The Procrastination Equation (18 page)

OUTSIDE IN: NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T

Here is a trick that will give you an extra month of efficiency each year. It is easy to implement, immediately effective, and doesn’t cost a cent. First, go to your e-mail program. Second, disable all the audio alerts and mailbox pop-ups. In Microsoft Outlook, they are buried pretty deep under “Advanced E-Mail Options,” but the controls are definitely there. Just unclick every-thing under “When new items arrive in my Inbox.” That’s it, there is no third step. Banishing e-mail notifications will make you about 10 percent more efficient and over a year that translates into one more month of productivity.
^9e
The best work happens when you engage deeply in a single task. Every time you stop your flow, you have to once again decide to work and then it takes time to become fully re-engaged. Unfortunately, we are conditioned to answer e-mail instantly, responding to the tell-tale “ding” like Pavlov’s dogs. Unless you have a pressing reason, check your e-mail at your convenience, during natural breaks in your productivity.

What we are doing here by changing our e-mail settings is regaining
stimulus control.
Part of our decision making occurs subconsciously, in our limbic system. This is not the brightest part of our minds; it takes much of its lead from environmental cues—that is, from the
stimuli
of sight, smell, sound or touch.
³⁹
A provocative image pops up and we think of sex, a tasty smell wafts our way and we become hungry, or we hear a snippet of a song and start humming the tune. These associative cues cause our mind to wander and we forget the original task. With just a little nudge, our imagination slips down the rabbit-hole and we find ourselves mulling over some more personally relevant issue, like what’s for lunch. We have been distracted.

These distracting cues are powerful and pervasive, and are actively pumped into our world. John Bargh, head of Yale’s Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Emotion (ACME) Lab, has spent decades showing how little it takes to influence our minds.
⁴⁰
We can be prepared—primed—for almost anything, all without being aware of it.
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A slight dimming of the lights increases our fearfulness. Hold a hot cup of coffee and warm feelings infuse us, causing us to be more charitable. Putting Hershey’s chocolate kisses on a secretary’s desk in a clear rather than opaque bowl, thereby making them more visible but not more available, increases snacking at the office by 46 percent.
⁴²
The power of cues is such that they can create cravings that leap upon us—“If you speak of the Devil, so he will appear.” Addicts often feel an overwhelming urge to relapse when they encounter a strong drug cue, such as a neighborhood hangout or a former fellow user.
⁴³

Big business has been aggressively trying to direct these cognitive cues, deluging us with over a thousand advertisements each day. To take back control of our environment, essentially we need to run our own personal advertising department. As it is, our workplaces and schools are motivationally toxic, polluted with distractions. We need to make them sanctuaries of performance, taking advantage of the “out of sight, out of mind” adage to purge our offices and classrooms of irrelevant cues. At the beginning of this section, I asked you to turn off all your e-mail alerts. I also told you about how Ulysses had his crew seal their ears with wax to avoid hearing the Sirens. Both of these examples draw upon the same principle of eliminating external cues. You need to identify your distractions and cleanse their accompanying cues from your life. I bet you have more than a few Internet sites hot-linked on your computer for easy access. Start by deleting those. While you are at it, get rid of any quick-launch icons for games, or better yet, erase the games completely. At home, hide the remote control for the TV or close the doors of the television cabinet if you have one. Now for the really hard part.

A messy workspace, cluttered and disorganized, is a minefield of distractions. For every minute you hunt for a misplaced report or book, the likelihood increases that some tangential tidbit will entrance you. Everything extraneous on your desk distracts and detracts, making it harder to find and focus on your primary purpose.
⁴⁴
But here is the catch-22: the number one activity that people postpone is “cleaning out closets, drawers, and other cluttered spaces.”
⁴⁵
Procrastinators are more likely to leave clutter, which in turn, increases their procrastination.
⁴⁶
You need some help. You can combat clutter with some of the other procrastination-fighting techniques in this book—the structured or productive procrastination we looked at in chapter 8 is particularly relevant for you. The most motivating time to de-clutter your life always seems to be before another pressing deadline. Alternatively, look outside these pages for help. Just search online under the word “clutter” to find books on how to organize your life. You can also call in organizing experts; it’s no more unusual than hiring a personal trainer to jumpstart your exercise program.
^9f

Once you have banished the signs of temptation, the other half of this stimulus-control strategy is filling the void. External reminders of our goals are important, but instead of motivational posters featuring generic catch phrases, your reminders need to be personally relevant. They need to speak to
you.
What do you strongly associate with the target task? If there is a quotation you find particularly inspiring, have your screensaver produce it whenever you idle. If you are slow at paying bills or taxes, place them prominently on your kitchen or coffee table, where you can’t ignore them. Even writing a list is a good reminder, especially on a sticky note posted to the side of your computer screen.
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All these cues solidify into an unwaveringly effective concentrative strategy, focusing your attention toward your goal.
⁴⁸

To emphasize how effective this concentrative strategy can be, consider the boost it can give to your household energy efficiency. The problem with energy consumption is that it is distant and vague, only realized in a monthly bill long after the kilowatts have been killed. If we made a very small change and put your electricity meter on the
inside
rather than the
outside
of your house, this visible and constant reminder of your energy cost would coordinate your limbic system with your prefrontal cortex, sparking you to turn off unneeded lights and replace the remainder with efficient fluorescents.
⁴⁹
Mark Martinez from Southern California Edison, for example, had his customers use an
Ambient Orb
that glowed red when electricity was expensive.
⁵⁰
Within weeks, peak hour consumption voluntarily reduced by 40 percent; and other similar experiments have indicated about a 10 percent savings in monthly utility bills.
⁵¹

For work, stimulus cues don’t have to be store-bought. Anything associated with a task can spur you to complete it: time of day, preceding activity, and colleagues all can be transformed into work triggers.
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Most usefully, you can make your place of work itself a cue, so that focus comes automatically as soon as you sit down. This strategy requires dedicating your environment exclusively to labor. To do this, work in your office until your motivation leaves you and goofing off becomes irresistible. At this point, do your web surfing, your social networking, your game playing
somewhere else.
This may require you to get a second computer, one for play, but when the added productivity kicks in, the purchase will pay for itself. If you keep work and play in discrete domains, associations will build and attention will become effortless—your environment will be doing all the heavy motivational lifting. Three studies have investigated the effectiveness of this technique with students, and found that the use of dedicated work areas decreased procrastination significantly within weeks.
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Similar applications, such as using separate banking accounts to prevent impulsive spending, can be almost instantaneously effective.
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Without this segregation between work and play, you get conflicting cues every time you sit down at your desk, one indicating that you should research your report and the other egging you on to check your Facebook page.

To sharpen role boundaries between clashing life domains, typically family and work, we need to keep the demarcation lines pristine.
⁵⁵
If you can’t afford a separate computer, then at least create a second profile that requires you to log out of your workplace identity before you slip into your lazier alter ego. If you find your BlackBerry allows the office to pollute family time, get a stripped-down second cell phone to use when you punch out. You might also include a transition ritual to help you move from one domain to another, such as winding down with the radio during your commute or changing out of your “work clothes” when you arrive home. If you need to work at home, have a separate office, no matter how small or symbolic. These environmental cues will fence off distracting temptations, allowing you to truly
be
in each place.

2. Action Points for Making Paying Attention Pay:
Distractions are a major enabler of procrastination, so learning how to effectively handle them is a must. Your options are to denigrate, eliminate, or replace cues that remind you of your temptations.

• Sully tempting alternatives by using covert sensitization, imagining disgusting ways they may be tainted, or envision possible disastrous outcomes from procrastinating. The more vividly you can imagine the contamination or the catastrophe, the more effective this technique will be.

• When confronted with distracting temptations, focus on their most abstract aspects. Triple chocolate cheesecake, for example, can be construed as another fat and sugar combination.

• Entirely eliminate cues that remind you of distracting alternatives where possible. Keeping your workplace clear of clutter will help you accomplish this.

• Once you have purged your workplace of distracting cues, replace them with meaningful messages or pictures that remind you of why you are working. For some, a desk photo of loved ones can be an effective reminder.

• Foster these work cues by compartmentalizing your place of work and play, keeping them as separate as possible.

SCORING GOALS

Inch by inch, life’s a cinch; yard by yard, life is hard. How powerful is this mantra? Joe Simpson, in one of mountaineering’s greatest survival stories, used it to save his life. Left for dead at the bottom of a crevasse in an isolated Peruvian mountain with a shattered shinbone, he had three days to pull himself to a base camp through five miles of truly treacherous glacier field or be really dead. He was already utterly exhausted from an arduous marathon of an ascent, with no food and only a little water, so this journey should have been impossible, except for one critical survival tool: his wristwatch. With it, he set goals. Setting the alarm for twenty minutes at a time, he made for a nearby rock or drift—he was elated when he reached it in time and he despaired when he didn’t. Battling exhaustion, pain, and eventually delirium, he repeated this process hundreds of times and reached the perimeter of the base camp just hours before his friends' intended departure.

Simpson’s story, recounted in his book
Touching the Void,
highlights the power of goal setting. As Mark Twain wrote: “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” Further notions about how to construct goals to maximize their motivational benefits, however, are shrouded in confusion. Despite thousands of scientific studies on how best to set goals, little of this know-how has permeated into the mainstream.
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Since the mid-eighties, over five hundred books have stressed S.M.A.R.T. goals, an acronym that has both too many and too few letters. S.M.A.R.T. stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Anchored. There are too many letters, in that
Specific
is redundant with both
Measurable
and
Time-Anchored
while
Attainable
is redundant with
Realistic.
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There are too few in that it is still missing major concepts. Let me tell you what you actually need to know.

We have already touched on some of what makes a goal good. In chapter 7, we mentioned that making goals challenging is more inspiring than making them attainable. Easy goals are attainable. You know what happens after obtaining your easy goal? The same thing that happens after you cross the finish line of any race: you stop.
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In chapter 8, we focused on making goals meaningful by linking them to personally relevant aspirations.
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If you see how present tasks lead to future rewards, you will value them more highly. In this chapter, we will put the finishing touches on goal setting by putting time back on your side.

THE FINISH LINE IS JUST AHEAD

Almost invariably, reporters contact me about their piece on procrastination mere hours before it is due.
Slate
magazine, for example, which did a special issue on procrastination, confessed: it was “originally planned for the week of May 5. Seriously. We'd planned to publish that Monday morning, but there was one problem: only a handful of our writers had managed to get their work in on time.”
⁶⁰
My theory is that the fourth estate is full of unrepentant procrastinators, drawn there because it is one of the few places they fit. Every day the job itself generates a specific and proximal deadline: so many words on this topic by this hour
or else!
This is exactly the type of goal that procrastinators excel at meeting. To get motivated, they need a clear and close finish line. Their action curve follows directly from the Procrastination Equation; as delay shrinks, motivation peaks.