The Planning Fallacy
It is also human nature to be overly optimistic. We assume we can get more done in less time than is reasonable, and we assume tasks will take less time than they usually do. This is at the heart of the issue—we are not really thinking about how long things usually take based on past experience. We focus on the singular event we are facing without taking into account distributive information about experience or similar events. What results from this optimistic bias is poor planning.
Self-handicapping to Protect Self
To self-handicap is to provide an excuse for oneself. For example, if you were to wear weighted shoes and have a running race with a friend, your ability or competence as a runner would never come into question. If you lose the race, it is the fault of the handicap, the heavy shoes. If you win the race, however, that is extraordinarily meritorious. It is win-win for the individual’s sense of self. Certainly, self-esteem is never threatened.
A similar situation can arise with procrastination. To the extent that we delay work on a task to the last moment, we can be creating another form of self-handicapping. As with the running race, a task done at the last minute can be excused if not done well because it was done in such a short amount of time. And, of course, if the task is done very well, it looks exceptionally good for the individual.
This implies that the needless delay of a task that we defined as procrastination may in fact fill a need. It can protect self-esteem, and experimental research evidence by Joseph Ferrari (DePaul University) indicates that chronic procrastinators in particular prefer not to have feedback about self if they have the choice. Of course, delay of this sort has begged the question of whether this is truly procrastination at all, because it can be seen as a strategic use of delay, but it is worth including here just to acknowledge that we can end up delaying our tasks for reasons that may not at first seem apparent.
Preferring Tomorrow over Today
Here is an example of a relation that we all understand: If B is greater than A, and C is greater than B, then we can assume that C is also greater than A. This is known as a transitive relation.
What about this example? Imagine a task is due on Friday. It is now Monday morning. It is preferable to work on this task Tuesday as opposed to Monday. In other words, the preference for Tuesday is greater than the preference for Monday. Tuesday arrives. Ah, it’s preferable to work on this on Wednesday as opposed to Tuesday. Wednesday arrives. Again, it’s preferable to work on this Thursday instead of Wednesday. So far, so good; these are transitive relations. Then Thursday arrives. Oops, we think, it is now preferable that we had begun on Monday. This is known as an intransitive preference. Chrisoula Andreou, a philosopher at the University of Utah, has argued that when it comes to procrastination, this is a common problem with our thinking.
Certainly, many health behaviors and retirement savings plans suffer from this problem with our reasoning. It comes to a point where tomorrow is not only less preferred, but that an earlier date is actually the preferred date (and it is now too late to act).
Many of us know this relation from experience. Studies from our research group also bear this out. We get a reversal of our preferences that makes for an intransitive preference structure. The problem is that the intransitive nature of this preference structure works against us in the long run. Tomorrow is not as preferable as we once thought.
Our Irrational Thoughts
We often believe things to be true that are not. We do not challenge these beliefs with any reality testing, so they persist. For example, we might believe that we cannot make any mistakes or that we have to be able to answer any and every question after a presentation. We might believe we need to be perfect. We might think that our whole self-worth is dependent upon our career success. All of these are examples of irrational thoughts, and they are common and problematic. They can lead us to experience very negative emotions, and they provide an excuse for not trying. For example, if we are fearful that we cannot do a task perfectly and that our self-worth depends on this perfect performance, then we may avoid the task to protect our self-esteem. We procrastinate.
Manufacturing Our Own Happiness and Resolving Internal Conflict
When our actions and beliefs or even two beliefs are in conflict, they are dissonant. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. Dissonance is uncomfortable. We want to alleviate this negative state. When we intend to act, when we have a goal toward which we have made an intention to act, and we do not act (voluntarily and quite irrationally choosing to delay action despite knowing this may affect us negatively), we experience dissonance. This dissonance is one of the costs of procrastination.
Here are a few typical reactions that researchers have catalogued as responses to dissonance (and ways that we reduce this dissonance):
Distraction—we divert our attention away from dissonant cognitions and avoid the negative affective state caused by dissonance.
Forgetting—can be in two forms, passive and active. Passive is often the case with unimportant thoughts, while we may have to actively suppress important cognitions that are causing dissonance.
Trivialization—involves changing beliefs to reduce the importance of the dissonance- creating thoughts or beliefs.
Self-affirmation—creates a focus on our core values and other qualities that reasserts our sense of self and integrity despite the dissonance.
Denial of responsibility—allows us to distance ourselves as a causal agent in the dissonance.
Adding consonant cognitions—often by seeking out new information that supports our position (e.g., “this isn’t procrastination”; “I need more information before I can do anything on this project”).
Making downward counterfactuals—“it could have been worse”—so we don’t learn anything, we just feel better in the short term.
Changing behavior—to better align with our beliefs and values. This means that we would act instead of procrastinating, although changing one’s behavior requires effort and is often not the most convenient way to reduce dissonance.
We are quite expert at employing these strategies to keep buoyant day-to-day. We manufacture our own happiness. It is part of our coping mechanisms.
That said, not all coping mechanisms are adaptive. Quite consistently, research has demonstrated that techniques like distraction, forgetting, trivialization, and denial of responsibility are emotion-focused strategies that are not nearly as effective in the long term as planful problem-solving strategies. Yes, we have to take care of our emotions, but this cannot be where the coping stops. If it is, that is just another instance of giving in to feel good, and we will pay in the long run if this is our dominant short-term strategy.
THE MYTH OF THE AROUSAL PROCRASTINATOR
We often hear this: “I work better under pressure.” This thinking reflects a sensation seeker of sorts, someone who thrives on pressure. The thing is, our research has shown that this is a myth, at least for the majority of people. Sensation seeking is not related to procrastination, and time pressure typically results in more errors. Although many people use the excuse that they work better under pressure to explain their needless task delay, it clearly falls into the category above as an example of a rationalization for the dissonance we feel when we fail to act when intended.
Perhaps a more accurate way to rephrase this oft-heard expression is that “we only work under pressure.” Why? Most probably because of the mistaken belief, presented in Chapter 4, that our motivational state must match the task at hand. When we do not feel motivated to work on a task, we put it off until finally the external time pressure to do the task motivates action (typically so late that a poorer overall performance is the result).
STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE
I have briefly summarized a number of important biases in our thinking that can get us in trouble. On the one hand, we tend to be overly optimistic about the future
and minimize the importance of more distant goals. On the other hand, when it finally comes down to doing something, we prefer tomorrow over today and make excuses about not working to make ourselves feel better. Given these psychological processes, change here is not a simple thing, but it is possible.
Knowledge is power. Recognizing that it is human nature to have these biases, and more important, identifying specifically what we tend to do can be the beginning of change. For example, if we typically say something like “Ah, it’s not that important” (trivialization of the goal) or “There’s lots of time yet, so I’d prefer to do it tomorrow” (planning fallacy and intransitive preferences), we can learn to make these “flags,” or signals for change.
By flag or signal, I mean that as soon as we say something like “There’s lots of time, I can do this later,” it acts as a trigger or stimulus for a new response. Remember the earlier example of this as an implementation intention? IF we say “Ah, it’s not that important,” THEN we stop and remind ourselves that this is a form of self-deception, a bias in our thinking, and we just get started on the task instead.
This form of implementation intention puts a cue in the situation (even in our thinking) to help us break a habit. The thought becomes the stimulus for a different response. We break our habitual way of responding. We begin to break that pernicious procrastination habit.
The takeaway for this chapter in terms of what you might do now is to use the space below (or a separate sheet of paper or your computer) to list the things that you commonly say or do to justify your procrastination. You may need to compile this list over the next few days or weeks. The key thing is to learn to recognize how you are reasoning and rationalizing the voluntary, unnecessary delays in your life. Each of these statements can become your own flags to signal a new response.
My typical excuses for rationalizing a needless delay are:
If these are your typical rationalizations or excuses for needless task delay, what will your new response be?
In the next chapter, you will see that I think the important step is “just get started.” So my standard implementation intention is “IF I say something to myself like ‘Oh, I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow,’ I will catch myself in this self-deception and add “THEN I will just get started on the task” instead.
It works. You’d be surprised. In the next chapter, I explain why.
6
The Power of Getting Started
Just get started.
I DON’T HAVE TO look very far for a story about this topic. My own life supplies many examples daily. When I face a task that I find aversive, a task I simply don’t want to do, a task that I find boring or tedious, or even a task for which I have doubts about my competence, it is tempting to walk away. I want to procrastinate. I find myself saying things like this to myself: “I’ll feel more like doing this later.” This is a flag for me. It is a signal that I have learned to identify that I am just about to procrastinate. At that very moment, I use this signal to just get started. I will immediately start on anything related to the task at hand. Let’s explore why this is so important.
Issue
Once we start a task, it is rarely as bad as we think. Our research shows us that getting started changes our perceptions of a task. It can also change our perception of ourselves in important ways.
In a series of studies, my students and I used electronic pagers to gather what is called experience-sampling data. We paged research participants randomly throughout the day over a week or two. Each time we paged them, we asked things like: “What are you doing?” “Is there something else you should be doing?” “How are you feeling?” “What are you thinking?” In addition, depending on the study, we asked the participants to rate what they were doing and what they were supposed to be doing on things like how stressful they perceived the task to be. A rating of 10 indicated extremely stressful, while a zero meant not stressful at all (and all points in between reflected the variability).
This type of data allowed us to take a sort of snapshot through time of what the participants were doing. Importantly, we also got a real-time glimpse of what they were thinking and feeling. Some of our findings were expected. Some surprised us. I have summarized these findings by simplifying the research as a Monday-to-Friday process and by focusing mainly on the task avoidance.
As expected, on Monday when participants were avoiding some task(s) (e.g., working on an assignment) in preference to other activities (e.g., hanging out with friends), we found that they typically said things like “I’ll feel more like doing that tomorrow” or “Not today. I work better under pressure.” As you learned in the previous chapter, we rationalize the dissonance between our behaviors (not doing) and our expectations of ourselves (“I should be doing this now”). Of course, later in the week, none of the participants spontaneously said things like “I feel like doing that [avoided task] today” or “I’m glad I waited until tonight, because I work better like this.”
Surprisingly, we found a change in the participants’ perceptions of their tasks. On Monday, the dreaded, avoided task was perceived as very stressful, difficult, and unpleasant. On Thursday (or the wee hours of Friday morning), once they had actually engaged in the task they had avoided all week, their perceptions changed. The ratings of task stressfulness, difficulty, and unpleasantness decreased significantly.
What did we learn? Once we start a task, it is rarely as bad as we think. In fact, many participants made comments when we paged them during their last-minute efforts that they wished they had started earlier—the task was actually interesting, and they thought they could do a better job with a little more time.
Just get started. That is the moral here. Once we start, our attributions of the task change. Based on other research, we know that our attributions about ourselves change, too. First, once we get started, as summarized above, we perceive the task as much less aversive than we do when we are avoiding it. Second, even if we do not finish the task, we have done something, and the next day our attributions about ourselves are not nearly as negative. We feel more in control and more optimistic. You might even say we have a little momentum.
Research by Ken Sheldon (University of Missouri, Columbia) also demonstrates that progress on our goals makes an important difference. Progress on our goals makes us feel happier and more satisfied with life. Interestingly, positive emotions have the potential to motivate goal-directed behaviors and volitional processes (e.g., self-regulation to stay on task) that are necessary for further goal progress or attainment. Very clearly we can see how if we “prime the pump” by making some progress on our goals, the resulting increase in our subjective well-being enhances further action and progress.
Of course, this simple advice is not the whole solution to the procrastination puzzle, but it is a crucial first step toward solving it and decreasing our procrastination. In the next chapter, I take us past this initial step.
STRATEGY FOR CHANGE
When you find yourself thinking things like:
“I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow,”
“I work better under pressure,”
“There’s lots of time left,”
“I can do this in a few hours tonight” . . .
let that be a flag or signal or stimulus to indicate that you are about to needlessly delay the task, and let it also be the stimulus to just get started. This is another instance of that “if . . . then” type of implementation intention.
I’ve raised the notion of an implementation intention a few times already, but I have not provided details about what it is. As defined in the well-developed psychology of action created by Peter Gollwitzer (University of New York), an implementation intention supports a goal intention by setting out in advance when, where, and how we will achieve this goal (or at least a subgoal within the larger goal or task).
It is not as effective to make ourselves a “to do”
list of goal intentions as it is to decide how, when, and where we are going to accomplish each of the tasks we need to get done. There is an accumulating body of research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues that demonstrates the efficacy of implementation intentions for initiating behaviors, including following through on the intentions to take vitamins, participating in regular physical activity after surgery, and acting on environmentally minded intentions such as purchasing organically grown foods. In short, implementation intentions are a powerful tool to move from a goal intention to an action.
As I have outlined in earlier chapters, these implementation intentions take the form of “if . . . then” statements. The “if” part of the statement sets out some stimulus for action. The “then” portion describes the action itself. The issue here really is one of a predecision. We are trying to delegate the control over the initiation of our behavior to a specified situation without requiring conscious decision.
IF I say to myself things like “I’ll feel more like doing this later” or “I don’t feel like doing this now,” THEN I will just get started on some aspect of the task.
Notice that we are not using the famous Nike slogan of “Just do it!” It’s about just getting started. The “doing it” will take care of itself once we get going. If we think about “just doing it,” we risk getting overwhelmed with all there is to do. If we just take a first step, that is much easier.
Solving the Procrastination Puzzle Page 4