End Procrastination Now! (4 page)

This is not a work harder and work longer type of book. Sure, there are times when maximum efforts are important. However, most of life involves typical performance, which is what you do on a day-to-day basis. The idea is to end procrastination interferences so that you can prosper without the pain that commonly accompanies needless self-imposed delays. You can then make that maximum effort sooner when it is necessary. You'll have more time for fun and for higher levels of accomplishment when you gain time normally lost through procrastination.

In
End Procrastination Now
! you'll learn a three-pronged approach to cut through procrastination and accomplish more of what you want during the time you'd ordinarily procrastinate. This program also applies to meeting deadlines and due dates without the usual last-minute rush. The three prongs are:

• Educate yourself about how procrastination works and how to change procrastination thinking (the cognitive way).

• Build tolerance and stamina to tough your way through uncomfortable circumstances (the emotive way).

• Decide your direction, behaviorally follow though, and apply what you know to prosper through your work and your accomplishments (the behavioral way).

This three-pronged program applies to reducing negatives (procrastination) and advancing your positive choices and purposes. Indeed, reducing a needless negative (procrastination) is also very positive.

The three prongs are separate but unified. Making positive changes in one area can have a beneficial effect on the others.

The cognitive, emotive, and behavioral approaches apply to broad challenges, such as how to make real personal changes that stick. For example, in the process of curbing procrastination, you'll learn how to meet challenges decisively and free yourself from stresses that contribute to procrastination and that result from procrastination.

The cognitive approach is grounded in thinking about your thinking and acting to change automatic negative thoughts (ANT) that lead to unpleasant emotions and self-defeating behaviors. A big part of the challenge is knowing when and how to recognize that thinking, and how to use this knowledge to prevent or short-circuit procrastination.

You can teach yourself to dispute procrastination thinking. You'll find guidelines, tips, and methods for doing so throughout the book. Procrastination thinking, such as, “I'll get to this later,” represents specious reasoning that you can quickly learn to debunk. You may fear failure because you fear that rejection will follow. You put off actions in the service of avoiding what is often a fictional fear. Part 1 of
End Procrastination Now!
will show you how to recognize and deal with these cognitive barriers.

Prior to procrastinating, you're likely to experience some form of unpleasant emotion(s) about starting an activity. You may feel tempted to duck the tension and follow the path of least resistance by substituting an emotionally safe diversionary activity for the
one you feel uncomfortable doing. However, the delayed task normally doesn't disappear, and the unpleasant feeling is likely to remain despite your best discomfort-dodging efforts.

Procrastination may start as an emotional reaction to a complex task, an activity with a reward that appears too far in the future, or something that you view as frustrating, unpleasant, or threatening. The task may evoke anxiety. It may be a default reaction to a whisper of negative emotion.

You may set emotional conditions for action. You may think that you need to feel inspired before you can act. If you wait to feel inspired, you may join the characters in Samuel Beckett's play
Waiting for Godot
. (Godot is a no-show.) However, when it comes to following through on unpleasant but necessary responsibilities, it is wise to lead with your intellect and force yourself to get past emotional barriers and onto a productive path. You'll learn many powerful techniques in
Part 2
to help you handle emotional barriers to success and happiness effectively.

When you procrastinate, you practically always substitute something less pressing or important for the activity that you delay. You may do a less pressing but more important activity. However, most behavioral diversions tend to be bottom-drawer-type activities, such as reading the comic section of your newspaper instead of digesting a complex new government regulation that will cause an important change in the way you do business.

In
Part 3
, you'll find a wealth of behavioral prescriptions to curb behavioral diversions and spur productive efforts.

A combination of procrastination thinking, emoting, and behavioral habits can overwhelm even an initial affirmative choice to stop procrastinating. A transition from procrastination to a productive follow-through habit takes time and practice, using the powerful cognitive, emotive, and behavioral antidotes that you'll find in this book. However, this program has a large value-added
feature. You can apply this comprehensive psychology self-help program again and again to get more of what you want and deserve out of life. Try it and see!

By developing your positive cognitive, emotive, and behavioral skills, you can quickly put yourself on the path to self-efficacy. The belief that you have the ability to organize, regulate, and direct your actions toward positive goals is among the most studied in psychology and is associated with higher levels of productive performance. Low self-efficacy, procrastination, and substandard performances are understandably associated.

By taking a cognitive, emotive, and behavioral approach, you can extend and refine your productive skills. However, this is not done in a vacuum: you engage in purposeful projects that yield meaningful results. Another element is accepting that major, purposeful life goals are accomplished small step by small step. Keep your eye on the prize of accomplishing more by procrastinating less and keep moving toward this objective.

In addition to tactics and strategies for ending procrastination, you'll find references to the scientific literature on procrastination. Some of this work is promising, such as recent research that deals with a segment of a theory on procrastination that I outlined. However, much of the research on procrastination suffers from a constant error. The student surveys conducted by the majority of social scientists represent a very limited sample in the broader social context of different peoples and groups. In drawing attention to a specific characteristic, such as procrastination, this can lead to a focusing illusion that can be a significant source of error. These consistent errors are scattered about in University of Calgary Professor Piers Steel's summary of the procrastination research. Perhaps in the next decade we'll find a rising tide of outcome research concerning what people can actually do to kick the procrastination habit. Until then, the three-pronged approach is based on strong findings from clinical research in the area of taking corrective actions.
What we already know about curbing procrastination can only get better.

Throughout this book, you'll find dozens of coordinated ways to advance your productive interests and decrease procrastination interferences. As an additional tool, at the end of each chapter of
End Procrastinating Now!
you'll find space for a procrastination journal of what you found important to remember, what you planned to do, what you did to execute the plan, what resulted, and what you can do with what you learned. This journal will give you an ongoing record that you can refer to whenever you want to review what you accomplished and use what you learned to move yourself to a higher level of confidence and accomplishment. It consists of four parts: key ideas, action plan, implementing actions, and what you learned. You can refer to the information when you want to remind yourself of what works for you, or use it as a tool to build your own program by putting together your own action plans.

There is much that you can do to gain relief from procrastination. By taking a longer-term self-education perspective, you are less likely to follow the procrastination path. By looking for opportunities to pit reason against procrastination deceptions, you are less likely to skid onto the procrastination path. By accepting unpleasant emotions and sensations as temporary, you are less likely to recoil from normal forms of discomfort. By forcing yourself to start taking corrective actions, you load the dice in favor of less hassle, more accomplishments, and a healthier and happier lifestyle. Let's get started!

Procrastination can be puzzling. This variable and complex process comes with lists of causes, symptoms, jokes, and horror stories. It can range from sporadic to persistent. It can be obvious or arrive in disguise. In this chapter, you'll begin to see procrastination from different angles and learn to adjust your level of aspiration concerning the time and resources you will need if you are to take corrective action against procrastination.

It's important to recognize that awareness is the very first step in identifying procrastination traps in order to make positive changes that can overcome the procrastination habit. However, as Alfred Korzybski, founder of General Semantics (an educational discipline on the accurate use of words), said, “The map is not the same as the territory. It's a symbol and guide. You learn the territory by engaging the process.” So let's get started!

Procrastination is a needless delay of a timely and relevant activity. This definition applies across situations ranging from returning a phone call to creating a business plan to quitting smoking.

Occasional procrastination delays in areas of your life that are of relatively low importance are not the end of the world. If you normally shop for groceries once a week and you put off shopping for a day, this procrastination act is inconsequential. However, persistently putting off a number of minor and middle-valued activities is self-defeating if you routinely feel swamped by things you delayed yesterday.

Regardless of whether your procrastination is erratic or persistent, taking action to stop procrastination habits or patterns can lift artificial limits that you previously placed on your life. Any area of procrastination is grist for the mill for purposes of teaching yourself to rid yourself of the procrastination act on the way to disabling the pattern. This is a radically different way of thinking from that of time management hawks, whose views are calculated to get people to work harder and to put out more under umbrella terms of working smarter and easier.

Some causes of procrastination are social, some are linked to brain processes, and others are belief-driven or reliant on temperament and mood. Some forms of procrastination can also be connected to anxiety—feeling uncomfortable about being judged or evaluated. Combinations of motives for procrastination tend to vary in each individual situation. However, it is both the consistency of the procrastination process and the great diversity in situations that set procrastination apart from conditions. A cued panic reaction normally takes far less time and effort to change than a broad pattern of procrastination that may show up in different venues and in surprising and unexpected ways. Let's take a look at general forms of procrastination.

Deadlines have an endpoint and are partially connected to some sort of rule or regulation that you often can't control but that requires your compliance. When you think of procrastination, you may think of missing deadlines or rushing to meet them. That's
a common view of procrastination. Not surprisingly, deadline procrastination is the act of waiting as long as possible before taking action to meet a deadline.

Work life is ruled by timelines, processes, and deadlines. Let's say you are working on your company's semiannual advertising brochure. To get it out at the appointed time, you'll need to take certain steps, such as preparing the content and design, getting it printed, and getting it distributed, in accordance with a schedule. If these activities were not regulated, the advertising brochure might be completed in a disorganized manner.

When a timeline and instructions are fuzzy, but the deadline is clear, you have a special challenge. You may see tasks with vague instructions as something to do later. When a task's purpose and instructions are clear and concrete (when, where, and how), you are more likely to do it. Thus, if you are not sure, ask. And if there is no clear structure, invent one!

You may have a deadline for a long and complex project, and the only reward in sight is the relief you expect to feel when it's done. In this case, you may face another set of challenges that has to do with the distance from your internal reward system. Pigeons will work for small immediate rewards but slack off for a larger reward that requires more work. Monkeys will get distracted and procrastinate when the reward is too far in the distance. We're not far from our mammalian roots when it comes to putting something off when the reward is distant and requires a lot of work. Humans will tend to go for quick rewards and discount bigger future rewards. We'll tend to delay starting projects that appear complex or ambiguous, or that promote uncertainty. Conflicts between our primitive impulses to avoid discomfort over complexity and our higher cognitive functions to solve problems can interfere with rational decision making and promote delays. Thus, a complex long-term project may be like the perfect storm unless you do something else first.

Deadline situations are often trade-off situations. If you want to get a paycheck, you follow the organization's processes and
schedule and avoid procrastinating. The organization gets what it wants, which is a work product, and you get what you want, which is payment for your services. When you have a deadline in the future and the project is complex and requires consistent work, you may have no alternative other than to start early and invest significant time and effort in the process. If the process is internally rewarding, then that may suffice. Otherwise, you'd wisely set periodic rewards following intermediate deadlines that you set for yourself following the completion of predefined chunks of work.