A Blogging Handoff

Today got away from me.  Too many appointments, meetings and work commitments.  One too many naps in the sun.  Not nearly enough meals.

So tonight, instead of cranking out some drivel to fill this space, I'm going to direct my Put it to Bed readers to this excellent post on the subject of procrastination, "Why Procrastination Is Good for You: 5 Ways to Make it Work", by Lisa Earl McLeod.

And here's why.  Because:

• It's way better than anything I'm going to write tonight.  Trust me.
• It takes a position pretty much the opposite of what the experts tell us to do about procrastination, which appeals to my inner Che.
• I find myself knee-deep in great posts to read, and bowing out on this occasion will make more reading time available for an existing post that deserves attention.  (If my seven regular readers all follow this bread crumb to the post in question.)
• Of some other reasons I'm too tired to articulate adequately.

Thank you Lisa Earl McLeod, for providing this fortunate "out" for a played out blogger.

What This Procrastinator is Really Doing

Too much talking this week.  I'm out of words.  So I'm falling back on the blogging device of going pop culture.

This "What I'm Really Doing" meme has been done to death.  It's even made it to the Buddhists.  Here's my procrastinator's angle:

Click to Enlarge

Credit to memegenerator.net, which you should visit if you want to get in your shot at this expired equine.

Brain Basics: A User's Cheat Sheet

In the category of resurrected wisdom . . .

Some months ago, I bookmarked an article I came across that was originally published in August of 2009, more than a year before I started writing Put it to Bed.  I have a whole store of such resources, kind of a personal tidbit library.  I periodically visit this cluttered virtual chamber, in search of "writing juice," something that will trigger the process of thought and invention that gives me something to say.

This particular piece caught my eye at the time, and again this morning, because its title resonated with the self-help fatigue that intermittently overcomes those of us who tend to read our way through problems.  "Why do so many self-help books sound the same?" was written by neuroscientist Dr. David Rock for his Psychology Today blog Your Brain at Work:  Using Neuroscience to Improve Daily Life.

In it he says 

It's not that authors are plagiarists, it's that there are a small set of quirks about the brain that require a lot of attention, if you want to succeed in the modern world. The reason these quirks require attention is that they are not insights we might learn automatically, like how to breathe: they require learning, like a language. And these quirks are often hard to remember because in many cases they go against what seems logical.

He identifies the following as five of the bigger quirks:

• The brain is built to firstly minimize danger, before maximizing rewards. This means people tend to naturally err on the side of cautious, even when the opposite would be better. This is an overarching organizing principle of the brain.

• Too much uncertainty feels dangerous. It feels like possible pain so we avoid it.

• Our conscious processing capacity is small, which makes us terrible at a lot of things, including predicting what might make us happy.

• Our capacity to regulate emotions is limited, depletes fast and needs to be used quickly to be effective.

• Our intentions and goals alter the information that the brain pays attention to.

So this is why I struggle with procrastination, and why I spend so much time reading about procrastination.  Because, although I am not encountering so much that's cutting edge, uncharted, or unique, still I need to hear what I already know, at some level, again.  And again.  And yet again.  In picking up one more "handbook," "guide" or "program," I am setting my intention; giving my tiny conscious processing capacity another shot at the material; becoming more familiar with the unknown and uncertain; and learning more about what will make me happy.  

Sometimes I wonder why we ever left the cave.  We are apparently so ill-equipped for the world we inhabit.  We inherit this life-long project of training our outgrown brains for the way we want to live.  And it's a lot of work . . .

1000 Awesome Things for Procrastinators: The First Ten

Like many web visitors, I make frequent pilgrimages to Neil Pasricha's 1000 Awesome Things for inspiration, amusement and cheer.  

For today's post, I am channeling my inner Neil.  If Neil were a procrastinator, or if my inner Neil were awesome, we might see 1000 Awesome Things for Procrastinators.   Here are ten things I can imagine on the list, contributed by the angel and the devil of procrastination, five each:

Good Awesome (from the angel of reform)

#1  Already being in your seat/on your mat/on the dias before your meeting/yoga class/speaker's introduction begins.  (Whew!)

#2 Turning in a project before its due date.

#3 Crossing off backlogged items on your to-do list.

#4 Starting on something well ahead of time.

#5 Facing a clean desk first thing in the morning.

Guilty Pleasure Awesome (sources of joy from the devil of delay)

#1 Finally winning at solitaire (which my old British novels call Patience).  Especially if you're playing the version that celebrates with applause audio and dancing cards!  (Unless you're in public, or at work, where you'll want to mute that potentially embarrassing telltale sound effect.)

#2 Facebook Games!  What a colossal  waste of time!  And you can connect up with your friends and help them waste time too!  And publicize your non productive behavior!

#3 Killing an hour (or two, or three) surfing the web.  Sooooo much good information, and the thrill of addiction.

#4 Letting something go for so long that it becomes moot.  Like finally accepting in May that you're not going to get around to sending holiday cards this (last) year.

#5 Forgetting to write down an appointment, so you can forget to keep it. 

I have not fleshed these out ala Mr. Pasricha, because I am late getting this post done tonight.  But the reader can picture each awesome item accompanied with a charming illustration, and some written long and featuring internal rhymes.  

While I'm at it, here's an Awesome Thing for this blogger--the creative piggyback.  Awesome!

And thank you, Neil Pasricha, the back to my pig.  (Your crown is safe.)

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: 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."

To Do Nothing, or Not?

For much of her childhood, my daughter slept on "Happiness sheets" depicting Charles Schulz's multiple views of this elusive state.  According to this antiquated bed linen, "Happiness is," among other things,  

• being able to reach the doorknob
• finding a caddy who doesn't fall into the hole [i.e., bigger than Woodstock]
• being one of the gang
• one thing to one person and another thing to another person

 In the chapter we reviewed yesterday in Procrastinating 101, Dr. Timothy Pychyl, procrastination researcher and author of The Procrastinator's Digest:  A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle,  tells us that 

both philosophers and psychologists have proposed that happiness is found in the pursuit of our goals.  

He goes on to say, existentially speaking, that 

It is not necessarily that we are accomplishing anything in particular, but that we are engaged in the pursuit of what we think is meaningful in our lives.

So we might conclude that happiness, in addition to being "a warm puppy," is also getting on with doing what we think is important to do.

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project and perhaps the best known of a growing crop of "happy-ologists," has written frequently about procrastination, underscoring this inverse relationship between happiness and procrastination.  Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, she argues that we will be happier if we learn to procrastinate less.  

In a post last week--"Problem With Procrastination? Try This: Do Nothing."--Ms. Rubin considers the advice of Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.  

Baumeister is an increasingly prominent social psychologist.  As I was reading Rubin's post, my husband was, quite coincidentally, reading about Baumeister's work on self-regulation in Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide; I had earlier encountered his work on "the costs and benefits of dawdling" and wrote about it in a previous post; and he was cited in Chip and Dan Heath's book Switch:  How to Change Things When Change is Hard, which inspired several Put it to Bed posts.  Like Chickenman in the ancient comic radio series, "He's everywhere!  He's everywhere!"

Gretchen Rubin is most interested in Baumeister and Tierney's recommendation of  the “Nothing Alternative” to procrastination.  This approach borrows from Raymond Chandler's practice of not allowing himself to do anything else during the time he set aside each day for writing--whether or not he was actually writing.  Thus the multitude of distractions so many of us succumb to become taboo.  And theoretically we have no choice but to knuckle down to the work we most need to do.

This tactic is the opposite of Stanford University philosopher professor John Perry's Structured Procrastination, 

an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you.

Perry appears to have despaired of procrastinators behaving rationally.  Instead he would have us make use of some fairly sophisticated self-deception, whereby we 1) pretend that there is something extremely important that we really want to accomplish; 2) fill out to-do lists with other useful and important projects; and 3) (since we're going to be procrastinating anyway) avoid the supposed top priority work by applying ourselves to the other tasks on our list.  Thus we back into a state of personal productivity.

Gretchen Rubin's readers seem somewhat divided in their reactions to her "Do Nothing" prescription.  Some of the comments to her post, and her own responses, are concerned with the definition of doing nothing.  Is "reading message boards for hours, thus accomplishing neither the task I am avoiding nor any other useful task," for example, as one reader holds, doing nothing?  Rubin responds "Reading message boards is absolutely something, a distraction. Allow yourself to do NOTHING. No reading, no using the internet."

Then there are the comments that question the effectiveness of the strategy.  For example, the reader that claims to be "the do nothing MASTER," and says that she could sit forever doing nothing, no problem!  

One intriguing comment may offer a way out of our quandry--to do nothing, or not to do nothing.  This reader writes

I'm wondering after reading all the comments if this approach could work for only people who generally like to DO lots of stuff. I see there are lots of do nothing folks already and it won't work for them.

Maybe it's an individual thing? 

Perhaps there is something to be said for both doing and not doing--and whether or not the doing is avoidance-related, or the not doing intended to force eventual doing of high priority tasks.  Lou Marinoff, author of Plato, Not Prozac! Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems!, told Amy Finnerty, for an O! Magazine article entitled "Is Procrastination Actually Good for You?" that 

[Ms. Finnerty's] husband's idleness and procrastination are grounded in a venerable Eastern tradition.  "Chinese philosophy—the I Ching, for example—is full of advice about the natural order of the universe and the correct timing of actions," he says. "Indian philosophy also gives equal weight to the paths of action and inaction." The right timing, he explains, can be just as productive as effort and sweat: "Sometimes we fulfill our responsibility not by acting but by doing nothing."

 I admit that some nothing was done in the process of producing this post.  It's evening now, and I'm overdue for a whole other kind of nothing.

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!

A Poem Because I Put Off Writing This Post

Putting Off a Mirage

It seems to me

we live in the myth

of choice

and control

opting

solving

conducting

our lives

Weighing one way

against another

aim

against aim

judging

ourselves

improving

ourselves

In truth

so much takes place

outside this illusion

is “chosen” or done or lived

by others

happens 

to others

and rolls down to us

What then does it mean

to procrastinate?

Life is so much bigger

and smaller

than that

Famous Procrastinators for $100, Alex

If you've been paying close attention to my posts, you should be able to answer at least some of these.

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?