End Procrastination Now! (24 page)

Create Clear Objectives
. When you break your goals down into concrete and measurable objectives, you improve your chances of achieving your mission. That is because smaller steps have shorter deadlines and the rewards of completion are closer in time. Thus they are more likely to get done. Objectives provide a sequence of activities. Finishing one step sets the stage for finishing the next.

Suppose you have procrastinated on working to overcome a fear of speaking before community groups. Your goal is to overcome this fear. You can break the goal down to five sample objectives:

1. Recognize powerless anxiety thinking, such as “I can't cope,” and then look for exceptions to challenge this self-imposed verbal rumination.

2. Complete a public speaking course at a local college.

3. Research a project suitable for presenting before a community group.

4. Practice the presentation before a video camera to pick up and change any mannerisms that might distract from the presentation.

5. Present before a community group.

You can measure and achieve each of these objectives. For example, if you participate in a public speaking course, you have achieved that objective. Now, what can you do if procrastination gets in the way?

One Goal at a Time
. You'll normally get better traction against procrastination if you pick one area where you procrastinate that is personally important to you and focus your efforts in that area. I've taken this approach effectively with people whom I've worked with who had hard-core procrastination habits. I used the same
one task one step at a time
approach with my graduate group counseling students.

Like the hard-core procrastination group, the counseling students took on an important self-development project they put off doing where each could make progress or complete before the end of the semester. Each had a buddy to report to and weekly progress reports that they submitted to me.

The following target areas show the diversity of challenges described by the hard-core and group counseling folks: completing performance reviews, finding a great new job, overcoming a fear of public speaking, getting better organized, completing assignments before a deadline, kicking a drinking habit, physical exercise, weight loss, saving rather than shopping, completing a
dissertation, getting out of an abusive relationship, procrastination on stopping procrastination, and so the list goes on. Over a nine-year period, better than 90 percent achieved their objectives, as measured by confirmable results. Was this easy for each to do? Hardly. The students came away from the exercise with a deeper, personal understanding of what it takes to make an important personal change. I hoped that this personal experience would contribute to a feeling of empathy for the clients they would help who struggle with issues of personal change and development.

Why focus on one self-development challenge at a time? It takes time and effort to start and continue with any lifestyle change. Change is a process. As a species, we tend to be change-resistant when it comes to modifying what we are used to doing or find threatening. Developing skills in applying psychology principles to a self-management challenge and in applying self-management to help arrest a psychological challenge ordinarily takes time, resources, and effort.

It is the night of December 31. The hour and minute hands turn and meet for a fleeting moment at the number 12. With the sound of the chime, the New Year begins.

You tell yourself that this year will be different. You'll to to the gym. You'll turn over a new leaf on the job and get that coveted salesperson of the year award. You have a list of home maintenance tasks that are long overdue. They are now on your New Year's list of things to do. So, you give yourself a promissory note. Like so many others with you and before you, the note goes overdue.

Now 365 days have passed. The old year merges into the new. Not much has changed. Your sales performance was okay. You followed the same routines you did the year before. Your wish for a trophy whisked whimsically into the annals of irresolute resolutions as you clapped when the trophy went to someone else. You signed up and paid for the gym and then stayed away.

Draft a Specific Plan
. What do the three New Year's resolutions have in common? They are personally selected and discretionary. Carrying them out would have some value; otherwise why decide on specific self-development goals? They involve goals, and perhaps a vague plan. However, people who make resolutions without deciding how they'll go about achieving the resolution (goal) risk procrastination.

You can love the idea of accomplishing your self-development goals. Sure, it would be great to manage conflict effectively. You'd be happy to shed an inhibiting fear. Losing weight looks like a good choice. Life could be easier if you were better organized. However, because you are responsible to yourself for the choice and its execution, you can usually find a way to give yourself an extension. You can also give yourself an excuse. Are you not the only person that gets hurt by such delays? That often-used rationalization to justify procrastination holds as much water as a lead ball.

If your promissory notes to yourself stay on the drawing board, this may happen for roughly these reasons:

• Weak commitment

• Underestimation of the ways in which old patterns interfere with the new ones you want to establish

• Lack of planning or inadequate planning

• Not building in counter-procrastination strategies

• Not planning for addressing procrastination about procrastination

When you procrastinate, you may have an idea for a productive plan that you can fall back upon. But that plan may be too general. If you want to tackle an entrenched form of procrastination, you'll normally do better if you formulate an organized plan that takes the cognitive, behavioral, and emotive aspects of procrastination into account.

Stay Flexible
. I've seen many people stick to a plan when the circumstances had changed so radically that they figuratively were joining lemmings in a rush over a cliff.

Preparation is important, and so is being nimble and adaptive in the face of surprises. The
principle of acceptance of uncertainty
is that when the unexpected is discovered and needs to be managed, solutions may be invented “on the fly.”

Unless there is good reason to the contrary, it is normally better to trust to your inventiveness when you are facing uncertain conditions, especially when unexpected events abound. The alternative is to play possum or join the ostrich with its head in the sand. However, putting your head in the sand won't stop what is coming your way.

The predictabilities in the procrastination pattern increase your chances of exercising control over the process, provided that you also establish control over the productive process. So, plan to address procrastination by introducing a competitive productive process.

Scenarios to Get Past Procrastination
. Needless anxieties can arise from worrying about “what if situations,” such as, “What if I were to fail?” What if I were rejected?” Because this form of scenario thinking reflects a sense of vulnerability and uncontrollability, it fertilizes procrastination, However, scenarios can prove to be highly productive, providing you pose alternative scenarios to yourself, extend the outcomes, and select the one that holds the best promise. In this form of productive scenario you focus on productive problem solving, the kind that can support constructive and sustainable change. Solving the problems through scenarios creates the framework for a plan.

You're thinking of creating a Web site to sell replacement automobile products for vintage Cadillacs, such as fan belts, spark plugs, and ignition wires. You plan to learn how to create and maintain the Web site, negotiate agreements with product manufacturers,
determine what items to stock and what you can have drop-shipped, find out how to process credit card orders over the Internet, learn whatever you don't know about what you don't know, and so forth.

In one scenario, you gather the information you need, including doing a preliminary market analysis, and you look into how to finance the operation. The information you gather points to a low financial risk for a moderately profitable operation. You then bring a procrastination element into the scenario. You have a strong tendency to behaviorally procrastinate. You extend the scenario by analyzing the procrastination process and by creating a solution.

To behaviorally procrastinate, you have to have done something in preparation first. You find research and planning appealing. You determine that the project is viable. You find that fact interesting. However, you feel uneasy about how you'd handle Internet and phone inquiries about the products you sell. You don't like dealing with customer complaints and sorting out whether the returns were the result of preexisting damage or were customer-related.

Your history of bringing yourself to the brink of getting projects up and running and then putting off the execution phase is familiar. You recognize the emotional feeling of resistance to going further as you imagine executing the plan. From past experience, you recognize that your behavioral procrastination is a hard challenge to get beyond.

If you are going to behaviorally procrastinate, then except for the joys of doing the preliminary research and planning, it's less costly in time and resources for you to drop the idea at the start. The effort that goes into the research and planning phase in such a
set-up and stop
scenario might be better applied to a productive effort that you know you'll finish.

In a second scenario, you walk yourself through the preliminary phases just as before. However, you create a strategy for addressing the behavioral procrastination phase that you anticipate.
To get over this hump, you plan to make a public announcement of the launching of this new enterprise. You plan to throw a party to celebrate this new venture. You invite a group of friends, relatives, and acquaintances. You also know your history on the value of making a public announcement. When you make a public commitment, you follow through. You want to get past behavioral procrastination and deal with your execution uncertainties. If the numbers support starting the business, in scenario two, you'll take it to the public commitment stage.

Scenario three takes scenarios one and two into account, but also includes hiring someone to handle orders and customer service. Assuming that the execution of the complete plan leads to favorable results, this may be the thing to do if the plan proves economically viable.

Broadening Your Plan for Change
. Having goals without plans is like traveling aimlessly without the benefit of a map. Planning is the step that prepares for the actions that you will take to achieve the mission that you seek by meeting the goals you establish. Planning that includes setting early start times is associated with a reduction in procrastination and an increase in productivity.

A plan is a blueprint for the steps you intend to take to move through the gap between where you are and where you want to be. However, the idea of planning can have about as much appeal as a diet of porridge. But is it really appealing to start with a promissory note for later actions and then excitingly run breathlessly at the eleventh hour to beat the clock? Few people I've worked with look forward to feeling pressured and frenzied at the eleventh hour.

Plans concern answers to at least these four questions: Where am I today? Where am I going? What do I need to do to get there? What alternative routes are available? They range from figuring out how you'll negotiate for an automobile purchase to something as complex as the Program Evaluation and Review Technique
(PERT). This is the planning structure that the U.S. Navy developed and used to produce the Polaris submarine.

You may not require a framework as elaborate as PERT to carry through with a physical exercise plan, to prepare to win a sales award, or to complete separate home maintenance projects. However, you can apply key steps to achieve your target goals. Here is the gist of the PERT plan:

1. Identify specific tasks and milestones (start dates and completion dates for each phase).

2. Determine the ordering of the activities, including which tasks can be done in parallel and which depend on the completion of other tasks first.

3. Estimate the amount of time required for each activity (expected time, most optimistic outcome, and most pessimistic outcome for meeting deadlines).

4. Determine the total time required (add up the times for each segment to estimate the total time).

5. Update PERT as the project progresses (modifying the process as actual times replace estimated times and adjustments are made on resources and their allocation).

PERT plans are useful for addressing timing and pacing issues. The model applies to maintaining a productive momentum to avoid last-minute time crunches, simplifying the activities in complex long-term projects, and positioning yourself to control the process by controlling the schedule.

Organize for Action
. As any useful framework for planning might do, PERT provides psychological coat hangers on which to hang information about goals, objectives, and resources. You supply the judgment on when and how to apply them through actions such as setting schedules, identifying outside groups to support the process, and determining when those groups will be brought
into play. This preliminary work takes both time and resources. However, when you are facing a well-practiced procrastination habit, the time you take to work out the details can save you considerable effort and time and reduce needless hassles that can come later. You won't know what is missing from the plan until you take the steps along the way. If you wait for perfection, it will probably never come.