The Procrastination Equation

by Piers Steel

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  INSERT SIXTY SECONDS HERE

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  Did you win? I doubt it. According to Daniel Wegner, who wrote the book on thought suppression, the game is rigged against you.30 To make sure you aren’t thinking about pink elephants, you have to keep some notion of them in mind, otherwise you can’t watch out for violations. Ironically, by actively suppressing thoughts, you help to maintain them. This mechanism forms the basis of Freudian slips; trying to repress a trauma or a temptation seems to cause the dreaded idea to surface. For the few of you who did suppress the beast successfully for a whole sixty seconds, did you notice the post-suppression rebound? Your mind, in a sigh of release, probably indulged in a series of pink elephant fantasies as soon as the time was up.31 Despite its disastrous track record, thought suppression is a popular technique used to combat—ineffectively—everything from homosexual urges to racial stereotypes. If you find yourself pestered with an intrusive temptation, whether it be for an illicit lover or a new television show, you can find better ways to stop thinking about it. Here’s what works.

  Instead of avoiding thinking about your temptation, you can mentally distance yourself from it by framing your temptation in terms of its abstract and symbolic features. For example, Mischel had children delay eating pretzels by having them focus on the snack’s shape and color (“the pretzels are long and thin like little logs”) rather than on their taste and texture.32 Similarly, anthropologist Terrence Deacon managed to get chimpanzees to make food choices more strategically by using a form of symbolic representation called lexigrams.33 The chimps were to choose between two portions of fruit, kiwis and strawberries, and received the fruit they didn’t select. Only chimps who learned the lexigram equivalents of kiwis and strawberries (respectively a black square with a blue “Ki” versus a red square with two horizontal white lines) were able to enact the winning strategy of pointing to the less desirable fruit option and, in return, receive the more desirable one. As Deacon concluded, seeing the world in symbols tips the balance away from the stimuli-driven limbic system toward the abstraction-loving prefrontal cortex, enabling us to make better choices.9d To take advantage of this quirk, we need to keep our thoughts as airy and formless as possible, as if seeing temptations from a great distance. As the seventeenth-century Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi wrote in the Book of Five Rings: “Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.”

  Your second line of defense is to run a “smear campaign” on whatever features your limbic system finds desirable. You can ascribe negative qualities and consequences to every temptation to counteract its enticing features. Those pretzels, for example, could be stale or sneezed upon. The more such disgusting possibilities you generate, the more unpleasant the indulgence will seem.34 Furthermore, by imagining some really horrific outcomes, you engage in something called covert sensitization.35 This technique is to pair your temptation with an undesirable image, hopefully infusing the former with the latter. Here is a generic one I developed specifically for procrastination:

  I want you to imagine you've just put off a major project, one that you thought you still had plenty of time for. You are doing other less important work, surfing the Internet, watching TV at home—procrastinating. Finally, the moment comes when you can’t really put it off any longer and, though it will be stressful, you should be able to handle it—except you just came down with a throbbing headache. Given all the extra time you had to take on the project, you can’t use this as an excuse without looking lazy and incompetent. You start working on it, but the headache gets worse and worse, like a knife twisting behind your eyes. You are producing nothing of value despite the excruciating pain as you try to work. As your eyes almost tear up with agony, you take some pain medication only to find that it makes you sleepy, and indeed you do sleep. When you wake up, it is morning and you are late for work. Rushing to get there, you find that your boss has decided to gather all of your colleagues in the boardroom for you to present your project. The president of your company stops by and decides to listen in too. Being late, you are rushed to the front of the podium and everyone waits for you to get started. As you try to explain you have accomplished nothing because of a headache, you stumble over your words and look like an utter fool. There is a long silence broken only by a few sniggers, with your colleagues looking away, embarrassed to be associated with you. Afterward, your boss explains that she was thinking of promoting you but now she will have to fire you instead—what you have done is inexcusable. One of the people at the meeting recorded your “presentation” with her cell phone and posted it on YouTube, where people everywhere mock you. No one in your industry will even give you an interview and your career is ruined.36

  Feel free to change this scenario to fit your situation, tailoring it to your specific distractions. Joshua Shapiro’s friend Seymour, for example, might have had better luck with fidelity by focusing on negative possibilities, like getting a stranger pregnant, catching a disease, or destroying his marriage. For yourself, just remember that when you leave tasks to the last moment, you can get sick, competing emergencies do happen, and work almost always takes longer than you thought. As for the dire outcomes that result from your procrastination, imagine the worst. The consulting company Opera Solutions lost a million-dollar contest by submitting their solution twenty minutes too late.37 Elisha Gray lost credit for inventing the telephone to Alexander Graham Bell by submitting his idea to the patent office a day late. Delay makes bad things happen. Why not to you?

  Attentional control and covert sensitization aren’t perfect techniques, though. They require effort, and will eventually exhaust your energy stores—you can’t avert your eyes forever. As Mischel’s work showed, children’s ability to delay gratification was increased, but remained limited. Still, some delay may be enough for your purposes. Many temptations are time sensitive, like dessert at the end of dinner; if you can avoid them for an hour or so, the desire to indulge will disappear. It isn’t perfect, but it is better. If you are looking for more long-lasting solutions, read on.38

  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, Motiv
ation 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.41 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.47 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.52 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.53 Similar applications, such as using separate banking accounts to prevent impulsive spending, can be almost instantaneously effective.54 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 iso
lated 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.56 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.57 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.58 In chapter 8, we focused on making goals meaningful by linking them to personally relevant aspirations.59 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.