Procrastinating 101: Catching Up to the Can We Kicked

This week's Procrastinating 101 deals with Chapter 7 of Dr. Timothy Pychyl's book, The Procrastinator's Digest:  A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle.  Chapter 7 is entitled "Why Getting Started Isn't the Whole Solution."

At this over-halfway mark, Dr. Pychyl warns that "just getting started," as he advised in the previous chapter, engenders positive feelings.  Wait.  Warns?  Positive feelings?  All good, right?

Wrong.  Because those positive feelings can come back to bite us, setting us up for another round with those "biases in planning and thinking" that we know so well.  You might say (if you want to ring an over-used chime in this seemingly endless political season) we've "kicked the can down the road."

And so, says Pychyl,

we have to recognize other points at which we typically abandon our goal pursuit.  We have to be prepared to address each of these as they arise, otherwise we will fall back into habitual ways of responding. . . . [because] [p]rocrastination is not just a failure to get started.

And specifically

We have to be prepared to deal with changes in our mood related to setbacks and disappointments.  We have to be prepared to deal with distractions.  We have to be prepared to overcome obstacles.

Pychyl puts forth two main strategies to deal with this "delayed onset procrastination."  (As a runner who has suffered DOMS--delayed onset muscle soreness--I contributed this term.)  Here again, predecisions and implementation intentions are key.

The first approach is to "predecide" to eliminate/limit distractions--proactively.  The second is to formulate "if/then" implementation intentions to deal with distractions, obstacles and setbacks.  Ala this chapter's mantra--"I need to be prepared to deal with distractions, obstacles and setbacks."

Pychyl provides the following table to help us identify the distractions, obstacles and setbacks we typically experience with respect to or main procrastinated task(s); and to formulate a strategy to head them off proactively, or to resist the urge to procrastinate when they occur.

Distraction, Obstacle or Setback	Remove Proactively?	Implementation Intention
Example:  Email	Yes, shut it off before I work.
Example:  Friends’ Invitations		IF my friends call to invite me out this weekend, THEN I will immediately say “thanks but no, I’m committed to finishing my work.”
Example:  Stuck on my work and don’t know what to do		IF I get stuck, confused and worried because I don’t know what to do, THEN I will stay put and list what I do know to be sure what it is I don’t know.  Once I know this, I can seek help if needed.  I won’t give up.

Next week, willpower.  In the meantime you're missing some great cartoons, and lots more detail if you don't read the book.

Procrastinating 101: Just Start, to Finish

Okay.  It's Tuesday.  I don't know about you, but I'm still a procrastinator, in some form or another.  So it's time, once again, for Procrastinating 101--our (mostly) weekly survey class-type discussion of the findings and writings of experts in the field.

At present, we are making our way through Dr. Timothy Pychyl's blessedly boiled-down treatment, The Procrastinator's Digest:  A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle.  We are up to Chapter 6:  "The Power of Getting Started."

And the mantra for this chapter?  "Just get started."

So, let's begin.  

Pychyl tells us that "getting started changes our perceptions of a task," according to research he has conducted.  Specifically, once we have gotten our feet wet with respect to a dreaded task, we see that task as significantly less unpleasant, onerous, daunting, etc.  And we feel differently about ourselves, too, once we get started--"more in control and more optimistic."  So if we

'prime the pump' by making some progress on our goals, the resulting increase in our subjective well-being enhances further action and progress.

(And now that I am a few paragraphs into writing this post that I couldn't get to earlier today--thanks to a barfing grandson, a moody spouse, and the usual unanticipated work obligations and other interruptions--I feel more positive than when I began.  The post seems more "writeable" and I feel more capable of finishing it.  Dr. Pychyl and his academic crew seem to have gotten this one right.)

At this point, Dr. Pychyl returns to his advice, set out more generally earlier in the book, that we use the device of an implementation intention as a cornerstone of our strategy for change.   This time around, he provides a bit more detail:

As defined in the well-developed psychology of action created by Peter Gollwitzer (University of New York) [mentioned in an earlier post drawing on the book Switch:  How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath], an implementation intention supports a goal intention by setting out in advance when, where and how we will achieve this goal (or at least a sub-goal within the larger goal or task).

 An implementation intention that aims to interrupt our procrastinating behavior pattern could look like this:

IF I say to myself things like, "I'll feel more like doing this later" or "I don't feel like doing this now," THEN I will just get started on some aspect of the task.

Pychyl cautions us against going all Nike--"Just do it!"--lest we get overwhelmed.  We are "pre-deciding" only to start, after which "the 'doing it' will take care of itself."

I was particularly taken with Dr. Pychyl's reference to meditation as an example of something that takes continual "re-starting," as we return our wandering attention to the breath.  He uses this as an analogy for the process of starting on a task, not just once, but again and again throughout the day.

He goes on to provide research-based advice that we need to think concretely about a project, and to begin with a small, tangible action.  For example, we might begin a writing task by typing a title, or assembling references.  I might begin a blog by finding an image, or choosing labels.  

Tucked ever-so-subtly under this positive section describing writing, sculpting, farming, and carpentry as beginning with  "roughing" in, is this bit of "tough love" from the man whose students have dubbed him "Dr. Procrastination:"

Honestly, if you are not ready to make this first step, to just get started, on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis, then put this book down now.  You are not committed to change yet, and nothing else I have to say will matter in your self-change.  Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to discourage you.  I am just being honest.

If we are still hanging in after that "talking-to," Dr. Pychyl directs us to begin concretizing a project on which we have been procrastinating, using the following table:

Goal or Task
Priority or Order of Completion	List of Sub-tasks

   


And now that I've reached the end of this post, please excuse me while I proceed to fill in the cells with every trivial thing I can think of which might move me closer to the completion of my novel.  Of course, sharpening pencils is not only the most tired of cliches, but also anachronistic.  But what about cutting out pictures for a story board?  Or replacing the lamp in my work room?  Or . . . .

Procrastinating 101: Thinking Like a Human

Chapter 5 in Dr. Timothy Pychyl's book The Procrastinator's Digest:  A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle--entitled "Excuses & Self-Deception:  How our Thinking Contributes to our Procrastination"--is the basis of today's Procrastinating 101.  And his mantra for this chapter?  "I need to be aware of my rationalizations."

According to Dr. Pychyl, screwy thinking that supports the procrastination habit includes the human tendencies to:

1. discount future rewards in relation to short-term rewards
2. underestimate the time things will take and overestimate how much we can do  [leads to poor planning]
3. prefer tomorrow over today [eventually leads, via something psychologists call intransitive preference, to the point right before a deadline where not only is tomorrow no longer preferable to today as a starting date, but in fact a previous date--no longer available--is preferred to today]
4. self-handicap to protect self-esteem [like starting so late that you can't be expected to do really well on a project]
5. think irrationally about the task at hand and our ability to accomplish the task [like insist on perfection, for example], and
6. manufacture our own happiness by changing our thinking to be consistent with our behavior [i.e., contending with cognitive dissonance, which creates its own problems].

In order to cope with cognitive dissonance, procrastinators may employ 

• distraction 
• forgetting
• trivialization
• self-affirmation
• denial of responsibility
• adding consonant cognitions
• making downward-counterfactuals ("It could've been worse!"), and 
• [actually] changing behavior.  

Changing behavior would involve acting, instead of procrastinating--something that is difficult to do, and therefore not so likely.  The other coping strategies on this list, while they may result in better feelings in the present, can be maladaptive.  A better approach is what Pychyl calls "planful-problem-solving".  

Dr. Pychyl also reminds us, as we have learned from others in our Procrastinating 101 series, that, despite what many of us believe, in most cases we don't "work best under pressure."  (He includes in this chapter a pretty frightening cartoon, in which one of our last-minute brethren finally gets around to thinking about packing his parachute on the way down!  Maybe that will scare some of us straight--or early.)

Pychyl's main piece of advice in this chapter is that we identify those irrational thoughts that lead us to procrastinate; and having done that, that we form an implementation intention, which he described in his Chapter 3.  In this way, the irrational thought becomes the cue (e.g., "If I catch myself thinking/saying 'I work best under pressure,') to implement the desired change in our thinking ("then I remind myself that this is self-deception, and just get started on the task").

He leaves us with the assignment to list our typical excuses for procrastinating, something he says may take some time.  These lies we tell ourselves, when we hear them asserting themselves again, can then be used to trigger the new response--just get started.  

Next week, we will learn from Dr. Pychyl why this approach works.   I don't know about you, but from where I sit, it sounds too easy to be true.  But just in case, I plan to show up next week with rationalizations and excuses in hand, willing to take the plunge.  But not without packing my chute.  Not even this inveterate relier on that most motivating of hours--the 11th--would leave that to the last minute.

Procrastinating 101: Tomorrow--You're ALWAYS a Day Away

In Annie's rose-colored version of the song, tomorrow is a haven for hope, a raincheck, something to pin one's dreams to when today disappoints.  Dr. Timothy Pychyl, author of The Procrastinator's Digest:  A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, would have us sing it differently. 

Annie's view is that "Tomorrow is only a day away."  We don't have long to wait.  Dr. Pychyl points out that tomorrow, as a repository of new energy, better mood and motivation, never comes--it's "always a day away."

That cheery observation is the main message of Dr. Pychyl's Chapter 4, "Why We Won't Feel Like it Tomorrow." In today's Procrastinating 101 we continue digesting Pychyl's digest--kind of like a crib sheet from Cliff Notes.

Pychyl's formula should be familiar by now.  Each chapter includes a mantra.  Chapter 4's is "I won't feel more like doing it tomorrow."

His exposition of the issue presents some useful terms from the psychological literature, which were new to this reader of all things procrastinational.

The first is affective forecasting, which is basically our flawed attempt to plan actions based on how we think we're going to feel in the future.  In the case of procrastinators, this usually consists of a false expectation that the task that is so onerous today will be less so tomorrow--a tomorrow which Pychyl has warned us against waiting for.

And we go wrong in forecasting our future feelings because of 

• focalism--"the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings in the future" and
• presentism--putting "too much emphasis on the present in our prediction of the future."

And here's the "catch"--"when we intend a future action, our affective state is often particularly positive."

Pychyl's strategies for dealing with this human foible?

Strategy #1--Time travel

What he apparently has in mind here is getting more specific about the future.  For example, in thinking about retirement, he recommends we chart and spreadsheet our way to a more realistic picture of how current decisions will affect our future economic wherewithal.  

Although this practice might prove useful, Pychyl is concerned that us ditherers may engage in second-order procrastination--i.e., putting off the planning exercise intended to ward off procrastination.  Ah, there's a term for this troublesome behavior of mine.

Never fear, however.  There's a back-up strategy.

Strategy #2--Expect to be wrong and deal with it

As we have gotten used to doing with iffy weather forecasts and downright unreliable economic predictions, we can learn to discount our lousy predictions.  Pychyl outlines two approaches to doing this:

Approach #1-- Accept that "My current motivational state does not need to match my intention in order to act."

As Pychyl asserts, "This is a common misconception about goal pursuit; we believe that we have to actually feel like it.  We don't."

Approach #2--Similar to #1.  Kind of the difference between sucking it up today, and sucking it up tomorrow.  Realizing that when we do arrive at tomorrow, our mood is not going to be as good as we anticipated yesterday when we made the plan to act, we can plunge in anyway.  

"[T]he thing to do it to remember that this is a transient mood."  "And to know that this [being dismal at mood prediction, and having to pay the piper] is a common problem with being human."

The hope is that motivation will follow behavior.  Once we get going, we will feel more like continuing.

As Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, tells of her father's running program, which depended on the minimal commitment to "put on his running shoes and close the door behind him," behavior can produce attitude/motivation, as well as the other, perhaps more usual, way around.

The whole thing seems to me to amount to calling our own bluff.  For those of us who have fallen prey to our own fairy tales about "the day to come" more times than we care to admit, this sort of wising up should not be rocket science.

Procrastinating 101: What We Have Here is a Failure to Self-Regulate

In this week's Procrastinating 101, we continue to learn from Dr. Timothy Pychyl, author of The Procrastinator's Digest:  A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle.  His third chapter asks, and answers, the question "What's the Most Important Thing We Need to Know About Procrastination?"

And the answer is . . . 

Procrastination is an issue of self-regulation, or impulse control--which we have read about before.  Pychyl says our procrastinating is directed at "short-term mood repair," and that it is self-reinforcing.  We put off a dreaded or unpleasant task; we feel better; we learn that putting off tasks feels good; we are more likely to do it again.

So what does Pychyl see as the way out of this cycle?

Step 1:  Get smarter emotionally.  Pychyl defines emotional intelligence--a term widely used since its academic emergence in the mid-1980s, and having trickled into popular parlance by way of talk shows, magazine articles, blogs, even elementary school curricula--as "the ability to effectively identify and utilize emotions to guide behavior."

Apparently, "[r]ecent research has shown that lower emotional intelligence is related to more procrastination" but, thankfully, "[w]e can learn to more effectively perceive, understand and regulate our emotions."

Having recognized the emotional morass that leads to procrastination (and to other "poor choices," as grade school teachers are known to point out), the challenge is to get it together and stop acting out about our feelings.  As in

Step 2:  Learn to deal with the negative emotions associated with the tasks we tend to procrastinate.  Here's where the mantra for this chapter comes in:  "I won't give in to feel good.  Feeling good now, comes at a cost."

Using this statement to remind ourselves of what we know, we can stay put instead of fleeing the scene of an impending task, and "suck it up."  "If you turn away in an effort to make yourself feel better, it's over," warns Pychyl. 

Pychyl sums up his approach this way:

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.

He references the work of Peter Gollwitzer on implementation intentions, which take this IF/THEN form.   The stay put admonishment made me think of the Butt in Chair writer's guide developed by Jennifer Blanchard, author of the excellent, now-defunct-but-still-archived blog Procrastinating Writers. 

Dr. Pychyl softens the "suck it up" bromide with this suggestion.  We can overcome our discomfort with the negative emotions engendered by unappealing tasks by accessing some of the other thoughts and feelings that are also part of our "inner landscape."  For example, instead of focusing on the fear triggered by a daunting project, we can center our thoughts on the anticipation of success and reward, or on our interest in the content, or on our capable self.  

Again, a pithy treatise.  And because it's short, I still have time to get to some of the things I've been avoiding. . .  

"I won't give in to feel good.  Feeling good now, comes at a cost."

"I won't give in to feel good.  Feeling good now, comes at a cost."

"I won't give in to feel good.  Feeling good now, comes at a cost."

Procrastinating 101: Charting our Way Out

So it's Tuesday morning, and time, once again, for Procrastinating 101.  And between now and dinner time, I have to bake a requested Red Velvet Cake for my Valentine's Day birthday child, who turns 21 today.  And shop for its ingredients, and some other stuff.  And deposit my paycheck so I can pay for the shopping.  And find the check I've mislaid since picking it up yesterday.  And report to work for three hours.  And prepare dinner, and a room to eat it in.  And pick up our in-for-repairs-AGAIN car on the other side of the city.  And figure out when and how I'm going to exercise.  And pay an overdue bill.  And work on my clients' projects.  And finish this blog post.  And. . . and. . . and. . .

At least some of this workload is the result of things put off earlier--though I probably couldn't get them done before because I was dealing with that day's backlog.  Was there some original sin of procrastination that has set this all in motion?  Am I doomed to be playing catch-up ad infinitum?

In any case, I'm ready to learn what Dr. Timothy Pychyl's The Procrastinator's Digest:  A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle can teach us today.

Chapter 2--"Is procrastination really a problem?  What are the costs of procrastinating?"--begins with the ponderous mantra "Procrastination is failing to get on with life itself."  Sounds like a pretty big, all-encompassing problem, not the minor irritation of stand-up comedy legend.  The kind of thing likely to cause some serious regrets, as Dr. Pychyl learned from a psychologist expert in grief counseling.  

The regrets of omission related to our procrastination were most troubling in the grieving process.

And procrastination has a negative effect on the quality of our work (Pychyl cites Dr. Piers Steel's meta-analysis); our feelings (research shows that, even though we are ostensibly choosing an initially more pleasant state, in fact we're not enjoying it all that much, as feelings of guilt and dread intrude); and our health (as a result of stress, and failure to deal with health maintenance in a timely way).

But the bigger picture cost of procrastination is at the heart of the chapter's mantra.  As Pychyl exhorts us

When we procrastinate on our goals, we are our own worst enemy.  These are our goals, our tasks, and we are needlessly putting them off. . . . When we procrastinate on our goals, we are basically putting off our lives.

Dr. Pychyl is brilliantly concise, as befits his small book, in characterizing procrastination as 

a symptom of existential malaise . . . that can only be addressed by our deep commitment to authoring the stories of our lives 

and reminding us that

[t]o author our own lives, we have to be an active agent in our lives, not a passive participant making excuses for what we are not doing.  When we learn to stop needless, voluntary delay in our lives, we live more fully.

I don't know about you, but he makes me want to get off my butt and get on with it.

As a strategy for strengthening our commitment to act, Dr. Pychyl sends us once again to the chart.  This one directs us to reflect on costs and benefits related to those goals we have been putting off.  I have filled mine in in a preliminary, cursory fashion below, working as I am with limited space and time.  (And planning to avoid too much public self-incrimination.)

Task, project, goal, activity	Costs associated with procrastination	Benefits of acting in a timely fashion
Working on my novel	Someone else has already written some of the books I could have done	The satisfaction of being who I want to be, doing what I supposedly want to do
Tackling the basement	Continuing irritation, inconvenience, and potential injury	Finding long lost stuff, friends, whatever else may be lurking there
Researching/implement Living Trust	Dread of battling children scarier than death itself	Peace of mind
Meditating	Feeling harried too frequently	Lower blood pressure; feeling calmer
Making travel arrangements	Higher costs of plane tickets purchased within days of departure	Savings; more travel choices
Making medical appointments	Exacerbating physical problems	Recovering sooner; limiting damage

Go ahead.  Try it yourself. We have nothing to lose but our time--which some of us aren't making the best use of anyway!

Procrastinating 101: For Those With Short Attention Spans, a Little Book on Procrastination

Having dawdled through the last volume selected for Procrastinating 101--Diana DeLonzor's Never Be Late Again:  7 Cures for the Punctually Challenged--today we begin to make our way through The Procrastinator's Digest:  A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, by Timothy Pychyl, Ph.D.

The good news is that Dr. Pychyl's book is intentionally short (though not that short--the image here is hyperbole).  As Pychyl says, in answer to the question he imagines his readers pondering--"Why is the book so short?"--

Too often, we start books, read the first chapter or two, and never pick it up again (although we intend to finish it!).  Among procrastinators, this is a terrible risk.  In fact, procrastination is defined by this intention-action gap.  I do not want to contribute to this, so I have written a short book.  [emphasis mine]

While it may be that Dr. Pychyl ran out of sabbatical before he could complete a longer book, I, for one, appreciate his brevity.  I embrace his rationale.  And I am looking forward to his ten short chapters, punctuated with mantras, comics, and practical advice.

The first of these begins with a definition we have seen before--

Procrastination is the voluntary delay of an intended action despite the knowledge that this delay may harm the individual in terms of the task performance or even just how the individual feels about the task or him- or herself.  Procrastination is a needless voluntary delay.

The definition underscores the chapter's mantra, and main point:  "All procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination."

Personally, I am still trying to untangle this assertion as it applies to my own life, and task-challenges.  My formerly Catholic guilty self is prone to accepting blame for the type of delay Dr. Pychyl would let me off the hook for, while at the same time my lazy task-avoidant self tends to overuse excuses.  And then there are those I've met who complicate things by holding me responsible for life circumstances that promote delay--rather like the charge that individuals with cancer are culpable for the personality flaws that invited their disease.  In this vein is the "trainer" who accused me of having adopted one of my children in order to avoid completing my dissertation.

At the heart of the type of delay that is procrastination, says Pychyl, is "our own reluctance to act . . . when it is in our best interest to act."  Conquering procrastination, he asserts, relies on coming to "understand this reluctance," and implementing strategies to change what has become a habit of procrastinating.

In this first chapter, his "initial strategy for change" is to begin to distinguish delay from procrastination in our own lives.  As what he labels a "thought experiment," Dr. Pychyl advises listing "those tasks, projects, activites or 'things'" that we think we are procrastinating, and noting in writing--without overthinking--the thoughts and feelings we associate with each.

This seems useful, and do-able to me.  

My preliminary take:
 

Some Stuff I May Be Procrastinating About

Task, project, goal, activity	Feelings, thoughts about this task/goal
Working on my novel	Want uninterrupted work time Does the world need another half-baked story? Am I a good enough writer to do this project? Fear; frustration
Tackling the basement	Feeling overwhelmed Afraid to see how bad it is Not enough light, since the lighting project has not been completed
Researching/implementing Living Trust	One more complicated item to add to my already too-long list Afraid of the complexity, and the emotions stemming from step-family issues
Meditating	Too many other things to do Don’t have time Circumstances not conducive Difficulty settling down; distractions
Making travel arrangements	Worried about spending the money Too difficult to sort out all the scheduling issues Don’t like leaving my work and family
Making medical appointments	Worried about spending the money Afraid I’ll find out something bad Fear of having my blood pressure taken Difficulty squeezing appointments into my schedule

And now I'm supposed to look for patterns.  Hmmm. . . . Does it look like there's some fear at work here?