End Procrastination Now! (16 page)

A psychological illusion is a blend of intuition and false thinking. It is something that you believe is real and true, but that in fact isn't the way you perceive or read it. Psychological illusions can and do arise as answers for reducing uncertainty.

Do you believe that you make illusion-based decisions that can give you a false sense of clarity, but also a high decision error rate? Few people believe that illusions have a controlling influence over their lives. But illusions often interfere with identifying rational choices and deciding on what to do to best meet the challenge.

You probably have illusion hot spots that coexist with procrastination. Indeed, procrastination sometimes reflects the mind-fogging power of illusion. The tomorrow or mañana belief is an illusion of false hope. Believing that you can't manage uncertainty can map into an illusion of inferiority. If you do not see your harmful psychological illusions, you are likely to repeat self-defeating patterns without knowing why.

If you act as though you think your assumptions are the same as facts, you may operate with an
illusion of understanding
. You can misread situations with confidence and make decisions based on this misreading. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that when people are the least sure, they tend to be the most dogmatic.

Here is a sample of illusions that taint decision making:

•
Illusion of judgment
. You believe that your judgments are invariably accurate. However, for this to be true, you would have to have the best of all authoritative information and be entirely objective and free from bias.

•
Illusion of emotional insight
. You assume that if you feel strongly about something, you must be right. Based on this supposed emotional insight, you are likely to judge on the basis of your first emotional impressions with very little else to go on.

•
Illusion of superiority
. You assume that you are smarter and more capable than anyone else. Thus, you automatically reject suggestions or alternative courses of action that are inconsistent with your own views.

•
Illusion of inferiority
. You underestimate your capabilities even when your actions show greater capabilities. When you limit yourself in order to maintain consistency with this view of yourself, you risk making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here is a brief proactive coping exercise for addressing psychological illusions, making realistic decisions, and avoiding procrastinating on decision making.

In an unfamiliar situation, you may rely on heuristics, or examples, to guide your decisions. These rules of thumb, common sense, or selected tidbits or examples from experience take many forms. “When in doubt, flip a coin” is a heuristic.

Heuristics can map a path to better planning and decision making. You may profitably use a heuristic of mentally working back from a future time when you've achieved a goal. By reflecting on the steps you took, you may help yourself get past a planning bottleneck.

When there are gaps in your knowledge and you have virtually no time to study an issue, trusting your feelings may be the best thing to do. If something doesn't feel right, it may not be right. You're offered a deal that you have to decide on right away. It sounds too good to be true. You rely on emotional cues and past experience to assess the offer. You pass on the deal. However, some heuristics have a downside in that they lead to poor decisions, and some hide procrastination.

•
Heuristics sometimes work well enough.
However, rules of thumb can lead to distortions and bad decisions. You believe that someone who looks you straight in the eye is honest, but here is a paradox: pathological liars will normally look straight at you, whereas a shy but unusually honest person may avoid eye contact.

•
The fundamental attribution error is among the best-validated heuristics.
This is the tendency to see your own errors as situational and explainable. When observing the errors of others, however, you do the opposite: you downplay situational factors and attribute poor results to character flaws, such as “laziness.” This is part of a tendency to understand your own situation and exonerate yourself from blame, and then blame the other guy for actions that you wouldn't blame yourself for if you were the actor.
If you rely heavily on “gut” impressions, your decisions are likely to be arbitrary and biased.
Saying that you rely on gut impressions is often a cover for
expediency procrastination
. When you rely on gut impressions, you don't have to prepare and make a studied decision. Thus, relying on gut feelings can be unwise.

Heuristics are normally more efficient than the automatic reactions of perception, where a whisper of negative emotion is sufficient to trigger a procrastination sequence. However, because heuristics are blanket rules, they are normally inferior to a reasoned-out assessment. Here is a brief proactive coping approach for improving heuristic-biased decision making by adding some reflecti
ve
components.

When you worry, you show intolerance for uncertainty. You fill in the gaps with assumptions about harmful possibilities. You tense
yourself over threatening and catastrophic possibilities that you have no knowledge of actually happening.

This cognitive and emotional distraction may prompt procrastination.

Worry and procrastination share certain features. Both have a specious reward. When the catastrophic possibility doesn't happen, you feel relieved. Relief is a reward for a worry where the dreaded results don't happen. A decision to act later can feel relieving and rewarding. Relief is a reward when it increases the frequency of the act that it follows, making worry or procrastination, for instance, more likely to recur in similar circumstances.

Here is a brief proactive coping exercise for defusing worry-stimulated procrastination.

If mulling over pros and cons puts you in a procrastination holding pattern, this equivocation can set the stage for a perfect cognitive, emotive, and behavioral storm for making an impulsive decision. For 15 years, Willow looked for her perfect soul mate. Equivocating over one potential mate after another, she couldn't decide. As a skilled defect detector, she found flaws in everyone, angered herself over their imperfections, and eventually unceremoniously rejected all of them.

Then the time came when Willow's biological clock was winding down. She singled out the issue of having babies, and that
became her priority. Finding the perfect soul mate was no longer a priority. Marriage became the means to the end of having children. Tony, who had a serious alcohol addiction, was available. She impulsively married him. Two years and two kids later, an unemployed Tony has refused to stop drinking. Willow has another major decision to make, and she is uncertain what to do.

Here is a brief proactive coping exercise for addressing decision-making equivocation.

An automatic procrastination decision (APD) starts with a primitive perceptional whisper of emotion and an urge to diverge. APDs may come from subconscious causes, such as perceiving something in the situation as complex and unsettling.

A higher-order APD occurs when you make a promissory note to yourself to do later something that you can start now. This can trigger a chain of procrastination thoughts:

“I don't know which action is the most important or where to begin. I'll rest on it.”

“I need more references.”

“I need to read more before I can start.”

“I won't be able to start today because there isn't enough time.”

“I'll get to it later.”

A false
later is better
decision can glide under the radar of reason. When that happens, more procrastination decisions may follow. You decide to coddle yourself by telling yourself, “I'm too tired to think.” If your performance is later diminished, you can excuse yourself because you were once fatigued. And when the time comes to decide again, you self-handicap yourself again to sanitize a delay.

Thinking about your thinking and connecting the dots between procrastination thinking and its consequences puts you in a better position to decide on a productive course or action, and this is often a first step in asserting control over the procrastination process.

APDs are a predictable part of lateness procrastination and other procrastination styles.
Lateness procrastination
is when you dabble with nonessential activities and keep dabbling past the time when you should get going to arrive at a destination. Dabbling, or doing such things as dusting, showering, or making phone calls, is your APD. In
drifting procrastination
, you routinely put off creating life objectives and bind yourself to a sense of purposelessness and APDs such as TV watching. Decision-making procrastination, like lateness and drifting procrastination, is a distinctive procrastination style. It also has APDs, but they occur in the context of avoiding decisions.

Decision-making procrastination is a process of needlessly postponing timely and important decisions until another day and time. You have a choice of relocating to Boston or Miami for your job. Both have roughly equivalent advantages and disadvantages. If you put off the decision until you come up with the perfect answer, you've entered the decision-making procrastination trap.

Let's look at techniques and strategies for ending decision-making procrastination and building decision-making skills. These joint methods include singling out what is important, exercising a
do-it-now alternative, following through with a rational decision process, strategic planning, and problem solving.

Making a decision based on two or three of the most important factors in a situation is rarely a waste of time. Then when you single out one choice from among others, you've made it the most important. Deciding can be as direct as that.

In a work world with multiple responsibilities and conflicting priorities, how do you know if you are on track with your main priority? You can use the following priority matrix to rank information from what is most pressing and important to your “not important” and “nonpressing” activities. This priority defining matrix approach is a classic type of time management technique that can aid in making decisions about what to emphasize; the most important and pressing activity obviously takes center stage.

If an activity is important but not pressing, and nothing else is higher on your list, this is an activity that you can start without feeling rushed. For example, you know that you have a distant deadline for consolidating and simplifying 12 different but related production forms into one page of information. Rather than straightening out your files (not important and nonpressing), you attack the consolidation project. You've created an opportunity to get this activity done before it rises to a pressing status. The matrix also helps you distinguish between a priority and a diversion. If you do nonpressing and nonimportant activities over the important
and pressing ones, then you can assume that you are procrastinating on the priority.