When I’ve set my mind to write about procrastination, it became very quickly clear to me, that there is a lot already out there. I am not going to give you numerous different methods to solve it. Nope, no no. I can’t, really. Instead, in the lines following my own story unfolds and the real struggle is presented to you in its full glory.
Let me introduce the characters, you may already know some of them from the wonderful TED talk by Tim Urban. Rational Decision-Maker, Instant Gratification Monkey and the best of them all, Panic Monster. As the last character, it is me, the humble human whose head is the living playground for them all.
There is a believe that all of us procrastinate on something, meaning, we needlessly delay working or even starting on a task. I am myself very aware of this and it caused me great pains in my life. I have no trouble with starting to work on tasks in the business or at school, but I needlessly delay work on our house or my sports training. As you can see, tasks I procrastinate on are those, that are either for my, or my family benefit, but are not crucial per se and maybe, maybe they can wait. What might be already clear to you took quite a time to get sorted in my head, the tasks I procrastinate on are actually more valuable to my happiness than those I push through in my work. Heh, what?
In addition to that, I also tend to needlessly delay by watching all the crowd favorites, streaming and video platforms are just, well, crazy. See, we do not have a TV in our house, but, we have our phones everywhere. How easy it is to fire up your phone or tablet and dive right into a fantasy story taking you out of your life with your hard tasks into an amazing new world, or maybe you fancy watching sports, TV shows, cooking shows, pottery or glass making shows, murder mysteries and so on and on and on and on. And if you get yourself out of that, what about those social media platforms, what did your friends post, your colleagues, someone you follow?
What does it have to do with procrastination you might ask. For me, everything. Don’t take me wrong, I love the age I live in and I do not long for the days without technology. Unfortunately, it is very easy to become a slave to our devices and give in to the endless stream of distractions, minutes turn to hours and all your time you had to work on your tasks is already gone and lost forever. Aaaand all those distractions are the best energy source for our Instant Gratification Monkey while our Rational Decision Maker is screaming somewhere in the corner and our panic monster is chasing monkeys of people who are even in a deeper trouble then we are.
“The issue of short-term mood repair in favor of long-term goal pursuit is a crucial one when it comes to addressing our procrastination”
- Dr. Timothy A. Pychyl, Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change
We need to learn to be mindful, to be present in the moment, to understand the pulls and pushes in our lives and know our emotions. If the main challenge is with the mood repair, which I guess in my case is really true in a lot of cases, as I watch videos and streams mainly when I need to chill out or when I feel too stressed to do anything hard, how do we deal with it. For me, I am going to try and use the following method of implementation intentions:
“Implementation intentions facilitate goal attainment on the basis of psychological mechanisms that pertain to the specified situation in the if-part and to the mental link forged between the if-part and the specified goal-directed response in the then-part of the plan”
- Gollwitzer & Oettingen, 2011
“Think: IF I feel negative emotions when I face the task at hand, THEN I will stay put and not stop, put off a task, or run away”
- Dr. Timothy A. Pychyl, Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change
To adopt the strategy above, we have to feel our emotions, recognize them and not give into the hands of instant gratification monkey and postpone the task to tomorrow in order to watch an amazing movie that just popped on our streaming platform of choice. There will never be the right tomorrow to start working on the task, you can always find another reason why tomorrow you do the same.
“Once we start a task, it is rarely as bad as we think. Our research shows us that getting started changes our perceptions of a task. It can also change our perception of ourselves in important ways” and “Once we start a task, it is rarely as bad as we think. In fact, many participants made comments when we paged them during their last-minute efforts that they wished they had started earlier - the task was actually, interesting, and they thought they could do a better job with a little more time”
- Dr. Timothy A. Pychyl, Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change
Now, you might think, ok, but I cannot just simply start every task that comes to me as that would make me context switch a lot and that might not be the best idea. I commit to the following set of implementation intentions:
IF a new task comes to my mind while I am working on another, THEN I write it down along with its perceived priority
IF the new task has a higher priority and is not a distraction, THEN I will switch and start on it right now, ELSE I stay put on my current task
IF I feel negative emotions when I face the task at hand, THEN I will stay put and not stop, put off a task or run away.
(by the way, have I mentioned I also develop software from time to time? My developer brain is happy when IF THEN ELSE is used :D)
If you boil it down, it is about mindfulness, recognizing your emotions when there is a task at hand you need to start on, you start and if there is one you need to continue on, you stay put and do the work. Sounds easy right? It is all but easy and we’ll continue to dig deeper together as I implement the rule above and start adding another practices on top. I do believe for me, I have to internalize the intentions above, they need to be always available when I make decisions on what to spend my time on.
And what about you? What implementation intentions you can set-up for yourselves to fight that monkey?