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.

To Curb Procrastination, Close Some Windows

In reading Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, I discovered (not rediscovered, because they were new to me) several gems--concepts that help me think about my struggles with productivity, creativity, activity, proclivity, and all those other troublesome "ivities." One that comes to mind this morning is the Zeigarnik effect. 

Not so long ago (in the mid 1920s), in a galaxy not so far away (Vienna, to be exact,) Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian psychologist, was lunching with some other psychologists.  She was struck by their waiter's ability to remember a complex set of orders without writing them down.  But afterwards, one of the party returned to the restaurant in search of a misplaced item.  The waiter had no memory of having waited on this individual a short time ago, or indeed, of having ever seen the person before.  Which got Zeigarnik to thinking.  And when psychologists start thinking, researching is seldom far behind.

What Zeigarnik learned, in a series of studies, was that those tasks we leave unfinished tend to remain in our short-term memory.  

Jeremy Dean, at PsyBlog, joins Baumeister and Tierney in fleshing out what this has to do with procrastination.  (And he has a wonderful vintage picture of Ms. Zeigarnik, looking soulful and inquisitive.)  He uses the model of the "cliffhanger," so frustratingly familiar to TV series viewers, to illustrate the power of the unfinished.


The lesson for procrastinators, asserted by Baumeister and Tierney, and by Dean, is that we continue to be distracted, to hold in consciousness, those tasks that we have left "hanging."  This distractedness gets in the way of our ability to focus on the task at hand, leading us to go "off-task" at least mentally, dividing our attention and diminishing our productivity.  The solution, say Baumeister and Tierney, is to figure out how to park those tasks that are in process, such that they don't keep "popping up."  They advise us to make a specific plan, detailing when and how such projects will be taken up again, including precise next steps.  They maintain that this strategy will reduce stress, improve focus, and lead to a higher rate of task completion.


The image that comes to my mind is not the TV cliffhanger, but my cluttered computer desktop.  My son remonstrates with me regularly about the number of windows and applications I have open at any given time.  This ADHD-style computer usage causes my processor to overheat, and to slow down to a primordial pace.  The solution?  Close some windows.  Close a lot of windows.  I literally can't complete what I'm working on with gillions of applications running in the background, and scores of tabs open.  


My brain, it seems, is experiencing the same difficulty.  The solution?  Close some windows.  Close a lot of windows.  Calendar them, bookmark them, list them, delegate them, organize them. . . .  And close them.

For Procrastinators: A Cautionary Tale of Your Own Making

Remember Mad Libs?  If you have kids, or have been one more recently than I have, you have probably spent some time with these wacky little fill-in-the-blanks stories, and hopefully some of it in shared hysterics.  Because I need a break today, and a laugh above all else, I am presenting this Procrastinator's Mad Lib (which is kind of redundant, don't you think?).  My own fill-ins appear in list form, at the end.  Enjoy!  (Don't you just hate when they say that?)

Still Procrastinating, After All These Years VERB ADVERB PLURAL NOUN ADJECTIVE NOUN NOUN NOUN EXCLAMATION ADJECTIVE NOUN NOUN NOUN PAST TENSE VERB VERB NOUN VERB ENDING IN ING ADJECTIVE NOUN NUMBER PLURAL NOUN NOUN NOUN NOUN VERB ADJECTIVE PLURAL NOUN ADJECTIVE PLURAL NOUN ADJECTIVE NOUN NOUN NOUN ADJECTIVE ADJECTIVE NOUN NOUN NOUN VERB NOUN PLURAL NOUN DAY OF THE WEEK NOUN DAY OF THE WEEK VERB ENDING IN ING NOUN VERB ENDING IN ING VERB ENDING IN ING NOUN

My fill-ins, left to right

Consider	Stupidly	Fiascos	Tiny	Pride	Sound
River	yikes	Sandy	Cormorant	Train	Sliver
Cooked	Eat	Store	Spilling	Trendy	Sidewalk
42	Swans	Kitchen	Novel	Friendship	Stomp
Clumsy	Results	Fertile	Crowds	Raggedy	Armchair
Steed	Saber	Far-fetched	Silver	Pretense	Drama
Copyright	Clone	Stone	Sheep	Thursday	Can
Friday	Cramming	Shoes	Participating	Cringing	Pansy

I'd love to see your tales.

Procrastinating 101: Late (Again) Because Too Many Funny Things Happened on the Way to Wherever

Is this you?

Or this?

Or this?

                                          Absent-Minded Professor Brainard's housekeeper tries to keep                                                 him from missing his wedding--for the third time!

Then this week's Procrastinating 101 may just resonate, as we look at "Cure Five:  Get Focused and Organized" in Diana DeLonzor's Never Be Late Again:  7 Cures for the Punctually Challenged.

According to Ms. DeLonzor's schema, the Absent-Minded Professor is one of the seven types of chronically late people--which you might be if you answer yes to two or more of the following questions:

• Do I frequently forget appointments, meetings, or where I put the car keys?
• Do I often forget names and details of conversations?
• Have I frequently been accused of being unobservant or of not paying attention?
• Do I notice that the light has turned green only after the driver behind me honks?
• Do I regularly digress from the subject when speaking?
• Do I jump from one activity to another before the first is finished?

(That would be three yeses for me.)

DeLonzor says that three main "problem areas" typify those of us who find ourselves in this overall profile: 

• Distractibility (like The Family Circus's Billy)
• Forgetfulness and Disorganization (like, well, me)
• Lack of Awareness of Others (like Fred McMurray's Prof. Brainard, who kept forgetting to show up for his own wedding)

The legions of individuals who are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder--like one of my children--have major struggles in these areas.  But not all of them, or of the rest of us, need Ritalin or some other concoction to cope.  And we can all benefit, argues DeLonzor, by taking these three steps:

• Learning to stay focused on one thing for a sustained period of time
• Getting organized and adding structure to our lives
• Increasing our awareness and observation of other people

As in her previous chapters, DeLonzor approaches our reform by outlining a series of exercises designed to help identify the ways in which these behaviors and tendencies are making us late, and practicing new habits.  

My favorites on her list?  Meditation to improve focus; and establishing times and days for certain tasks.  The first of these I continue to work on making time for, finding that the more I need it the less likely I am to do it--grrr!   The second is perennially difficult for me as well.  And I am not helped much by my freelancer's schedule.  I am inspired by DeLonzor's simple instruction, however, to make another attempt to set up at least a skeletal structure, and to resist the impulse to agree to whatever scheduling requests and changes my clients and part-time employers might suggest. 

So no, Ms. S, I can't squeeze in covering for you at a luncheon next week.  I'll be meditating.

And next week Tuesday?  I'll be here blogging about Cure 6--for the timeliness Rebels in the crowd. 

Procrastinating 101: The Long and the Short of It

If Dr. Piers Steel is to be believed, we procrastinators may be about to run out of excuses.  (And God knows, we love our excuses!)  It's his persuasive argument, and his damned (good) practical advice that may prove their undoing.

Procrastinating 101 has been focusing these last nine weeks on Dr. Steel's book, The Procrastination Equation:  How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done.  If you have been following its exposition, you may remember Dr. Steel's assertion that poor impulse control is at the heart of most procrastination.  In Chapter Nine, "In Good Time:  Managing Short-term Impulses and Long-term Goals," he lays out the problem more fully, details some creative solutions, and throws in a little ancient Greek literature.  As we have come to expect, Dr. Steel is once again an eminently companionable and unassailably (I looked it up--it's really a word.) knowledgeable tour guide through these regions of Planet Procrastination.

"Impulsiveness," says Steel, "multiplies the effect of delay, making it a major determinant of the Procrastination Equation's outcome."  For those who have not yet seen Steel's formulation, and those who have but have not committed it to memory, the mathematical expression he has devised to represent his theory of procrastination looks like this:

Here low Motivation predicts the big P, Procrastination.  The other elements have been teased out in previous posts (see, particularly, Procrastinating 101: 12-year-olds Get It, So Can We ).

Impulsiveness contributes to the divisor in the equation, so that the more impulsive among us will experience lower motivation, and thus be more inclined to procrastinate.  And, as Dr. Steel warns, "you can't escape your fate.  Impulsiveness is not something you have, but something you are."  Yikes!

But there is hope, and it begins with Odysseus.  Dr. Steel recounts the preparations urged upon Odysseus by the goddess Circe, who knew that he would face, on his return trip from Troy, the temptress Sirens.  Circe advised him to plug his men's ears with wax, and to lash himself to the mast of his ship, so that he would be able to pass through the district of these irresistible creatures and continue his journey.  Thus, Odysseus employed the technique of precommitment.

Dr. Steel recommends we face the fact that temptations too often get the better of us, leading us off task and into putting off what we need to get done.  We would do well to identify our Sirens, and to invest in precommitment.

He offers three contemporary strategies (no ear wax or ship masts required) for precommitting, intriguingly categorized under the heading "Bonding, Satiation and Poison."  For the sake of brevity, and my sanity (it has been a looonnnnnngggggggg week!), I will just hit the highlights here:  

• Throw Away the Key--The idea here is to devise a way, technological or analog, to block off the exits while focusing on work.  Steel mentions, e.g., a program for Apple users called Freedom, which blocks internet access; Clocky, an alarm clock on wheels that goes berserk when you hit Snooze; and Google's "Take a break" button, which gives the user fifteen minutes of email-free work time.
• Satiation--This approach addresses our urges and impulses by having us "tank up," scheduling in a modicum of pleasure and relaxation, and then slotting in work around these "appointments."  Dr. Neil Fiore popularized this Unschedule in his book The Now Habit:  A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play.
• Try Poison--This strategy features penalties & scare tactics.  One example was employed by my ex-husband in his dissertation research on behavior change.  Participants put up $100, which was forfeited to their least favorite cause or charity if they resumed smoking during the study period.  Alternatively, Dr. Steel recommends visualizing in horrifying detail the dire consequences that could result from putting off a dreaded task.

Then there's "Making Attention Pay," Steel's two-pronged advice for diminishing the pull of distractions/temptations.

• Inside Out:  Pay Attention Please!--We can minimize the appeal of those objects and activities that would keep us from work by altering our perceptions, and thus the level of attention these things command.  Using abstraction and symbolic representation--e.g., focusing on attributes of a desired food, and thus recruiting the prefrontal cortex to compete with the limbic system response of "yum," "gimme"--is one way of doing this.  Another is to run a "smear campaign" on the desired object, attending to its negative qualities and consequences--e.g., weight gain and high cholesterol from junk food; STDs, unwanted pregnancy and a ruined marriage from infidelity; or public disgrace and firing from failure to complete work.
• Outside In:  Now You See It, Now You Don't (stimulus control)--This approach attempts to limit the environmental cues which distract us.  For example, a dieter might stock the fridge with only healthy food choices.  Those of us who struggle to stay on task might limit the number of windows open on our computer desktops; remove troublesome bookmarks; arrange our work spaces to cue work and not entertainment; incorporate work triggers; and--addressing two of my personal pet peeves--declutter our work space, and maintain "pristine" boundaries between "clashing life domains, typically family and work."  Hard to do for the increasing number of us who work from home, and whose laptops accompany us from one messy and distracting space and location to another.

And finally, Scoring Goals.

Dr. Steel has this to say about goals:

We have already touched on some of what makes a goal good.  In chapter 7, we mentioned that making goals challenging is more inspiring than making them attainable.  Easy goals are attainable. . . .In chapter 8, we focused on making goals meaningful by linking them to personally relevant aspirations.  If you see how present tasks lead to future rewards, you will value them more highly.  In this chapter, we will put the finishing touches on goal setting by putting time back on your side.

• The Finish Line is Just Ahead--Dr. Steel's suggestion in this section is to proceed toward "concrete, exact" goals by stages, using subgoals.  In this way, we can take advantage of our tendency to work more intensely closer to deadline; a series of intermediate "deadlines" will result in spreading out effort, and a better quality product.  He discusses the issue of "motivational surface tension," and using a technique I first learned from Alan Lakein (in How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life)--setting a mini-goal that gets us started, and more often than not, ultimately engaged in the work we're avoiding.
• Full Auto--This advice builds on the predictability that flows from build routines and habits of work.  He also urges us to plan for distraction, as in "'If I lose focus, then I will move my attention back to the task.'"

But again, Dr. Steel says all this better than I.  You might want to just read the book yourself.

Next Week:  Chapter Ten--Making it Work.  We're in the home stretch now!

Procrastinating 101: From Hammock to "Halo"

In week 5 of our sojourn with Dr. Piers Steel's The Procrastination Equation, we consider Chapter 4, "ProcrastiNations:  How Modern Life Ensures Distraction." 

Dr. Steel opens with an engaging tale of his personal struggles with video game addiction.  Of course, he passes off his most recent skirmish as having been in the interests of science.  Thusly:

To better write it [the chapter], I reacquainted myself with an old distraction, purposefully re-infecting myself with what had afflicted me for so long as a student--video games. . . . for the purposes of this book. . . . Oh, the sacrifices I make for science!

Wow!  Taking one for the cause.  And his drug of choice?  Conquer Club, the electronic version of Risk, a board game which nearly ended my first marriage, long before I eventually ended it myself, for much more mature reasons.

Steel identifies the following "elements" of his ensuing enslavement, typical of the situation too many of us find ourselves in these days.

• proximity to temptation
• virulence of the temptation
• variable reinforcement
• instantaneous reward

Following his consideration of the harmful nature of this form of entertainment, he goes on to discuss the even greater damage wrought by TV, in the six decades plus since it was welcomed into our hearths and homes, and its ongoing inroads with near-universal adoption of cable and digital service, DVR technology, and migration to computers and smart phones.

And then there's the Internet itself, with its (ahem) blogosphere, 24/7 email, and social networking.  (Excuse me while I take a brief break to check my Facebook page.)  Not to mention the lure, for an information junkie like myself, of all the reference material (refereed and not), arcane tidbits, and spiritually uplifting (or not) stuff (for lack of a better word.  No, wait.  My computer-housed thesaurus suggests "resources."  Yes, much better.)

And the games!  No console necessary.  (My personal Waterloo?  Bejeweled Blitz.  And it's on Facebook.  A two-fer!)  One-stop shopping for the procrastinator.  Oh, and I forgot to mention the shopping!  (Where else could I spend 45 minutes searching for the exotic new tea-processing device I recently saw in Seattle?  Or the perfect, like-new triathlon suit for my next race?)

Dr. Steel doesn't mention porn, but no matter whose numbers you believe, it seems pretty clear that the pursuit of prurient interests on the Internet is not adding to our productivity.  One much-cited source tells us that 25% of all search engine requests (68 million a day) and 35% of all Internet downloads are pornographic; that every second, 28,258 Internet users are viewing porn; and that 20% of men and 13% of women (but not this one) admit to watching pornography at work.  Another claims that 70% of all Internet porn traffic occurs during the 9 to 5 workday.

But whatever we're doing on the Internet, and the TV, and our cell phones, smart and otherwise, and our Wii's and Playstations and X-Boxes, and our iPads, a lot of it could properly be termed procrastination.

As Dr. Steel says, "Every distraction the modern world offers also exacerbates the mismatch between who we are and what we need to be."  

And, more pointedly, 

Modernization brings with it procrastination.  As our economies have grown over the last few decades, we have experienced a fivefold increase in chronic procrastination.  In the 1970s, 4 to 5 percent of people surveyed indicated that they considered procrastination a key personal characteristic.  Today, that figure is between 20 and 25 percent, the logical consequence of filling our lives with ever more enticing temptations [or of ever more books, articles, and blogs about procrastination?].

 

And while work is as much fun as it ever was (!), whole industries have grown up around the competition for our time and attention.   And with all this proliferation of entertaining alternatives,

[t]he rise of procrastination is hard to avoid, given its deep roots in our brain’s neurobiology.  The limbic system focuses on the now while the prefrontal cortex deals with longer-term concerns. . . . Though both the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex come together to reach a final decision, their duet ensures the rise of procrastination.

And the effect is purposeful, relying on sophisticated design and advertising:

Businesses respond to our dominant desires, so there is no coercion or conspiracy here, just the invisible hand of the market building a limbic system wonderland. With the ubiquitous overemphasis on the immediate and the material, on the instant and the consumable, people are seduced into putting off long-term but ultimately more satisfying goals involving career achievement, volunteering in the community, raising a family or following a spiritual path.  Materialism and consumerism are merely emergent properties of our neurobiology given free rein in a free market.

As he wraps up the chapter, Dr. Steel builds to a crescendo of foreboding, from this Aldous Huxley quote, from Brave New World Revisited-- 

 "All the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized" with the aim of controlling people by finding "the best ways to take advantage of their ignorance and to exploit their irrationality."  

to this from Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death--

“the rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

And finally, to this—

In sum, the free market is geared toward providing increasingly irresistible temptations that distract us from our greater goals.

Never before in our history have there been as many temptations, as succulently devised, as readily available, and as adeptly marketed.  Adam and Eve only had to deal with a juicy apple purveyed by a serpent.  Nowadays, our apple is caramel coated and chocolate dipped, marketed with a multi-million dollar advertising campaign in a blitz of commercials, pop-ups, and inserts.  Inevitably, as our lives drown in these diversions, our procrastination is on the rise.

The exploitation of the limbic system is baked into capitalism and you can’t stop it without making the entire wonderful wealth-generating machinery grind to a halt.  Someone will always create a product that provides short-term pleasure along with considerable but deferred pain simply because we will buy it.  Consequently, dealing with constant temptation and its potential for creating procrastination is and will continue to be part of living in this world. 

But, lucky for us, we

are reading this book. . . . Learning better ways to cope with temptation and procrastination is what we will be doing together in later chapters; we will make the Procrastination Equation work for us, one variable at a time.

Except earlier, Steel hazarded a guess that those of us making our way through this third chapter would have already been engaged in reading the book for about three months—based on statistics about how much time people spend, relatively, watching TV versus reading.  So the (over)haul is likely to be a long one.  

And what of those of us who will remain unremediated?   

I've spent a fair amount of the last, well, more than a decade, reading about young people who are "twice exceptional," "driven to distraction," and "differently abled," in the attempt to facilitate the education and uprearing of my middle child (And what kind of word is that, anyway, uprearing?  And what might it mean about the tendency to "rear up" that I observed in that same dyslexic, ADD, and eventually depressed son, as he wrangled with the academic powers-that-were in his tender years?).  But are any of us, however abled, immune from the cultural influences so hauntingly described by Dr. Steel?  And which is the new, and which the retro neural architecture, and "learning style?" 

Will the successful educational institution, and workplace of the future accommodate the brains our technology is rebuilding, so that work becomes more reinforcing?  My husband, the university professor, has adapted his pedagogy to reflect the cable-ready students who must take his courses.  The end result?  What appears to be real learning seems to be taking place, and students flock to sign up for his classes, and swell his waiting lists.  But is this pandering, akin to the infotainment that passes for news coverage on our TV screens?

Dr. Steel's description of the forces of distraction is compelling, if distressing.  He does not, however, examine the cultural shifts involved in what might be termed our present day procrastination hysteria.  As leisure shrinks, and work and its demands consume us more and more, are we more focused on the unproductivity we therefore problematize?  Steel provides this example of early 20th century exhortations about procrastination, from William Bagley's 1911 treatise on "The Craftmanship of Teaching," in which he described 

 

the "hammock on the porch," the "fascinating novel," and the "happy company of friends" as the "seductive siren call of change and diversion, that evil spirit of procrastination!"

Were the hammock, the novel, and the friends' happy company really so much less distracting a century ago?  Or were those who turned to them perhaps less overwhelmed with work, and less concerned about dalliance?

For myself, as I wrote this piece over the course of the day, I took a page out of Dr. Steel’s book, literally, and got in some Solitaire ‘Til Dawn (Forty Thieves), and a little Facebooking.  I also stopped off at the donut shop for some empty calories to celebrate my son’s return to school, after a several year hiatus for academic detoxing.  I spent some highly distracting, and enjoyable time in a hammock, socializing with my husband and kids.  I read a bit.  I checked my email to see what time I was supposed to meet my running partner.

I'm not always clear what is really "productive," goal-oriented use of my time, and what is real distraction.  I do know, though, that I am enjoying wrestling with Dr. Steel's ideas, and their articulate presentation.

Next week--Chapter 5:  The Personal Price of Procrastination.

The Procrastination Police You Can Download

"Step away from the solitaire."

It's late, and I'm tired.  But I'm making an effort to keep up with Monday through Friday posting.

So tonight, I'm going to pass on this little nugget from my procrastination news reader.

Among the nifty tools available to thwart our inner procrastinators is an app for Mac called Obtract.  According to the review I read, Obtract detects your unproductive computer use, relying on your own definition of what's unproductive (Maybe you really need to be constantly checking Facebook for work?).  When Obtract catches you digitally "procrastinating," it covers your screen with a maze you must solve in order to "buy" the time necessary to engage in said unproductive activity.  

The app can also be used by a team, allowing team members to monitor each other's unproductive time, and to buy unproductive time from each other.

Since I got sucked into the solitaire vortex earlier this evening, while intending to relax from a strenuous day, I decided this would be a perfect time to try out this new app.  I downloaded it for free, but encountered some difficulty setting it up.  I have not yet figured out how to tell it what I consider unproductive.  

Not waiting for instruction, the application determined that blogging was unproductive.  It told me that I had become "too distracted to continue this activity. . ." and should "complete the maze for 5 more minutes of distraction."  So I guess we know what it thinks about the value of this blog!  I had to kill the darn thing, temporarily, in order to complete this apparently unfruitful post.

I'm going to take another stab at bringing Obtract to heel.  When I've got it up and running, I will post an update about its efforts to keep me in line.