Knowledge is power in this regard. First and foremost, we need to recognize that this task makes us feel awful and what we are trying to do is to run away from these feelings. Of course, this takes a certain amount of emotional intelligence. This type of intelligence is not related to the size of our vocabulary or the ability to do arithmetic. Emotional intelligence is the ability to effectively identify and utilize emotions to guide behavior. Recent research has shown that lower emotional intelligence is related to more procrastination, but the good news is that we can increase our emotional intelligence. We can learn to more effectively perceive, understand, and regulate our emotions. This is very important in terms of more effective self-control.
In any case, based on what I know about procrastination, it seems clear that most people who procrastinate are emotionally aware enough to recognize that some tasks make them feel awful and that they are procrastinating to escape these emotions. What may require further focus and strengthening is the ability to regulate emotions, or at least some commitment not to take the path of least resistance—that is, not to give in to feel good.
What we really need to do is to come to terms with our negative feelings about a task. We need to find a way to cope with these negative feelings so that we can continue to pursue our intended goal. The question is, how?
While I was writing this book, Ivy, a podcast listener, wrote to me to say that she had developed some of her own mantras related to the iProcrastinate Podcasts. Here’s what she developed on this topic:
“Don’t give in to feel good, step on up to what should.”
I like this type of mantra or slogan, as you know. It can help us focus more on changing our procrastination habit. Ivy’s mantra could easily replace the one I offered at the beginning of this chapter.
This tough strategy is immediately effective as a first step. We have to “suck it up,” as they say. Yes, we are feeling awful about the task at hand. We would rather run away, give in to feel good. However, the first step at the moment of procrastination is to stay put. If you turn away in an effort to make yourself feel better, it’s over.
Certainly, staying put and dealing with these initial negative emotions is not the whole solution, but it is an absolutely necessary first step.
The key to success with this emotional experience is to be prepared. I will explain just why I am urging you to prepare in a certain way later. For now, I just want you to think about the following as your first step in an antiprocrastination strategy:
THINK: IF I feel negative emotions when I face the task at hand, THEN I will stay put and not stop, put off a task, or run away.
This “if . . . then” format of an intention has been labeled an implementation intention by Peter Gollwitzer (New York University). I will have more to say about implementation intentions in a later chapter. At the moment, the key thing is that you need to internalize this implementation intention in order to take a first step related to the negative emotions that are associated with procrastination.
Although I think most of us have to recognize that we might very well have to just experience the first moments of these negative emotions, we do not simply have to take a tough-guy approach and “suck it up” to succeed. There is another, gentler approach we can take.
Essentially, it comes down to choosing the emotions on which we will focus. For example, although the dominant emotion at the moment may be fear—we may have fear—the key thing is that we do not have to be our fear. We can acknowledge this fear but choose to continue to pursue our goals working from some other part of our self. Parker Palmer, one of my favorite educational writers, speaks of this as working from some other part of our “inner landscape.” Our inner landscape, the psychology of self, is more than the fear we may be experiencing. It also includes our curiosity, our desire to succeed, and another very strong emotion, our interest.
If we choose to acknowledge our fear but find “the courage to be” in spite of this fear, to work from another part of our inner landscape, we may more successfully stay put and stay on task. We will not give in to feel good. We will have made the first step toward beating procrastination.
Of course, we are quite expert at finding reasons not to persist like this. In the face of negative emotions, we might even try to justify why we want to run away. We will not acknowledge our fear or frustration. We might simply think, “I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.” We probably won’t. I think we all know this deep down. This is part of the strangely puzzling nature of procrastination. We have become our own worst enemy, and we even know how to lie to ourselves.
Emotionally, we are giving in to feel good while justifying this choice by thinking, “I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.” No, we won’t! In the next chapter, I explain why.
4
Why We Won’t Feel Like It Tomorrow
I won’t feel more like doing it tomorrow.
TO INTRODUCE THIS CHAPTER, I want to share a story I received from a reader of my Psychology Today blog. It clearly illustrates the problem of tomorrow. This reader said that the issue of feeling more like it tomorrow was reminiscent of a sign in a butcher’s shop window in his grandparents’ village in Poland.
Translated into English, the sign read: “Today you pay and tomorrow you get it for free.”
When the customers would come tomorrow for their free goods, the butcher would say, “Read the sign: Today you pay, tomorrow it’s free.” As this reader noted, it is pretty much that way with procrastination. The tomorrow in which “I’ll really feel like it” is always a day away. It never becomes today.
Issue
The story above captures the basic issue with procrastination: I’ll do it tomorrow. In fact, the Latin roots of the word procrastination mean “to put forward to tomorrow.” Yet, as the butcher explained with his sign, that tomorrow never really comes.
As with the butcher’s sign that implied that customers would get free goods tomorrow, our thinking plays a trick, too. We think, “I’ll feel more like it tomorrow.” What we need to understand, so as not to be tricked like the butcher’s customers, is why this is not true. We will not feel more like it tomorrow.
Research, particularly studies by Dan Gilbert (Harvard University) and Tim Wilson (University of Virginia), indicates that we are not very good forecasters. No, I don’t mean weather forecasters. Meteorologists seem to be better at forecasting the weather (at least in the short term) than we are at forecasting our own mood in the future. Forecasting our future mood is known as affective forecasting.
The main idea behind affective forecasting is that we have a bias when we predict future mood (affective) states in relation to positive or negative events. For example, a couple of years after winning a lottery, the winners were about as happy as they were before their win, despite the general affective forecast that they would be much happier if only they could win the lottery. This is also true of people who have suffered debilitating accidents. A few years after the accident, despite long-term effects such as paralysis, accident victims were about as happy as they were before this life-changing event—again, despite the general affective forecast that they would be much unhappier.
Two concepts are used to explain these peculiar findings: focalism and presentism. Focalism is the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings in the future. Presentism, as you might guess, addresses the fact that we put too much emphasis on the present in our prediction of the future. Taken together, this means that we focus on our current situation and how we feel now without enough consideration about the future situation, what might happen and how we might feel then (or have in similar situations in the past).
Here are some common experiences of this: If we go grocery shopping just after a meal, we will generally underestimate how much we will eat in the week ahead and buy less. Addicts who have just ingested their drug of choice will
underestimate how much they will crave the drug later. Irrationally, we think how we are feeling now is how we will feel later. The most astonishing thing about this is that it is true for simple things like current and future hunger states.
HOW IS THIS RELATED TO PROCRASTINATION?
We need to consider what this human bias in affective forecasting means to our understanding of procrastination. By this point, the argument may be apparent. In making an intention for future action, we focus on our current affective state with the mistaken assumption that our affective state at the point we expect to act on our intention will be the same as it is now.
The real catch here is that when we intend a future action, our affective state is often particularly positive. Why? There are two reasons.
First, because we are putting off action until the future, we get the reward that we discussed with giving in to feel good. We feel good now that the intention is for future action. At the very least, we feel relief that we are not on the hook to act now.
Second, we are imagining ourselves engaged in some future action that we perceive will make us happy. This is pleasant in and of itself. Health behaviors are good examples here. If we intend to go for a run tomorrow, we feel good about ourselves for making such a proactive health-related intention. Good for us! Our current affective state is positive, and we incorrectly forecast that our affective state tomorrow at the intended time of the run will be the same.
There is nothing like a righteous intention now for action later to make us feel good. “I’ll run tomorrow.” “I’ll do that assignment tomorrow.” “I’ll write that report later.” Happiness now, pay later (or not, as the case may be). Unless we can get better at “mental time traveling,” where we can set intentions with clearer knowledge about how we will feel about taking action in the future, we will continue to be predictably irrational with our procrastination.
STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE
We need a two-pronged approach to increase the likelihood that we will act on our intentions. One strategy is “time travel.” The other is to expect to be wrong and deal with it.
STRATEGY #1—Time Travel
As numerous psychologists who study affective forecasting have advocated, we need to use mental images of the future more often and more accurately. We need to represent the future as though it were happening in the present. For example, a person who is procrastinating on saving for retirement might imagine as vividly as possible living on his or her potential retirement savings. To make a future image like this more concrete and accurate, it may be important to set out some numbers for a budget and take into account the reality of the need for, and increasing expense of, health care in old age. This “time travel” can help make our predictions of the future more accurate and motivate us to take more appropriate action now.
Unfortunately, I am not that confident that this approach will work for many people. First, it is possible that we will put off this planning task itself, a form of second-order procrastination. Second, even if we do this task, the initial emotional response (e.g., fear) will most likely wear off quickly, and, more important, the fact that retirement is so far away may still result in our discounting its importance and delaying our savings further.
STRATEGY #2—Expect to Be Wrong and Deal with It
This second strategy is more effective, but you may think that is a hard-nosed approach. In this case, rather than trying to change what seems to be a deeply ingrained bias in human thinking by improving our affective forecasts, I think we should simply learn to expect to be wrong and go from there. We do this every day with respect to weather forecasts, and most recently we have been learning to do this with ridiculously inaccurate economic forecasts. Given our ability to cope with inaccurate meteorological and economic forecasts, I have confidence we can cope effectively with our poor affective forecasting. This strategy, by necessity, takes two forms or approaches.
APPROACH #1
When we are tempted to procrastinate on a current intention or task, thinking that we’ll feel more like it tomorrow, we need to stop and think, “No, that’s a problem with my forecasting. There is a good chance I won’t feel more like it tomorrow.” AND it is important to add the following:
“My current motivational state does not need to match my intention in order to act.”
This is a common misconception about goal pursuit: We believe that we have to actually feel like it. We don’t. And, with many of the tasks in our lives, we won’t feel like it . . . ever! The thing is, our motivational state does not need to match the intention. We can do something even if we do not feel like it. Parents spend a lot of time explaining this to their children.
Here is another example: Much as we might prefer a sunny day to go out for a run or a bike ride, we can put on rain gear and get outside. In fact, successful athletes do this every day. They are not “fair-weather trainers.” The weather does not have to match the activity. We can cope with what we get and still act as intended.
Similarly, acknowledging that our motivational state is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure action, we can simply remind ourselves of our personal goals (a form of self-affirmation) and “just get started.” Progress will fuel well-being and enhance goal attainment (more on this in Chapter 6).
APPROACH #2
When we set an intention to act tomorrow, and tomorrow comes, expect that you probably will not feel overly enthused to get started. Given that our intention was made yesterday (or much earlier) with the optimistic mood that comes with having a plan, we will probably feel less happy than we expected with the reality of the task now at hand (again, this is all part of our biased affective forecasting).
Now the thing to do is to remember that this is a transient mood and think through all of the issues raised with Approach #1, particularly how your motivational state does not need to match the task for you to get started right now.
This is “tough love” with oneself, I suppose. Certainly, many of us have heard this advice as we were growing up. It was couched in terms of “maturity” and the “responsibilities of adulthood.” These were often expressions of tough love, too. This was advice from adults in our lives who were trying to nurture fortitude and realism with respect to willpower.
In sum, the strategy I am advocating for dealing with our bias toward thinking we’ll feel more like it tomorrow is knowing that this is a common problem with being human. We are not very good at predicting how we will feel in the future. We are overly optimistic, and our optimism comes crashing down when tomorrow comes. When our mood sours, we end up where I started in the last chapter, giving in to feel good. We procrastinate.
The problem is pretty obvious, as is the solution: Let go of the misconception that our motivational state must match the task at hand. In fact, social psychologists have demonstrated that attitudes follow behaviors more than (or at least as much as) behaviors follow attitudes. When you start to act on your intention as intended, you will see your attitude and motivation change.
This gets me a little bit ahead of our story, however. For now, let’s keep the focus on the mantra for this chapter: “I won’t feel more like doing it tomorrow.”
5
Excuses and Self-deception: How Our Thinking Contributes to Our Procrastination
I need to be aware of my rationalizations.
ALLAN LAMENTED HIS PROCRASTINATION to anyone who would listen, but nothing seemed to change. His friends recognized him as the master of excuses, although Allan didn’t acknowledge his own hidden talents here. He was truly the “Teflon guy” when it came to being accountable, even to himself. Nothing stuck to him. There was always an excuse for waiting another day, and there was always an excuse for being off task.
It’s not due for weeks.
I can do that work in a few hours.
I work better under pressure.
Of course, another day always became another, and soon weeks
or months passed without progress. Why couldn’t Allan see how he was just rationalizing this needless delay?
Issue
In addition to understanding our basic impulse to give in to feel good (see Chapter 3) and not really feel more like doing it tomorrow (see Chapter 4), we need to consider some of the biases in our thinking. There are a number of very important issues to consider, including the human tendency to:
discount future rewards in relation to short-term rewards,
underestimate the time things will take and overestimate how much we can do,
prefer tomorrow over today,
self-handicap to protect self-esteem,
think irrationally about the task at hand and our ability to accomplish the task, and
manufacture our own happiness by changing our thinking to be consistent with our behavior.
Books have been written about each of these topics, but true to the digest nature of this book (and the promise to provide you with what you need now), I have summarized each of these problems in the sections below. Of course, this is followed by strategies for change.
Discounting Future Rewards over Short-Term Rewards
Future rewards, particularly those in the more distant future, seem smaller in size. It is as if we are looking at a picture of a distant mountain and assuming that it is actually small. We do not seem to have perspective for size when time is involved. This is the notion of discounting future rewards, also known as temporal discounting.
The problem is that future rewards seem less attractive to us than immediately available ones. I guess this should not surprise us too much. From an evolutionary perspective, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Our brains seem programmed to prefer immediate rewards. This stone-age brain is not so adaptive in our modern world, where we need to meet distant deadlines by doing things today.
Solving the Procrastination Puzzle Page 3