The Procrastination Equation

by Piers Steel

  A few groups seem particularly well structured for fostering a positive spirit. Service clubs like the Elks, Masons, Rotarians, or Shriners have millions of members worldwide, all bent on doing good work for their communities, but your options don’t end there. My wife goes to a local Calgary group, the Famous Five, which holds women’s leadership luncheons. I'm indebted to Toastmasters, a club that promotes public speaking and is endlessly encouraging and welcoming. You can even start a group yourself.18 Benjamin Franklin, for example, labeled his friends the Junto or the Leather Apron Club. Every Friday night, they would have a few beers at a pub and discuss how they could help their community.

  2. Action Points for Vicarious Victory: Seek inspiration from stories or, better yet, from social groups. It is easier to believe in yourself if you are surrounded by others who believe in themselves—or you. Here are some suggestions:

  • Watch inspirational movies. Here are a few I've seen: Men of Honor, My Left Foot, Apollo 13, Invictus, and Hotel Rwanda.

  • Read inspirational biographies or autobiographies. The most effective will resonate with your own background, so use the bookstore staff to help you find an appropriate book. For example, if you are a chef, read Humble Pie by Gordon Ramsey, in which he speaks of his hard upbringing.

  • Listen to inspirational speakers. Great athletes, heroes, and entrepreneurs regularly speak about their experiences. Seek them out.

  • Join a community, service, or professional association. By hanging out with people who are trying to better themselves or the world around them, you will be infused with optimism.

  • Start your own support group. As long as it contains a circle of mutually encouraging friends, it can be your running clique, your religious study group, or in the case of Ben Franklin, your drinking buddies.

  WISH FULFILLMENT

  Professional athletes often use visualization to achieve their goals. Before going to sleep every night, they imagine the perfect golf swing or triple axel landing. The detailed mental recreation of a performance engages mirror neurons that engrave the act in your brain almost as deeply as if you were actually practicing it.19 Visualization can also combat procrastination through the technique of mental contrasting.

  The expert on mental contrasting is Gabriele Oettingen from New York University, who has made this technique a cornerstone of her psychology career.20 Begin by imagining what you want to achieve. If it is a car, visualize yourself behind the wheel, cruising for all to see. If it is a job, see yourself in that dream career. Have you got a good mental picture? Good.

  Now here’s the all-important second step. Contrast where you want to be with where you are now. Visualize that dinged-up rust-bucket you drive or your dumbed-down joke of a job with its paltry paycheck. The result will be that your present situation becomes framed as an obstacle standing in the way of your dreams. Mental contrasting doesn’t create optimism but it maximizes optimism’s motivational benefits, creating energy and effort as well as jumpstarting planning. People who practice mental contrasting almost immediately start pursuing their dreams, putting a crimp in procrastination.

  What happens if you forgo the second step and just focus on the positive fantasies alone? Creative visualization advocates just that. It involves creating vivid and compelling pictures of your heart’s desire, with the aim of drawing this vision toward you. But Oettingen, who has researched this for twenty years, finds that such fantasies tend to have the opposite effect than advertised; they sap motivational energy.7c The only wealth created by creative visualization is a rich fantasy life. Whether the task is preparing for exams, getting a job, recovering from surgery, smoking less, dating an attractive stranger, or improving personal relationships, she found that the worst-performing group used positive fantasies alone. You are better off not using the technique at all.21

  3. Action Points for Wish Fulfillment: Fans of creative visualization don’t have to stop what they are doing; they just need to add to it. Keep with the affirmations, the personal mission statements, but afterward reflect on where you really are. Here is a step-by-step walkthrough to make wish fulfillment work for you:

  • Sit down in a quiet place and clear your mind. Think about the life you want for yourself.

  • Break off a manageable piece of this future by focusing on just one aspect you desire. It may be a relationship, a job, a home, or a healthy body.

  • Elaborate on all that makes this mental picture attractive to you. You can use a daily diary, create a collage of images, or just spend some quiet time concentrating on it.

  • Then mentally contrast this future with where you are now. Focus on the gap. Put the same emphasis on vividly reflecting on this discrepancy as you did on imagining your idealized future.

  • If, after mentally contrasting, you remain optimistic about realizing this ideal future, you will find more motivation to pursue your goal. Procrastination will disappear as you start actively closing the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. You know what to do and have the drive to do it.

  Fantasy Land

  Overconfidence is just as problematic as under-confidence. Forty-one days before the start of the Iraq war, the U.S. defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, estimated that it could “last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” The allied troops would surely be greeted as liberators. The cost? It was supposed to be fifty to sixty billion dollars, not almost a trillion. Regrettably, military overconfidence leading to lengthy and unprofitable wars is quite common.22

  In the business world, overconfidence creates a host of similar problems: mergers aren’t usually finished within time or on budget.23 Overconfidence, for example, contributed to the Concorde fiasco; despite mounting evidence that it wouldn’t be profitable, Air France and British Airways continued to pursue its development.24 Entrepreneurs often exemplify this point, reflecting Jeffrey Vancouver’s observation that optimism has a sweet spot (see the graph on page 118).25 Confidence is definitely needed to start a business, and entrepreneurs tend to have more of it than the rest of us. Just as the graph predicts, however, overly confident entrepreneurs tend to fail. When confidence becomes supersized and unearned, it fuels procrastination because the overconfident tend to discount serious problems and subsequently delay responding to them.26

  Certain philosophies, such as the philosophy of Pangloss, a character created by Voltaire to epitomize naive and unrestrained optimism, exacerbate the problem of overconfidence. Over the last few centuries, unbounded positive belief has formed the basis of several success systems, such as Phineas Quimby’s New Thought Movement or Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking.27 The best modern example of Panglossian thinking is The Secret, a book (and movie) developed by Australian television executive Rhonda Byrne. According to Byrne, thoughts have magnetic energy that draws like to like by a Law of Attraction—think positive and the positive will come toward you. There are millions of followers of this philosophy but I am not one of them.28 The Law of Attraction separates positive belief from action, leaving belief free-floating and unconnected. It changes the story of the Little Engine That Could from “I think I can” to “I think it will.” That’s a big difference.7d

  To prevent ourselves from falling into over-optimism, we need a teaspoon of pessimism. As Freud put it, we need to activate the reality principle: to confront the reality of the situation when we are seeking the best way to achieve our goals. Invoking the reality principle is a sign that we have outgrown our childish and impulsive ways and can acknowledge the price we must realistically pay for our dreams. This entails imagining what could go wrong and how you would prevent or mitigate potential pitfalls. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, used this principle during his lunar escapades. “Well,” he would say, “I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.”

  In business, this reality check is a standard step of crisis management. Adages to this effect are
well worn: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” or “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”29 We can apply this principle to procrastination in two ways: Plan for the Worst, Hope for the Best, and Accept That You're Addicted to Delay.

  PLAN FOR THE WORST, HOPE FOR THE BEST

  Very few succeed in major life reforms on the first try; most of us need multiple attempts. Take New Year’s resolutions, for example: it often takes five attempts before vows last for more than six months.30 I myself sweated out several attempts to quit smoking before I successfully put cigarettes aside. For more serious alcohol or drug problems, the same need for repetition applies. Whatever you do, don’t wallpaper over this painful and repetitive process; wishful thinking will only increase your procrastination.

  Psychologists Janet Polivy and Peter Herman describe such dysfunctional over-optimism as the False Hope Syndrome. Overconfidence about the size, speed, and ease of major life changes is associated with lower success rates. If people have unrealistic, supersized expectations, they discount modest achieve-ments. They only lost ten pounds. They smoked at a party. They skipped the gym for a week. They see these as “failures” and they lose momentum—they are more likely to give up and feel worse than before they made the resolution to change. This disillusionment is common, as the self-help industry instills incredibly high expectations and promises. If you are in the vast majority who don’t transform as quickly as advertised, you feel that your failing is personal rather than a failure of the program.

  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

  Now suppose you had to decide what to do for just the next five minutes—either work on the paper or play one game of pinball. The paper can wait for one game—there is little long-term cost. In the short run, five minutes of pinball is far more pleasurable than five minutes of paper writing, and after all, how much of a paper can you do in five minutes? Pinball is the obvious choice. The game is over so you must decide about the next five minutes. The situation is only trivially changed, so you will reach the same result. Once you've taken the possibility of pinball seriously and fragmented your night into five-minute intervals, you may be doomed to play until you run out of money, the machine breaks, someone meaner than you wants to play. The trouble is, even five minutes has a real cost to the paper. Because a single game of pinball is brief, it is particularly seductive.

  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:

  Lose this day loitering—’twill be the same story

  To-morrow—and the next more dilatory;

  Each indecision brings its own delays,

  And days are lost lamenting o'er lost day,s

  Are you in earnest? seize this very minute—

  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

  Only engage, and then the mind grows heated—

  Begin it, and then the work will be completed!

  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 o
ut 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.