A familiar pattern?
You’re sitting at your desk, staring at the monitor, trying to force yourself to get some work done. The Pomodoro app is ticking away on my phone, the timer in ‘Focus Mode’ for 25 minutes. You should be completing the PowerPoint presentation you’ve got to finish tomorrow but instead you’re “looking something up” on the internet, intermittently chatting to someone on Teams, and replying to the odd email. You’re not in ‘Focus Mode’ at all, but the very opposite – distraction and procrastination are the modes for you today. And yesterday. And the day before. You could have finished this piece of work days ago but you know (if you’re really honest with yourself) that you will leave it until the afternoon of the deadline and only then will your ‘Focus Mode’ kick in and you will finally knuckle down and do the actual work.
And you hate yourself for it. For following this same pattern over and over again, wasting time, feeling stressed and guilty, and for the lies you tell yourself: “I work better under pressure” or “I need a deadline”. You try to convince yourself that this is just how you are wired. It’s who you are. But you don’t enjoy it. It’s stressful and frustrating. You try to change but can’t seem to break the pattern. Why don’t all the tips and life hacks you try work?
Does this sound familiar? This used to be me.
Nothing new
There can’t be many people who haven’t experienced procrastination at some point in their lives. Whether it’s putting off cleaning the bathroom; not pressing send on that job application; or leaving every work deadline until the last minute; most of us know that mix of feelings of denial, stress and guilt that we feel each time we decide to put something off or delay it.
Procrastination is nothing new. In a collection of Jewish ethical teachings from around 100 BC Hillel the Elder wrote
“Do not say, ‘When I am free I will study, for perhaps you will not become free.”
and in Ancient Greece the the poem “Work and Days” by Hesiod urges his brother to stop avoiding work with these words:
“Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.”
So procrastination may not be new but nowadays we have seemingly infinite ways to procrastinate, with our phones providing the most socially acceptable, common way of losing hours of our lives with nothing to show for it at the end.
Is it procrastination or inertia?
The dictionary definition of procrastination is:
‘The act or habit of procrastinating, or putting off to a future time’
But that simple definition encompasses everything from the straightforward choice to clean the bathroom tomorrow; to the repeated putting off of completing a piece of work like I described in the opening paragraph. It’s easy to see that the delay of bathroom cleaning is usually a simple case of not wanting to do a slightly unpleasant task, one that only has consequences for ourselves, and can easily be done the next day (or even delegated!). Any stress you feel about it will probably be short-lived and is easily fixed. However, if you procrastinate on a piece of work that is due you will probably feel gradually increasing levels of stress over the days leading up to the deadline; a big spike in stress when the deadline is looming; you can’t easily pass the work on to someone else; and the consequences for you (and potentially others) if you don’t get it done / do a good job are likely to be high.
Most people will be able to see the differences between these 2 examples. There are clear differences between the complexity / challenge of the tasks; the value of the tasks; and the potential consequences of delaying the tasks.
Not cleaning the bathroom feels more like an example of inertia (which I think of as ‘mild procrastination’) – a lack of motivation or willpower to just get something done that needs to be done which can be fairly easily overcome. And when I see posts about procrastination on social media platforms most of them seem to offer solutions that will work well for inertia. You can find plenty of solutions to inertia including:
- The 5 Second Rule (made hugely popular by Mel Robbins). Quite simply, when we want or need to get something done, we start right away by counting down from five to one and then doing it.
- The 2 minute-rules. There are several different versions of these, including:
- David Allen’s version – For any action that can be done in 2 minutes or less, do it IMMEDIATELY
- James Clear’s version from Atomic Habits – If you want to form a habit, start with a two-minute version of that habit and build from there.
- A third version of the two-minute rule tells you to reduce procrastination by committing to work on a task for two minutes.
- The “Do It Now” mantra that W. Clement Stone (a businessman who built a billion dollar insurance company) apparently made his employees repeat over and over every morning.
All of these are good techniques to try, that are rooted in neuroscience and CAN help you overcome inertia. But what if inertia isn’t the problem. What if you count down from 5 to 1 and still your hands hover above the keyboard as you find yourself unable to start? Or you count down from 5 to 1 and make a start but 10 minutes later you’re off surfing the internet or making yourself a cup of coffee? What if you’ve tried all of these and you’re still procrastinating? What’s really going on?
Let me give you a great example of someone for whom all the life hacks in the world wouldn’t make a difference. Where procrastination was nothing to do with motivation or time management or willpower. Where there was a much deeper cause.
A chronic procrastinator
My client came to me because she had a deadline to meet for an important piece of work. And when I say important, I mean really important. Something she had been working on for a couple of years. Something that would impact her career, her future and her family’s future. It held the key to her being able to leap up the career ladder AND to her potentially starting her own business. She cared deeply and passionately about what she was doing. But the deadline was approaching and she was panicking that she wasn’t going to get it done. She was juggling her day job, family life, her new business idea and this deadline. She described how she was struggling to fit everything in and she wanted me to act as her accountability partner to keep her honest. She thought she was struggling with prioritisation and time management so at the end of the session we came up with a number of actions, the key one being a plan. She went home and created the plan and seemed excited about feeling more in control. I waited with interest for the next session, suspecting that a plan was not going to solve the problem for her, as she seemed more than capable of having done that already.
My first question to her in our 2nd session was “How’s the plan going?” and I could see immediately that my suspicions were correct. Her body language changed as she admitted that she had not stuck to it, and in fact had started working on something new. She gave me plenty of reasons for her actions, but it was very apparent that there was something deeper going on.
A fortnight later the same thing happened. This time she had volunteered to help someone else with their work! We were already another month towards her deadline and she was actively taking on additional work that she didn’t need to!
What was going on? My client didn’t lack motivation for this work (it was critical to her future); she was perfectly capable of managing her time when she chose to (she had previously completed a Masters); and she clearly had willpower (she had a track record of taking on intellectual and physical challenges and completing them despite obstacles). So why wasn’t she doing the work?
I pushed and probed, getting her to think more deeply about other times she had procrastinated, and times she had been in ‘flow’ and nothing could have stopped her getting things done. We started to spot a theme emerging and I pushed her hard on what she was avoiding. Eventually a deeper cause emerged. She was scared of rejection and ridicule. Actually submitting this piece of work would mean others would see it and critique it. She would find out whether it had all been worth it. Was she really capable of the next step she was hoping for? What if she wasn’t? What if it all came to nothing?
These were deep existential questions that were paralyzing her with a fear that no 5 Second Rule would ever overcome. They were borne out of a deeply held belief that she wasn’t really good enough; that she didn’t measure up; and that it was only a matter of time before she was exposed. As soon as she realised this she felt the shock of recognition of all the different times and ways this belief had held her back, over and over again. In the coaching sessions that followed we tackled that limiting belief, freed her from its grip, and made it her old problem.
As my client’s story shows, chronic procrastination (by chronic I mean when it happens repeatedly, even when the potential negative consequences are significant) is NOT about lack of time management, willpower, or motivation. It can’t be overcome by simple life hacks. But it can be overcome by getting to the real root cause and dealing with it (in this case by removing that deeply held belief).
Stop being in denial
We often don’t want to admit to ourselves that we’re struggling with procrastination. It can seem like such a silly thing for any rational adult to admit to. So we often mask it with stories, like the lie I used to tell myself that “I work better under pressure” or when we kid ourselves that we are being productive by answering those other emails or organising our inbox when we should be doing that piece of work. We’ll blame external forces – the unexpected meeting or the colleague who needed help or we’ll decide to accept that we procrastinate and just live with all the stress that it brings, saying to ourselves “That’s just how I am”.
But there is a better way. No-one enjoys being a procrastinator. No-one would say they choose to cause themselves unnecessary stress, but that’s exactly what we’re doing every time we decide to do something else instead of the thing we should be doing. And the more we do it, the more we are training ourselves to do it. The more often we call ourselves a procrastinator and tell ourselves those stories (lies) the more we reinforce the habit. Because it is a habit, not a personality trait, and it’s something you can change, as long as you work out what that habit is driven by.
If it is driven by a lack of motivation (“I don’t really care if the bathroom isn’t spotless”) or inertia (“I’d really rather stay in bed than go for a run”) then the life hacks I listed earlier will almost certainly help you overcome it and break the cycle. But if it’s driven by a deeply-held belief about yourself then it’s what Cory Muscara author of Stop Missing Your Life describes as:
“the refusal or inability to be with difficult emotions.”
It can be hard to face what’s really going on. It’s not a comfortable thing to do, but without doing the inner work and getting to that root cause you will be stuck in that horrible cycle for years to come. Nobody wants that, but it’s what we choose every time we procrastinate about dealing with our procrastination habits. Maybe it’s time to take action and free yourself from that cycle. Just think how much better you will feel when you are free of that old problem, how it will feel to hit those deadlines with time to spare; to see your workload as something you can cope with rather than struggling to keep up. Doesn’t that sound like a better way to live?