The Procrastination Equation (14 page)

Success requires balancing optimism with realism: it will be a hard slog and there will likely be lapses, but you can get back on track.
³¹
When I quit smoking, I paid attention to two variables: how many cigarettes I smoked during a binge and the length of time between binges. As long as the first number went down and the second went up, I was getting somewhere. Rather than believing you can entirely and easily beat the problem of procrastination, believe that you can beat it down. Instead of aiming to never procrastinate, aim to start just a little bit earlier on more and more projects. Modest gains can have significant outcomes. I have some students who start studying for exams only forty-eight hours beforehand, but if they started one day earlier, they'd increase their cramming time by 50 percent. As the author Louis L'Amour counsels: “Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more.”

4. Action Points for Plan for the Worst, Hope for the Best:
Life won’t always go your way. Rather than expecting perfection, anticipate difficulties and setbacks. When they inevitably occur, you won’t be as easily derailed. Here is how to inject some healthy pessimism into your plans.

• Determine what could go wrong to distract you on the way to your goal. Reflect honestly on your past experiences and seek counsel from others who have gone through similar difficulties. For example, take a look at the online forums about procrastination.

• Make a list of the ways you habitually procrastinate, and post it where you work.

• Avoid these pre-identified risky situations. For example, if text messaging is your problem, turn off your cell phone or PDA before you get to work.

• Develop a disaster recovery plan ahead of time. If you stumble and start skipping the gym, what emergency cord can you pull? Do you have a friend you can go to for a pep talk? Can you hire a personal trainer to get you back on track?

• If you find your motivation derailed, use your recovery plan. Focus on reducing the depth and duration of your motivational lapse.

ACCEPT THAT YOU'RE ADDICTED TO DELAY

When procrastination gets really serious, baby steps might not work. You may need a heavy-duty technique, one that you borrow from the Alcoholics Anonymous' twelve-step recovery program. AA’s first step is: “We admit we are powerless over alcohol.” Many find this admission a strange start to sobriety, since it runs counter to any notions of optimism and increases the chance that once you've had one drink, you will abandon all self-control and go on a bender.
³²
Still, acknowledging powerlessness over alcoholism or procrastination can paradoxically lead to the elimination of both.

Indeed, it is possible to improve self-control by embracing your pessimism. How does this work? Well, truly acknowledging that any single failure of willpower inevitably leads to the collapse of all your self-control gives you far more motivation than believing that occasional lapses can be safely contained.
³³
Abstinence is a preferable antidote to rationalizing every slip and indulgence. Since one drink, a lone candy bar, or a solitary cigarette is in itself inconsequential, we can trick ourselves into downplaying their significance. If we indulge in thinking one additional day of delay is always all right, then tomorrow’s day of action never comes.
³⁴
Maury Silver and John Sabini, who researched procrastination in the 1970s, describe this problem in terms of the prototypical student procrastinator:
³⁵

When it is time to decide whether to work or procrastinate, there is no shortage of excuses for giving in to temptation. Conditions will be better tomorrow, so I will start then; I'll work better after I get something to eat; it will be easier if I clean up first; I'll start after I finish this level, finish watching this show, finish this e-mail; this party/episode/diversion is especially good, so it would be unfair if I missed it; I deserve a break because I've been working so hard already; others are procrastinating, so why shouldn’t I; it’s just this once so it doesn’t count; there’s still plenty of time; and finally, it’s already too late to make a difference so there’s no need to start now. These are all justifications after the fact. Their only purpose is to assuage your anxiety and guilt.

There is only one surefire way to stop you from justifying your way into procrastination. Follow the Victorian era’s greatest maxim: “Never suffer an exception to occur.”
^7e
This is the same advice given by Alcoholic Anonymous. You buttress your commitment to early starts by believing that any slip will be catastrophic, that the initial step toward procrastinating is merely the first link in an endless chain. The specifics of tomorrow will be much the same as today: you will be tempted to incur a small but cumulative cost to gain a moderate immediate pleasure. If you decide to delay even once, your decision will be replicated daily and the consequences will grow. It is as these verses from Goethe’s masterpiece,
Faust,
indicate. Asking for more time can be a deal with the devil:

5. Action Points for Accepting That You're Addicted to Delay:
If you find yourself chronically procrastinating, consistently able to fool yourself into extended delays by finding moment-by-moment excuses, this may be the technique you have been looking for. Procrastination has a very deep hold on you, and to defeat it you need to accept this humbling fact.

• Take a moment to reflect upon how many times you have talked yourself out of your plans and into trouble. Start keeping a daily log to track your procrastination habits.

• Acknowledge that your biggest worry is your own weak will, that you
will
try to fool yourself into thinking “just this once.”

• Accept that the first delay allows you to justify all the subsequent ones. By doing so, you will be far less likely to take that first step.

LOOKING FORWARD

This chapter is primarily for the low-expectancy Eddies, those who need just a little more confidence to reach their potential. Back in chapter 2, Eddie stopped believing in his ability to make the sale and because of this self-doubt, his failure became inevitable. If he had attended more to his progress, he could have initiated a success spiral. If he had supplemented this momentum by attending a sales support group, creating a little vicarious victory, he could have maintained a career in selling. You might have also stopped believing in your ability to advance your career, your personal life, or your health. You make plans to change but no longer truly believe in your ability to pull them off. Take a moment to review your results from the self-assessment quiz in chapter 2. If you scored 24 or below on the Expectancy scale, maybe you, like Eddie, should take a closer look at the techniques presented here.

On the other hand, there are a few of you who are overconfident, and you may be equally at risk. Confidence or optimism turns out to be a lot like vitamin A: too little of it will lead to blindness but too much of it can kill you. The trick is to find the sweet spot between being pessimistic and being happy-go-lucky, a place where you have faith in your ability to succeed but not so much faith that you fail to put in the effort. Whether you need your positive expectations fired up or dampened down, you are in luck. All the techniques shown here are rock-solid and scientifically sound. They will start working immediately and you will get better with practice. Believe me.

Chapter Eight
Love It or Leave It

FINDING RELEVANCE IN WORK

If time flies when you're having fun, it hits the afterburners when you don’t think you're having enough.

JEF MALLETT

T
o warm up my students for a class on motivation, we play a game called
My Job Is Worse Than Your Job.
Since misery loves company, it is a lot of fun. We try to find the worst past employment experience in our group and then deconstruct the job to determine why it was so terrible. The room echoes with groans of sympathy as the students talk about summers spent shoveling pig manure or their scorching, exhausting, and mosquito-plagued months spent tree planting. But invariably, the jobs voted “worst” aren’t the physically demanding ones; the worst are the mind-numbingly boring ones. For example, one bright young man used to spend his potential straightening cardboard boxes when they occasionally became misaligned crossing conveyor belts. I was once a lifeguard at a waterslide park, assigned to watch the same few meters of splash zone for time without end.

These sorts of jobs turn us into clock-watchers who wait for each agonizing minute to pass.
¹
Since every aspect of the job has been mapped out, we are left with little to say about when or how to do the work, little chance for initiative or innovation. We must repeat the same actions endlessly. Are we doing a good job? Nobody really knows except when we slip up. Movies such as
Modern Times
and
Office Space,
in which the protagonists escape such employment purgatory, become cult classics. More recently, the award-winning television show
The Office
has been a success in half a dozen versions around the world. Part of the show’s charm is its ability to demonstrate how humanity manages to rise above the squelch of meaningless work. Factory and office jobs, however, weren’t always like this.

We owe the “modern” workplace largely to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the originator of scientific management.
²
Before he came along, the majority of work was skilled and somewhat immune to direct management, performed by craftsmen who learned their trade through years of apprenticeship and specialization. Managers couldn’t easily supervise such artisans when they had little idea of how they did their jobs and it wasn’t in the workers' interest to tell them.
³
Taylor’s breakthrough was to fragment work into more easily managed elements—simple routine tasks lacking autonomy. When his system, Taylorism, was first implemented, back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was considered an abomination that lobotomized the human spirit, robbing work of its meaning and pleasure. People hated it so much that its introduction at the U.S. government arsenal at Watertown, Massachusetts, spurred a strike that led to a special investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives. The congressional committee concluded that man should naturally resent “the introduction of any system which deals with him the same way as a beast of burden or an inanimate machine,” and took action to prevent the adoption of Taylorism in governmental facilities. When the industrialist Henry Ford implemented a similar system, employee turnover at his automobile factories increased almost tenfold; workers stayed barely a month before leaving. Taylorism, however, had an ace in the hole: it was efficient and it was profitable. Though Ford eventually had to double wages to fill his factory jobs, the improvement in efficiency allowed him to simultaneously increase his workers' pay and cut the cost of his Model T cars by almost half. In the end, Taylorism helped to give rise to cheap goods and a wealthy middle class that could purchase them. Assembly line work, on the other hand, still often sucks.

The tasks we hate are among those we tend to postpone. Because Taylor’s system leads to standardized, repetitive, and rigidly controlled tasks, hating work can be a chronic state of being, an inevitable result of jobs being designed around mechanistic instead of motivational models.
⁴
What can we do about this? We might dream of returning to a time when what we desired to do and what we needed to get done were the same, but that’s not realistic. Even if you are your own boss and can dictate your own terms, you still need to accomplish some tasks that are no fun, and these are exactly the jobs that people put off. Perhaps it’s time to think about tricking yourself into getting them done. As the title of this chapter goes, you love it or leave it—until later that is.

GAMES AND GOALS

Whoever we are, we are likely to put off doing whatever we find excruciatingly dull. Boredom signals that what we are doing is irrelevant, and so the mind slides off the task.
⁵
It makes sense, then, that procrastinators are much more likely than non-procrastinators to perceive life’s daily tasks as drudgery. Of all the boring tasks that fill the world, the one that tops most people’s hate list is routine paperwork. The busywork—filling in timesheets, submitting expense reports, and supplying the data that companies and governments endlessly require—seems pointless, even when it isn’t. Remember Michael Mocniak, that general counsel who got fired for putting off completing $1.4 million worth of invoices? Fortunately, however, boredom isn’t inherently part of any job—anything can be made more interesting simply by the way we treat it.
⁶
Tom Sawyer, for example, managed to get the village boys to
pay him
for the privilege of whitewashing his Aunt Polly’s picket fence. How? By insisting that they couldn’t help and making them envy an unenviable chore. Here are a few effective techniques for turning leaden tasks into golden ones.

To relieve task boredom, try making things more difficult for yourself. (Don’t overdo it though—when tasks are too difficult, frustration can take hold.)
⁷
Finding the balance between the difficulty of your task and your ability to do it is a key component for creating
flow,
a state of total engagement.
⁸
Flow states don’t happen naturally, since many jobs are structured around an unvarying level of difficulty, whereas most workers' ability increases with practice. When work is new and its difficulty exceeds your ability, anxiety rises as you fumble to perform. Then, as you improve, the work can become engaging, but this motivational fit is momentary. When you have gained true mastery, boredom becomes the rule; you have done it all before. To prevent this descent into dullness, game playing becomes a common strategy. Set your own standards, create your own feedback, and try to beat your score. Can you do it in half the time? How about one-handed? Eyes closed? The comedy group Broken Lizard devised a film,
Super Troopers,
around this theme: five Vermont state troopers find ways of weaving games and shenanigans into their work, making their days passable.
^8a
One elderly potato-chip factory worker kept her days full by collecting unusual chip deviations that resembled famous people.
⁹
Competitive swimmers keep boredom at bay by imagining sharks in the pool water.

By the way, I can’t help but notice that you are continuing to read this book despite the shelves of other books to choose from. I'd guess that procrastination is a problem you or someone in your family experiences, and that as a consequence you are finding these pages personally pertinent and interesting. You could put the book aside, but relevance keeps you reading. This is equally true for other actions and tasks: the risk of procrastination diminishes when tasks are relevant, instrumentally connected to topics and goals of personal significance.
¹⁰
Actions that don’t fit self-determined and self-defined goals are
amotivational.
¹¹
They are imposed upon us and we reluctantly comply. At my university, we have many managers voluntarily coming to school each evening after working a full day at the office in order to earn their MBAs. I imagine their motivational chain of objectives goes something like this:

• They read the book so they can prepare for a test.

• They prepare for the test so they can ace the course.

• They ace the course so they can get the grades.

• They get the grades so they can receive an MBA.

• They get the MBA so they can get a promotion.

• They get the promotion so they can make more money and enjoy their work.

All the sub goals in this hierarchy are predicated on the last—getting a promotion so as to enjoy more interesting work.
¹²
You need a string of future goals that you find intrinsically motivating to hook your present responsibilities onto. Break this motivational chain at any point and you leave it anchorless; goal commitment is negligible and, like a balloon, attention floats away with every waft.

The relevance factor is a major reason why procrastination decreases with age. As we mature, we increasingly connect the dots, seeing reasons for what we once thought was pointless. If you lack large resonating goals—life tasks—then your purpose now is to find them. It is a big world and you need to experience at least some of it. In the meantime, I will give you a generic goal that will inject any task with more meaning. Frame what you are putting off as a test of your willpower, and, as a buttressing side bet, tell your friends of your intention to start early. The goal of staying true to yourself and portraying your consistency to others will increase the pleasure of sticking with the task and resisting tempting alternatives.
¹³
For example, Barack Obama’s public announcement that he intended to quit smoking helped him put cigarettes aside, with only the occasional lapse.
¹⁴

To further maximize your intrinsic motivation, frame your long-term goals in terms of the success you want to achieve—an
approach
goal—rather than the failure you want to prevent—an
avoidance
goal. People who generate positive long-term goals go on to procrastinate less and perform better.
¹⁵
Advice like “Don’t fall!” to the precariously balanced or “Don’t forget the lyrics!” to singers increases the likelihood of the very outcomes they profess to prevent. Consequently, “I really want this book to get good reviews” is better than “I hope not to be openly mocked for my writing.” Thinking “I want her to like me” is better than “I don’t want to be rejected again.” Almost any goal can be flipped from avoidance to approach, from what you don’t want to happen to what you desire.
¹⁶
Just look at the following table:

AVOIDANCE GOALS ARE . . .

1.      Not staying home

2.      Not being tired

3.      Not staying in a dead-end job

4.      Not struggling with bills

5.      Not leaving the glass empty

6.      Not beginning late

APPROACH GOALS ARE . . .

Exploring the World

Having energy

Finding your calling

Making more money

Filling the glass up

Starting early

On which side of that table do you usually reside? Do you focus on not eating treats when dieting (an avoidance goal) or on eating healthy meals (an approach goal)? Do you think about not procrastinating (an avoidance goal) or about starting earlier (an approach goal)? I thought so. So the lesson is: Stop making avoidance goals!
^8b

1. Action Points for Games and Goals:
It is said, at least by people quoting Shakespeare, that there is nothing good or bad in this world but thinking makes it so. The Bard is exaggerating a bit but he is essentially right. Frame your tasks appropriately; the way you view them significantly determines their value.

• Avoid boredom by making tasks more challenging. Games can be handy here, with the rules limited only by your imagination and common sense. For example, when you are competing against your colleagues, almost any task can become a race to finish first or to get the most work done. In competing against yourself, you could also try to finish the task in fewer hours.

• Connect tasks to your long-term goals, to what you find intrinsically motivating. For example, if you are a social person, you could frame cleaning your house as “Providing an inviting home for family and friends.”

• Frame your goals in terms of what you want to achieve rather than what you are trying to avoid. For example, think “I want to succeed” instead of “I don’t want to fail.”

ENERGY CRISIS

When I moved to Minnesota to work on my PhD, my wife, Julie, and I managed to snag a dream apartment: a converted warehouse loft. Rent was low—a key feature on a student income—and the location was close to both my university and her workplace. Even better, only a wide golden field separated us from the Mississippi River. Nothing, however, is all good. That field was full of ragweed, which triggered my hay fever. My allergies had never been bad enough to warrant medication, but after my third box of tissues, I quickly opted for an over-the-counter allergy drug. Suddenly, I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning without repeated sharp prods from my wife. Work became incredibly difficult, like running through deep powder snow. What was wrong with me? Was I depressed? Overwhelmed? Finally, I read the back of the medication box: “May cause drowsiness.” Later I learned that most allergy medications contain antihistamines, which have the same active ingredient as the sleep-aid
Nytol.
I was taking the equivalent of sleeping pills and no wonder I was having trouble tackling tasks.

Whether tiredness is drug-induced or not, being too tired is the number one reason given for procrastinating; 28 percent of people claim, “Didn’t have enough energy to begin the task” as the cause.
¹⁷
When you are tired at the end of day, after your job has already got the best part of you, cleaning out the garage is the last thing you are going to do. Fatigue increases task-aversion, saps interest, and makes the difficult excruciating.
¹⁸
Whether it is an exhausted muscle or an exhausted mind, you can feel the burn of being burnt out.
¹⁹
When you're tired, it becomes even harder to force yourself to tackle jobs you dislike. Burnout saps your willpower because the exercise of will—self-control and self-motivation—takes energy. Whenever you have to suppress a competing impulse, you exhaust your energy stores and willpower. If you have to stop yourself from eating that cookie, you deplete your willpower. If you suppress an emotion, like laughter or anger, you deplete your willpower. If you are coping with stress, your willpower depletes. This decrease in self-control occurs after you make difficult choices, one reason why clothes shopping can be an exhausting ordeal if you lack an innate fashion sense. Those bizarre outfits that languish in your closet were likely purchased toward the end of a shopping trip.