4.2 Procrastination

One of the challenges many students face is being over committed. Some are working full-time, going to school full-time, and have other responsibilities as well. Students may be taking care of children, siblings, parents or have engaging social lives. It can be difficult to take action to complete goals when there are so many areas competing for our time and attention. Sometimes we cannot “do it all.” In those instances, we need to prioritize, let something go, adjust and reevaluate what the most important things are to us.

Students may struggle because college does not have as much structure as what they may have been used to in high school. Why should I start a homework assignment now when I don’t have anything I have to do for the next three days? This mindset usually leads to the student waiting until the last minute to start the assignment and as a result, the quality of work is not high.

Either a homework assignment gets done on time or it doesn’t. Think about this: If someone were to give you $500 to complete the assignment on time, would you complete it sooner than you ordinarily would have? What level is your internal motivation? How important is the assignment to you? How important is your grade? How important is your class?

Procrastination is the act of putting something off. It’s doing something that’s a low priority instead of doing something that is a high priority. We all procrastinate sometimes. But when we procrastinate on an assignment or studying for an exam until there is little or no time left, our grades suffer and it can be stressful. Learning about why we procrastinate can help us overcome it.

Reasons We Procrastinate

We don’t feel like it. There are times when we have to complete tasks that may not be enjoyable or we might not be in the mood to do them. Examples of this type of activity depend on the person, it might be folding your laundry, doing dishes, or an assignment for a class you do not particularly enjoy.. The problem is, you might never feel like starting it. It becomes increasingly important to understand that whether we like it or not, there are things that need to get done whether we are in the mood or not.

Perfectionism. We want to do it perfectly and there is not enough time to do it, so we are not going to do it at all. While it is important to have high standards for work, it is also worth noting that earning zeros on assignments is probably not the goal either. When students struggle with perfectionist tendencies they must be more mindful of how long tasks will take and make sure to start them earlier to meet expectations. However, in those instances in which meeting your standards will be difficult, it is worth completing the work to the best of our abilities and keeping this experience in our mind to be more prepared the next time.

Fear of success. If you study your tail off and earn an A on an exam, people will start to have such expectations from you all of the time. Fear of success is real and it can result in avoiding opportunities that might lead to new and better things. It is a form of self-sabotage and prevents change. When considering our own fear of success, it is important to understand that past performances, whether good or bad, do not dictate our future endeavors. Additionally, having clear goals for our performance and what we would like to see happen can shape how much effort we place on a task.

Fear of failure. For some students, confidence is tightly linked to academic success.  High achievement increases confidence and poor performance results in feelings of insecurity.  For these individuals, anxiety created by academic tasks can lead to avoiding the task altogether¹. Fear of failure can be a crutch to rationalize our effort. It helps justify failure. We failed not because we are not capable. We failed because we did not complete the work.

Whatever the reason, procrastination will undermine academic success. It can be a difficult cycle to escape from and it can carry some serious consequences. The stress created through procrastination can be compounding– it can be stressful to complete something if you left it to the last minute. It can further  be stressful to know that you  didn’t submit work that was your best. High levels of stress can further take a toll on physical and mental health, which often also contributes to poor academic performance.

These reasons have been keeping some students from completing assignments and studying for exams. Do you procrastinate? Why?

So, how do we avoid procrastination?

Tell yourself to do your best all of the time. Ask yourself what is important NOW. Other peoples’ expectations of you shouldn’t matter. Be confident in yourself and in your abilities. Do the best you can and be satisfied with your effort. Realize that no one is perfect. Make your goal to do your best and understand you don’t need to be perfect. Also, realize that you may never “feel like” doing an assignment or studying for an exam.

Get Started. It is the hardest part to do and will have the biggest effect on defeating procrastination. It can be simple: skim the chapter you have to read, think of a title for your paper or schedule an hour for when you will study. The rest of it will be easier once you get started.

Establish and rely on a process. Figure out what works best for you. Take some time to make a plan, list, or outline that allows you to see what you will do and when to complete your assignment or goal. It might be setting aside time early in the morning or waiting to watch a movie until after you’ve finished an assignment. Set your priorities and stick to them.

Set Imaginary Deadlines. If the paper is due in six days, tell yourself it is due in two days. Knock it out early and then enjoy not having it over your head. Fake deadlines are less stressful. And if you do end up needing more time, you have a cushion.

Don’t Break the Chain. Jerry Seinfeld developed a system to help prevent procrastination. He wanted to be a better comedian and believed that writing better jokes would help. To write better jokes, he thought he should write every day. His system, called Don’t Break the Chain, was used to motivate himself to write every day. He started with a big wall calendar with a whole year on a page and a red marker. For each day he wrote, he would place a big red X on that day of the calendar. After a few consecutive days, he had a chain. And then the task became not breaking the chain.

Video: Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator, Tim Urban TED Talk

Estimating Task Time

One of the biggest challenges students have is accurately estimating how much time it will take to complete a task. You might think you’re  going to be able to read an assigned chapter in an hour. But what if it takes three hours to read and understand the chapter? Having the skill to know how long a homework assignment will take is something that can be developed. But until you can anticipate it accurately, it is best to leave some time in your schedule in case it takes longer than anticipated.

We hear people say, “I wish there was more time” or “If there was more time, I would have done this.” We have enough time to do many of the things we wish to do. People run into difficulty when they spend time on things that are not the most important things for them.

Video: How to Gain Control of Your Free Time, Laura Vanderkam TED Talk

You must make time for the things that are most important to you. In order to make time, you may need to decide you will not do something else.

The ability to say “no” cannot be underestimated. It isn’t easy to say “no,” especially to family, friends and people that like you and whom you like. Most of us don’t want to say “no,” especially when we want to help. But if we always do what others want, we won’t accomplish the things that we want—the things that are most important to us.

Ask yourself:

• What am I doing that doesn’t need to be done?
• What can I do more efficiently?

Have you ever ordered an appetizer, salad, beverage or bread, then felt full halfway through your entree? In situations like this many people claim, “my eyes were bigger than my stomach.” This is also true with planning and goal setting. It may be that your plan is bigger than the day. Experiment with what you want to accomplish and what is realistic. The better you can accurately predict what you can and will accomplish and how long it will take, the better you can plan, and the more successful you will be.

Why You Procrastinate²

Before diving into some tactics to stop procrastinating, you should know why you procrastinate in the first place.

According to Timothy Pychyl, procrastination is fundamentally a visceral, emotional reaction to what you have to do.

When you put pressure on yourself to accomplish certain tasks, you “have this strong reaction to the task at hand, and so the story of procrastination begins there with what psychologists call task aversiveness” (Pychyl). The more aversive a task is to you, the more you’ll resist it, and the more likely you are to procrastinate.

Pychyl, in his research, identified a number of task characteristics that make you more likely to procrastinate. Tasks that are aversive tend to:

• Be boring
• Be frustrating
• Be difficult
• Lack personal meaning and intrinsic rewards
• Be ambiguous (you don’t know how to do it)
• Be unstructured

The more negative emotions you show toward a certain task, the more likely you are to procrastinate, and according to Pychyl, “any of these [characteristics] can do it”.²

As Pychyl wrote in Solving the Procrastination Puzzle³, “[t]he key issue is that for chronic procrastinators, short-term mood repair takes precedence. Chronic procrastinators want to eliminate the negative mood or emotions now, so they give in to feel good. They give in to the impulse to put off the task until another time.” Then, “not faced with the task, they feel better.”

10 Tactics That Will Help You Stop Procrastinating²

Even though there is no magical cure, there are numerous tactics that you can use to quit procrastinating and get more done. Below you’ll find 10 tactics for limiting procrastination from Timothy Pychyl and his book Solving the Procrastination Puzzle.

1. Flip a task’s characteristics to make it less aversive

When you notice yourself procrastinating, use your procrastination as a trigger to examine a task’s characteristics and think about what you should change. Tasks that are aversive are usually a combination of boring, frustrating, difficult, meaningless, ambiguous, and unstructured. But by breaking down exactly which of these attributes an aversive task has, you can take those qualities and turn them around to make the task more appealing to you.

Tim gave the example of a task that is boring and frustrating. “You’re able to look at it and assess it and say, ‘Oh, this is so boring and I find it so frustrating’, so you make a little game out of it. How can you make it interesting? So I might play a game of, ‘How many of these could I get done in 20 minutes?’. And you find something to do–some competition within it, and so all of a sudden you make it interesting”, and much less boring and frustrating in the process.

2. Know the ways your brain responds to “cognitive dissonance”

Whenever you realize that you should be doing something but that you aren’t (psychologists call this separation between your actions and beliefs cognitive dissonance), you can respond in one of several ways to feel better about yourself. In his book, Pychyl identifies a number of unproductive responses people have when they procrastinate:

1. Distracting yourself, and thinking about other things
2. Forgetting what you have to do, either actively or passively (usually for unimportant tasks)
3. Downplaying the importance of what you have to do
4. Giving yourself affirmations, focusing on other your values and qualities that will solidify your sense of self
5. Denying responsibility to distance yourself from what you have to do
6. Seeking out new information that supports your procrastination (e.g. when you tell yourself you need to have more information before you get started on something)

Of course, the best possible response to cognitive dissonance is to change your behavior and get started on whatever you’re procrastinating on, but that’s often much easier said than done.

To push back against these biases, recognizing them is key. Then, Tim recommends that you “list the things that you commonly say or do to justify your procrastination”, and use these biases as triggers that you should respond to your behavior differently.

3. Limit how much time you spend on something

Limiting how much time you spend on a task makes the task more fun, more structured, and less frustrating and difficult because you’ll always be able to see an end in sight. There are some huge productivity benefits to the idea as well. When you limit how much time you spend on something instead of throwing more time at the problem, you force yourself to exert more energy over less time to get it done, which will make you a lot more productive.

4. Be kind to yourself

According to Tim, when you procrastinate “negative self-talk comes out in spades”, which is completely counterproductive. Be mindful of how kind you are to yourself, and watch out for times when you try to deceive yourself. The reason you deceive yourself when you procrastinate is simple: at the same time that you know you should be doing something, a different part of you is very much aware that you’re not actually doing it, so you make up a story about why you’re not getting that thing done. This is the cognitive dissonance mentioned in tactic #2. Negative self-talk is not going to help you accomplish a task. Remember to acknowledge that negativity when you notice it and then find a more productive way to move forward.

5. Just get started

People, as a rule, overestimate how much motivation they need to do something. After all, usually you just need enough motivation to get started. For example, to work out, you don’t need to be motivated for an entire hour to finish a workout; you just need to be motivated for the 10 minutes it takes you to pack up and drive to the gym. Once you’re at the gym, you’ll always work out.

One of the biggest recommendations Tim had was to simply get started. “Once we start a task, it is rarely as bad as we think.” In fact, once you get started on something, your “attributions of the task change”, and what you think about yourself changes, too.

6. List the costs of procrastinating

The costs of procrastinating can be enormous; as Tim put it in his book, “[w]hen we procrastinate on our goals, we are basically putting off our lives.” Since procrastination is very much an emotional reaction to what you have to do, activating the rational part of your brain to identify the costs of procrastinating is a great strategy to get unstuck.

Tim recommends that you make a list of the tasks you’re procrastinating on, and then “[n]ext to each of these tasks or goals, note how your procrastination has affected you in terms of things such as your happiness, stress, health, finances, relationships, and so on. You may even want to discuss this with a confidante or a significant other in your life who knows you well.” At the end of the day, “you may be surprised by what they may have to say about the costs of procrastination in your life.”

7. Become better friends with future-you

Research has shown that we have the tendency to treat our future-selves like a complete stranger, and according to Pychyl, that’s why we “give future-self the same kind of load that we’d give a stranger”. ³(This is also the reason you have 10 food documentaries in your Netflix queue.)

The solution to this? Become better friends with future-you. Here are a few of my favorite ways:

1. Create a future memory. Interestingly, research has shown that all it takes to delay gratification is to imagine your future. This is easy to do–for example, if you’re debating between doing an assignment today or next week, create a future memory by imagining all you will be able to get done next week if you start it now.¹
2. Imagine your future self. Research has shown that all it takes to increase your future-self continuity is to imagine yourself in the future. The more vivid the future feels, the better.²
3. Send an email to your future self. Seriously, do it. FutureMe.org lets you send an email to yourself in the future at a date you specify. A great way to bridge the gap between your present and future selves is to tell your future self how your current actions will make your future self better.

8. Disconnect from the Internet when you have to get something done

One of Pychyl’s studies found that 47% of people’s time online is spent procrastinating, which he calls a “conservative estimate” since that study was conducted before social networks like Facebook and Twitter became popular. “There is little doubt that our best tools for productivity–computer technologies–are potentially also one of our greatest time wasters.”³

“To stay really connected to our goal pursuit, we need to disconnect from potential distractions like social-networking tools. This means that we should not have Facebook, Twitter, email, or whatever your favorite suite of tools is running in the background on your computer or phone while you are working. Shut them off.”³

That might sound harsh, but according to Tim, “if you are committed to reducing your procrastination, this is something you really need to do.”

9. Form “implementation intentions”

Tasks that aren’t clearly defined are ambiguous and often unstructured, which makes you a lot more likely to procrastinate with them. The cure? Form implementation intentions for those tasks.

That’s basically just a fancy way of saying that you should make your tasks more concrete, by thinking about when, where, and how you’re going to do them. Tim is a big fan of implementation intentions. “I have to make sure that I’m not lying to myself right off the top with making a broad goal intention. ‘Yeah, I’ll do that writing on the weekend.’ Well, both the time-frame and the task are defined too broadly to be meaningful at all³.

“So, one of the very first things is start making a more concrete and start tying it to something in the environment. And so, these are called implementation intentions. Move from broad goal intentions to specific implementation intentions. So that’s a cognitive technique, where you’re going to do some thinking around: “What am I going to do when?” And that pre-decision is really important.”²

10. Use procrastination as a sign you should seek out more meaningful work

You procrastinate a lot less with meaningful tasks that are intrinsically rewarding. For that reason, Tim recommends reexamining your work if you find yourself constantly procrastinating with what you have to do.

“Sometimes I would say procrastination is just a symptom that your life just doesn’t match what you’re interested in and you’re putting everything off because all of your goals are kind of falsely internalized and you’ve got no intrinsic motivation in any of this, and so maybe you should do something else.”

In every course there are going to tasks you find aversive, but when you constantly find yourself procrastinating because the work is aversive, there may be other majors or career paths that are more aligned to your passions, which you will be much more motivated and productive in.

Citations

1. Goldberg, Carlos. (1973). Some Effects of Fear of Failure in the Academic Setting. The Journal of Psychology. 84. 323-31.
2. Bailey, Chris. (2014). Here’s Why You Procrastinate, and 10 Tactics that Will Help You Stop. A Life of Productivity. https://alifeofproductivity.com/why-you-procrastinate-10-tactics-to-help-you-stop/#fn1-6482. CC BY 3.0.
3. Pychyl, T. A. (2013). Solving the procrastination puzzle: A concise guide to strategies for change. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA).