- “People engage in this irrational cycle of chronic procrastination because of an inability to manage negative moods around a task.”
Man, this makes a lot of sense but until today I'd never thought of it that way.
Strongly agree with the article! There is a great “2-Minute Rule” to stop procrastination that states “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” You’ll find that nearly any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute version: “Read before bed each night” becomes “Read one page.” “Do thirty minutes of yoga” becomes “Take out my yoga mat.” “Study for class” becomes “Open my notes.” “Fold the laundry” becomes “Fold one pair of socks.” “Run three miles” becomes “Tie my running shoes.” The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start.
The source of some of the negative mood is not merely that a task sucks, but that we don’t know where to start. The task is ill-defined or amorphous, and because we have no point of entry we feel a certain sense of dread. Better to do something to alleviate that dread than to merely keep feeling it, so let me alphabetize the spice rack. I try and remind myself in moments of that peculiar helplessness to try and define just one next-step. So instead of “start project” it’s “open a browser, read three serious articles about one aspect of the project, summarize those articles”. The concreteness means that I’m doing the “easy” work of following an algorithm, not the hard work of figuring out what to do.
Personally I hate most business lingo, but I do really like the SMART criteria for tasks. I sometimes use that to break my Big Things up into little ones, because each of the five criteria makes a task smaller and more attainable. Still though I procrastinate even when I know exactly what to do next because I'm scared or anxious or whatever. It's another, separate way of tasks being hard to do I think.
It's not just that IMO, it's more about how to deal with stuff that sucks. Because the prevailing narrative is to just try harder, to exert more willpower, while the article says that that's simply not going to work. I have often struggled to call someone, or to do something important, because I had too much fear / dread / anxiety to make the first step. But you have to deal with the emotion around a task first before you can succesfully tap the well of willpower.
That's your interpretation, not what the article says. In short: yes. Procrastination isn’t a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt and beyond. “Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem,” said Dr. Tim Pychyl, professor of psychology and member of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa. Nobody procrastinates on a task that will have a payoff of success or accomplishment. They procrastinate on a task that they feel the negative emotions will outweigh the positives. The article further argues that we can estimate the negative emotions accurately but not the positive ones, and further that we can dissociate the present from the future: “We really weren’t designed to think ahead into the further future because we needed to focus on providing for ourselves in the here and now,” said psychologist Dr. Hal Hershfield, a professor of marketing at the U.C.L.A. Anderson School of Management. Dr. Hershfield’s research has shown that, on a neural level, we perceive our “future selves” more like strangers than as parts of ourselves. When we procrastinate, parts of our brains actually think that the tasks we’re putting off — and the accompanying negative feelings that await us on the other side — are somebody else’s problem. Their suggestion? Realize that we don't do stuff that sucks because it sucks. Another tactic is the related practice of self-compassion, which is treating ourselves with kindness and understanding in the face of our mistakes and failures. In a 2012 study examining the relationship between stress, self-compassion and procrastination, Dr. Sirois found that procrastinators tend to have high stress and low self-compassion, suggesting that self-compassion provides “a buffer against negative reactions to self-relevant events.” In fact, several studies show that self-compassion supports motivation and personal growth. Not only does it decrease psychological distress, which we now know is a primary culprit for procrastination, it also actively boosts motivation, enhances feelings of self-worth and fosters positive emotions like optimism, wisdom, curiosity and personal initiative. Best of all, self-compassion doesn’t require anything external — just a commitment to meeting your challenges with greater acceptance and kindness rather than rumination and regret. This is a thousand word article saying "you don't do stuff that sucks because it sucks." I knew that. I've got a motorcycle that hasn't run in two years. And part of that is because whenever I start working on it, I have a new opportunity to check a dozen fruitless things, attempt to order a part from six thousand miles away, have that part shipped to the wrong state by a careless German, run out of time, leave things dismantled, go off to California for four months and forget everything I've learned so that I can do it fresh and shiny new when the weather isn't pouring down rain again. I don't work on that motorcycle because it sucks. The reward is the bike is working again, but that reward has become so abstract, and the sucking so concrete, that it takes a real force of will to power through it. It ain't laziness. It's pain-avoidance. And now here I am, waiting for a response from Dresden.Wait. We procrastinate because of bad moods?
Procrastination is a perfect example of present bias, our hard-wired tendency to prioritize short-term needs ahead of long-term ones.
One option is to forgive yourself in the moments you procrastinate. In a 2010 study, researchers found that students who were able to forgive themselves for procrastinating when studying for a first exam ended up procrastinating less when studying for their next exam. They concluded that self-forgiveness supported productivity by allowing “the individual to move past their maladaptive behavior and focus on the upcoming examination without the burden of past acts.”
I think I procrastinate because I'm paralyzed by options. Sometimes I spend hours trying to decide what to have for lunch by cycling through my options forever. I didn't read the whole article but its main thrust seemed to be "not because you're lazy." Like I know I'm not lazy and it's probably good that you're telling people that procrastination isn't laziness but is that the most common go-to explanation?