Address the real reasons you procrastinate and you're more likely to start achieving your goals.
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By Christian Jarrett
23rd January 2020
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Like many writers, I'm a supreme expert at procrastination. When I ought to be working on an assignment, with the clock ticking towards my deadline, I'll sit there watching pointless political interviews or boxing highlights on YouTube (cat videos aren't my thing). At its worst I can almost begin to feel a little crazy – you need to be working, I say to myself, so what on Earth are you doing?
According to traditional thinking – still espoused by university counselling centres around the world, such as the University of Manchester in the UK and the University of Rochester in the US – I, along with my fellow procrastinators, have a time management problem. By this view, I haven't fully appreciated how long my assignment is going to take and I'm not paying enough attention to how much time I'm currently wasting on 'cyberloafing'. With better scheduling and a better grip on time, so the logic goes, I will stop procrastinating and get on with my work.
Increasingly, however, psychologists are realising this is wrong. Experts like Tim Pychyl at Carleton University in Canada and his collaborator Fuschia Sirois at the University of Sheffield in the UK have proposed that procrastination is an issue with managing our emotions, not our time. The task we're putting off is making us feel bad – perhaps it's boring, too difficult or we're worried about failing – and to make ourselves feel better in the moment, we start doing something else, like watching videos.
This fresh perspective on procrastination is beginning to open up exciting new approaches to reducing the habit; it could even help you improve your own approach to work. "Self-change of any of sort is not a simple thing, and it typically follows the old adage of two steps forward and one step back," says Pychyl. "All of this said, I am confident that anyone can learn to stop procrastinating."
Short-term mood lifters
One of the first investigations to inspire the emotional view of procrastination was published in the early 2000s by researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. They first prompted people to feel bad (by asking them to read sad stories) and showed that this increased their inclination to procrastinate by doing puzzles or playing video games instead of preparing for the intelligence test they knew was coming. Subsequent studies by the same team showed low mood only increases procrastination if enjoyable activities are available as a distraction, and only if people believe they can change their moods. One study used 'mood-freezing candles' to trick some volunteers into thinking their low mood was frozen and, in this case, they didn't bother procrastinating.
The emotional regulation theory of procrastination makes intuitive sense. In my case, it's not that I don't realise how long my assignment will take (I know I need to be working on it right now) or that I haven't scheduled enough time for my YouTube viewing – in fact, I don't really even want to watch those videos, I'm just drawn to them as a way of avoiding the discomfort of knuckling down to work. In the psychologists' jargon, I'm procrastinating to achieve a short-term positive 'hedonic shift', at the cost of my longer-term goals.
Procrastination – while effectively distracting in the short-term – can lead to guilt, which ultimately compounds the initial stress
The emotional regulation view of procrastination also helps explain some strange modern phenomena, like the fad for watching online cat videos which have attracted billions of views on YouTube. A survey of thousands of people by Jessica Myrick at the Media School at Indiana University confirmed procrastination as a common motive for viewing the cat videos and that watching them led to a boost in positive mood. It's not that people hadn't adequately scheduled time for watching the videos; often they were only watching the clips to make themselves feel better when they should be doing something else less fun.
Myrick's research also highlighted another emotional aspect to procrastination. Many of those surveyed felt guilty after watching the cat videos. This speaks to how procrastination is a misguided emotional regulation strategy. While it might bring short-term relief, it only stores up problems for later. In my own case, by delaying my work I just end up feeling even more stressed, not to mention the gathering clouds of guilt and frustration.
It's perhaps little wonder that research by Fuschia Sirois has shown chronic procrastination – that is, being inclined to procrastinate on a regular, long-term basis – is associated with a host of adverse mental and physical health consequences, including anxiety and depression, poor health such as colds and flu, and even more serious conditions like cardiovascular disease.
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https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-procrastination-is-about-managing-emotions-not-time (https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-procrastination-is-about-managing-emotions-not-time)
I disagree. I know it's stressful for me, but I think more clearly and have more original ideas when I'm on deadline. It works for me.