time you’re procrastinating; you’ll probably have a immediate sense of which one(s) might be most useful to you to focus on. Or share the list with a colleague, direct report or your team and find out what insights flash for them – a quick chat about this can often shed light on our procrastination problem too. Good luck, let me know what works for you and if you want more personalised support then join my group coaching programme or ask me about my 1:1 coaching packages. A last word of advice: if procrastination is really holding you back right now, don’t make a mental note to come back to this at some unspecified time. Tackle it today.
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