End Procrastination Now! (8 page)

As another emotional contingency, you wait for a moment of inspiration to get started. But who expects to be inspired to file work orders? It's not that feeling good about what you do is a problem. The problem is delaying action while passively awaiting an unpredictable emotional state. From time to time, you'll experience an emotional state in which your problems are manageable, you are unaffected by negative events, and you efficiently finish what you would ordinarily put off. Thus, there is a basis for saying that you do better when you are inspired. How often does that happen?

In the
backward ploy
, you tell yourself that before you can defeat procrastination, you need to know how you came to procrastinate.
Otherwise, you're doomed to repeat the pattern. You tell yourself that until you get around to this archaeological expedition into the depths of your psyche, you'll never be free from procrastination. Meanwhile, you have a perfect excuse for procrastinating forever.

This ploy can have the surface appearance of seeking deep answers to profound questions about the self. It can sound like a sophisticated act. Yet it serves the same purpose as the other contingency ploys: avoidance, avoidance, avoidance.

There is no compelling evidence that scientifically demonstrates that searching through incomplete and biased memories to reach premapped but speculative unconscious territories correlates with reducing procrastination. However, understanding what you do today to create needless delays can be productive. Recognizing procrastination thinking, for example, opens an opportunity to change your thinking and get under way with what is important to do now.

Self-handicapping
is a term coined by psychologists Edwin Jones and Steven Berglas; it describes a cognitive process of enhancing self-esteem in dealing with tasks or goals that you may or may not be good at. Self-handicapping plays a critical role in your procrastination process. By laying the blame on uncontrollable obstacles, you can save face when you deliver subpar or failing performances. You have to take your hat off to anyone who creates this no-lose form of self-protection. However, does it come with a price? The price is likely to be in the direction of procrastination and mediocrity.

Here is how self-handicapping can feed procrastination. Your boss explains that because the economy is tight, your new assignment is to renegotiate purchasing contracts with the company's suppliers. She wants to put the company into a better competitive position by reducing prices without affecting profit margins. She thinks this is an opportunity to increase market share.

You think something else. You might be able to pull this off, but you are doubtful. Instead of facing your insecurities about your ability to negotiate a price reduction, you tell yourself—and others—that your boss is being unrealistic. The suppliers won't budge on price. So, based on that self-protective assumption, you drag your feet on setting up meetings, make a halfhearted effort to negotiate, and fulfill the prophecy. You reinforce your belief that your boss was unrealistic.

Handicapping is common in organizational settings. You can say that you could have done your work on schedule if you had had better people, more money, active cooperation from superiors, and more hours in the day. Office politics are distractions, as are complaints that others have not done their part, or that you were thrown off because you didn't have the supplies in time, or that the computer had glitches, or that the company consultants were messing with the system. If you are in a position where you'd compete with a more skilled player, might you handicap yourself by telling yourself that you don't stand a chance?

Why would a reasonable person consciously or subconsciously seek ways to promote a decrease in productive performances through self-handicapping? The usual suspects are social anxieties and fears about disappointing others, disapproval (evaluation anxiety), image management, and expediency (going for a quick way to avoid or shed tension).

The self-handicapping trap has an easily picked lock. If you want to spring yourself, you might consider evoking the concept of nonfailure and ask yourself the following questions:

•
Which of your personal resources can you apply to take the first step?
Think about your thinking. Are you setting yourself up to procrastinate by prejudging a situation as too tough, complicated, unpleasant, or undoable? If so, introduce a change into this thinking process. First, ask and answer what makes the task too tough for
you
? Separate belief and assumption
from fact. Consider the Chinese philosopher Laotzu's (604–531
BC
) oft-quoted perspective that the journey of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet.

•
Is self-handicapping inconsistent with your expressed long-term goals?
If so, what needs to change? What can you do to prepare differently in the next situation where self-handicapping beliefs surface and fog reality? For example, by recognizing self-handicapping procrastination thinking as a consistent but correctable error, you've put a special form of procrastination thinking into the spotlight.

•
Will awareness alone thwart a self-handicapping process?
Awareness is a start. You can normally advance this awareness by contrasting handicapping self-statements with do-it-now thinking and behavior. We'll get into how to create and support a productive do-it-now idea later in this chapter.

Counterfactual thinking is about what didn't happen but could have happened had you acted differently. One form is an
upward counterfactual
because it points to what you could have done to promote a better outcome. This thinking can extend into self-recrimination if you tend to blame yourself, or it can be useful information for future planning.

If there is an upward counterfactual, you can bet that you can find a
downward counterfactual
. This is about what could have been worse had you not acted as you did.

Unless you are careful about upward counterfactuals, you may get down on yourself. If you allow for no past, present, or future errors, counterfactual thinking can be a terror. If hindsight turns into an examination of what you should have had the foresight to see, this view can be dysfunctional

Downward counterfactuals are upward in the sense that you both have distanced yourself from the event and can feel better because things could have been worse.

You may feel better about your performance with a downward counterfactual than with an upward counterfactual. For example, Olympic silver medalists are inclined to occupy themselves with what they could have done to get the gold, and bronze medalists tend to think about their good fortune in avoiding fourth place.

Upward counterfactual thinking is associated with higher levels of procrastination under anxious circumstances. When counterfactuals combine with self-handicapping, the trend is to excuse procrastination and improve self-esteem. When delays lead to weak performance, safeguarding one's image can come into play in two ways: “If only I hadn't procrastinated on preparing for my presentation, I would have gotten the promotion.” This combination makes performance improvements less likely.

Depending on the situation,
could have
thinking can have different effects. This thinking can be depressing if you believe that you are powerless to take corrective actions in the next situation. You might consider how to do better in the future, and plan for taking the types of actions that offer you the best chance. Downward counterfactuals can help you save face. You have better alternatives.

• The first century
AD
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said: “Your past is gone, your future is uncertain.” If you take this message to heart, you know that you cannot change what has been done, but that the corrective actions you take today apply to shaping a positive future.

• “Could have” counterfactuals are associated with higher levels of procrastination. It doesn't have to be that way. With reflection and planning, you could have fewer “could haves” and more “have done” experiences.

• You can turn counterfactual thinking, such as “I could have done better,” into corrective reflection. If a counterfactual follows a delayed effort, use the occasion to plan a promising new counter-procrastination strategy. What do you want to
accomplish? What steps can you take to improve? When will you take them? How will you measure the results? How will you know when to adjust the plan?

• You can have the best analysis and plan possible, but you won't get beyond the joys of mental preparation unless you convert the plan into action. How might procrastination get in the way of a solution for curbing procrastination? What are you prepared to do to short-circuit mental and behavioral diversions?

Procrastination thinking is an automatic habit, but once you are aware of your automatic procrastination thinking habit, you are in a position to disengage from it. Here are some tips for deflating automatic procrastination thinking: (1) monitor your thinking, (2) identify the mental diversion, (3) question it, and (4) force yourself to follow through.

More than any psychology self-help system builder, New York psychologist Albert Ellis drew core principles from Epictetus' philosophy and built them into a powerful rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) approach. You can apply the method to decrease stress, promote wellness, and end procrastination.

Research into the complexity of human nature and REBT methods supports the effectiveness of this foundation method for the cognitive behavioral approach.

You can teach yourself to use Ellis's famous ABCDE approach to attack procrastination thinking. The system delivers a framework for organizing information about procrastination and describes how to challenge and change procrastination thinking. Here's the model:

•
A
stands for an aversive or activating event; it can range from giving up your favorite treats in order to lose weight, to a career reversal, to managing a difficult project.

•
B
refers to what you believe about the A. Beliefs include evaluations and can range from dispassionate to alarming. They usually come in irrational and rational forms. Irrational procrastination beliefs include later thinking. Rational beliefs may include do-it-now thinking. How you go about resolving a conflict between later and do-it-now thinking will help determine whether you will tend to move along a procrastination path or go a do-it-now way.

•
C
refers to the emotional and behavioral consequences that are the by-product of a belief about an unpleasant upcoming responsibility.

•
D
stands for disputing procrastination thinking and replacing these thoughts with fact-based rival beliefs.

•
E
is the socially and personally desirable effect from questioning, challenging, and disputing procrastination thinking.

By questioning procrastination thinking, you help make this type of thinking less automatic. The questions that have the most impact are (1) specific and require concrete answers: when, where, what, and how of experiencing, (2) scientific because they require a concrete answer, and (3) open-ended and flexible to pull more than one answer. The following questions apply to disputing procrastination later thinking:

•
Later Thought:
I'll call home now and worry about getting the schedule done after that.

Sample question:
What would be the result of writing out the schedule now and calling home later?

Sample answer:
I'll have broken a link in the procrastination chain and will have gotten the task off my back.

•
“I'll do it tomorrow” excuse:
I'll deal with my job stresses after I research the subject.

Sample question:
What actions can I take to deal with job stress as I do the research?

Sample answer:
I can start immediately and use the results of my stress reduction efforts to shape what I research next.

In the D phase, you refine your critical-thinking skills by applying them to procrastination thinking.

There is an almost endless number of questions that you can apply to recognize and uproot procrastination thinking. What do you tell yourself or believe about the target situation? Does this belief represent an assumption or a fact? Is there credible evidence to support the way you view the situation? Can you treat your belief like a hypothesis and test it? Do these questions help promote a realistic perspective?

If you prefer to use a tested set of questions, the following cookbook approach can serve that purpose. Here you apply six standards for rational thinking that you can contrast with suspected stress thinking and what you believe are examples of do-it-now thinking (see
Table 2.1
).

Your answers to these questions become disputes against the irrationalities of procrastination thinking. Additionally, the act of pausing and reflecting to interrupt an impulsive procrastination reaction introduces a change into the system to check your thinking about the situation.

Now let's take a look at the following ABCDE example, which shows how to use a do-it-now perspective to counteract procrastination thinking. Do you remember the example of Jane's procrastination pattern from the introduction? Let's see how she used the ABCDE approach.

Jane's procrastination pattern started when she saw her quarterly financial report assignment as complicated, difficult, and uncomfortable to do. Despite having done similar reports before, she habitually approached each new report with uncertainty and anxiety about her ability to perform effectively. She did a discomfort-dodging waltz by mowing the lawn and hobnobbing. She experienced relief when she decided to delay. She also felt satisfaction from delaying her goal by chatting with a neighbor.