End Procrastination Now! (18 page)

Forming the habit of acting decisively is rarely an overnight undertaking. It ordinarily takes a deliberate effort to familiarize yourself with a direct route to reasonable goals and action to get yourself out of a holding pattern. This
familiarizing decision
can get you out of an indecisiveness holding pattern.

When you are choosing between positive alternatives of roughly equal value, the experiences that follow are likely to be different. All things being equal, no one can tell if the way that was not chosen would have been better or worse or about the same.

What three ideas have you had for dealing with procrastination effectively? Write them down.

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What three top actions can you take to shift from procrastination toward productive actions? Write them down.

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What things did you do to execute your action plan? Write them down.

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What things did you learn from applying the ideas and action plan that you can use in other areas? Write them down.

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Astrip of wallpaper is slowly pulling away from your wall. You decide to paste it back to the wall. But first you'll have to buy paste, get out your papering tools, and then paste down the wallpaper. You scratch your head. This seems like too much work right now. You'll get to it later. Meanwhile, you dig night crawlers for fishing and then go fishing. When you return, the wallpaper is still on your mind. Pulling nut weed from your lawn seems more appealing. Weeks later, you continue to find ways to delay. Is pasting the wallpaper strip a big deal? Absolutely not. You could do it while you are half asleep. Yet you find that the longer you put it off, the harder it seems to get started and finish.

Behavioral diversions are a distinctive feature of procrastination. To avoid discomfort, you play solitaire. Instead of concentrating and taking notes in a lecture, you doodle. And these are not just trivial substitute activities; behavioral diversions are a big part of health procrastination, where you put off developing healthy lifestyle habits that will increase your health and happiness.

These diversions are not always simply detours from making healthy lifestyle changes. Sometimes the results of these diversions
become the bigger problem. You feel depressed. Rather than addressing the depression, you substitute drinking for coping, and problem drinking turns into alcohol abuse, which circles back to worsen the depression. If you are unaware of this cycle, you may not be aware that the drinking is a diversion. But you now have another significant problem habit that tracks with procrastination. Eating excessively can be a behavioral diversion from addressing anxieties, or used to fill hollow hours. After a while, you stop taking medication for preventing a coronary. It is inconvenient, and you'd rather eat chocolate instead.

Diversionary practices were known even in ancient times. Aesop had many fables to tell, such as about a rabbit who napped while a turtle passed by to win a race and about a grasshopper who fiddled the summer away while hard-working ants prepared for the winter.

If you are not diverting from your most pressing and important activity, you are not procrastinating. In this chapter, I will show you how to end behavioral diversions and use the time you gain to produce and prosper. You'll see how to sidestep behavioral diversions, make better use of time management information, apply an arsenal of cognitive and behavioral productivity techniques, boost your self-regulation skills, and harness the power of grinding it out when the going gets tough. Let's begin.

Behavioral diversions are a classic sign of procrastination. When you behaviorally divert, you substitute avoidance for productive actions. Instead of studying for tomorrow's test, you go to a party. Instead of dealing with an unpleasant conflict, you shop. Instead of overcoming your fear of making presentations, you decide to do some leisurely reading.

You can daisy-chain one behavioral diversion onto another. Instead of dealing with a knotty personnel problem, you check the latest news on the stock market. Then you browse a bookstore. You nap. You call a friend, and so on.

Paradoxically, productivity tools can be used as behavioral diversions. Computers increase productivity, but you can use them as a distraction to avoid an unpleasant situation by e-mailing friends, surfing online, and other such activities. Cell phones, PDAs, and text messaging are great ways to stay in contact with people, but they're also great ways to avoid work.

If you choose to trump a behavioral diversion(s), this ordinarily starts with knowing your options. To avoid automatically drifting in a procrastination direction, use the contrast exercise to sharpen your choice between behavioral diversions and
ending procrastination now
!

Now it's your turn to identify your personal behavioral diversions and alternative actions to end procrastination:

Take this exercise to the level of analysis. The Greek philosopher Epicurus once advised weighing the results of an action against its side effects. Behavioral diversions can lead to excuses to get off the hook, strengthening a procrastination habit and leading you to live uncomfortably with an incomplete task. A do-it-now alternative may have side effects of strain from pushing through inertia, but this adds weight to your belief in your self-efficacy.

Time management refers to the use of time-saving ideas and management tools to increase efficiency. The approach involves analyzing how time is being spent, setting priorities, and planning and scheduling to concentrate on what is most important to do in the present moment. Better time management presumably provides an opportunity to capture added time for production.

Is time management a behavioral solution for procrastination? The process may be useful in contributing to the solution for some forms of deadline procrastination. However, time management is typically most useful for those who need the program the least. It also seems to be used to as a technique to squeeze more work out of managers and staff, and that presents a different set of problems.

There is another side to the productivity story. Research over the past two decades suggests that higher levels of productivity are obtained more through human resources programs that emphasize self-empowerment, extensive training, and teams that actually work well together. Productivity gains from these improvements exceeded those created by just-in-time, Total Quality Management, and supply-chain partnerships. It's tempting to conclude that a sense of control over your work is a critical factor in containing procrastination and increasing productivity.

In manufacturing settings, productivity is increased by doing more with the available personnel or doing the same amount of
work with fewer people. Productivity may be measured by what a person does in an hour, and organizations typically shoot to get more done per productive hour. When you measure productivity against time standards, then increasing productivity follows efficient and effective time use.

Different jobs have different productivity expectancies. When they are applied to medical environments, production-line methods can detract from the quality of care. However, managed-care insurance companies rely on cutting down on the amount of time spent in physician-patient contacts and shortening the amount of time that it takes to process paperwork. This routine discourages the majority of new medical school graduates from going into primary care, where managed care can seem oppressive. It also increases the risk of burnout when one may feel like he or she is acting like a machine. From the perspective of a managed-care insurance company, one physician can be replaced by another, so burnout is a minor consideration. From a social and professional perspective, this is a serious waste of a finite resource, making this form of time management a nearsighted practice.

If you are a teacher, doubling the pace of your presentations may increase student burnout. Learning is a cumulative process, and developing new knowledge and skills is complex and takes time. However, a teacher may gain by avoiding procrastination on correcting assignments and planning lectures. Efficiencies gained in processing paperwork open more time for leisure activities.

In your daily life, keeping an eye on time can save costs. You avoid missing deadlines where you could face a stiff fine. You repair the roof before you also have water-stained ceilings to contend with. You fix your leaky car radiator before you have to replace a seized engine.

Maintenance delays reflect procrastination more than time management. Avoiding a crisis makes sense. However, procrastination can have a stronger magnetic pull. Here the issue isn't so much saving time as keeping yourself out of hot water. This is
where you fall behind because of procrastinating and need to make excuses and seek extensions.

A big problem with time management is that you may procrastinate on applying the methods. If you do use them at first, you may back off from the techniques later. Moreover, this mechanical approach to structuring time doesn't address either the automatic problem procrastination habits in simple procrastination or the co-occurring conditions in complex procrastination. Other issues around the concept of time management include the following:

• Time management normally needs to be sold on the basis of the benefits of using the process to produce more for the same pay. When people view this negatively, reactance and resentment can balance any gains.

• Setting priorities is relevant to deciding what is first in line to do. However, a one-size-fits-all time management approach ignores the psychology of individual differences and differences in work conditions.

• Time management appears to treat time as a commodity and people as machines working on a timeline. This approach can undermine the intrinsic values a person sees in work by substituting a time management system for empowerment and self-control.

Time management may be useful in helping some people gain more value from time, but it is a watered-down approach for addressing procrastination. The behavioral component may be helpful for some, but not necessarily for those who persistently procrastinate, who can profit from a comprehensive three-pronged approach.

END PROCRASTINATION NOW! TIP

Whenever you have an impulsive urge to diverge, think about the long-term hassles that can result from putting things off, and then think about your satisfaction when you act now.

If you asked Buddha how to obtain freedom from procrastination, he might say that you cannot desire freedom from procrastination because the desire would become the wall. You are the problem. Your ego takes up space. Don't desire, be desireless. Given this view, would Buddha make a to-do list?