Procrastination

by Jane B. Burka

  The Saint

  Some people add purpose and direction to their lives by taking care of others’ needs while procrastinating on their own. Of course, there will be times when you want to help your family and friends, but constant caretaking can distract you from the fact that, in your own life, you may be quite stuck. You may make yourself so available to others that you never have time to take care of your own priorities. Even though you’ve planned to spend the evening on work, when a friend calls in tears, you’re on the phone for two hours. When the PTA asks you to be chairperson of the spring festival, you agree, even though it means that you must give up all your free time. All because you are needed.

  Because it seems so justified, being overly available to other people is a deceptive kind of procrastination. When you choose to do for someone else instead of doing for yourself, you seem to be making an unselfish, generous, praiseworthy decision. But helping others to the exclusion of taking care of yourself makes it difficult to develop a sense of what’s best for you. Your own identity and your own goals never have a chance to emerge as long as you’re using all your time to take care of someone else. We’re not advocating that you lead a completely selfish life, intent only on pursuing your own goals. But if taking care of others has allowed you to avoid knowing yourself, then you’re not a saint; you’re a martyr.

  The Renaissance Man

  Some procrastinators create an identity based on knowing something about everything. They want their lives to encompass every dimension of human interest, from politics, philosophy, and technology to exercise physiology and basket weaving. Needing to know everything takes up a lot of time! Instead of doing their work, they spend hours online following the multiple threads of their latest interest, downloading books, and reading newspapers from all over the world.

  Often, these people are unable to use their considerable talents to their own benefit. The need to be well versed in everything prevents them from pursuing anything. They refuse to be limited to one field of study, one special interest, one predictable career. Believing they can embody the Renaissance ideal, they end up spreading themselves in so many directions that they can’t move forward.

  The Miracle Worker

  Procrastination can produce last-minute chaos and disaster, and some people thrive on making a heroic effort to save the day. They meet a deadline by working frantically for thirty-six straight hours or come up with an ingenious plan to buy more time. They use their creativity not to produce but to find an imaginative, brilliant solution to the crisis. They are seen as miracle workers.

  Often, the crises these people are heralded for resolving are of their own making. Disaster is imminent only because they’ve procrastinated themselves into a corner. Without their delay, they would have no problem to solve, no miracle to work in the first place. They need the miracle solution to feel special, and procrastinating provides the need for their magic touch.

  The Blank Slate

  Procrastination can camouflage the fact that you may not be very clear about who you are and what you want for yourself. It may look as if you haven’t achieved your goals because of your problem with procrastination, but perhaps you haven’t come to grips with what your priorities are in the first place: What are your interests, preferences, values, needs, and goals? Without more self-knowledge, even if you were to stop procrastinating, you might not know what to do with your newfound ability to make progress.

  If you haven’t asked yourself questions about what you really want out of life, or if you’ve asked and not been able to find authentic answers, you may be left with a sense that your life doesn’t have enough direction or purpose. This lack of direction can set the stage for procrastination. People who can’t clearly discern what really matters to them may be equally interested in each new opportunity that comes along. Incomplete work may pile up, as they abandon one activity after the other. If you are up to your eyeballs with half-finished projects, lists of things to do, anxiety about deadlines upcoming and deadlines missed, you may be filling yourself up with worries because you need to fill up with something.

  The Person beneath the Procrastinator

  Procrastination gets in the way of knowing yourself. When you are preoccupied with procrastination, you can’t really think clearly about important issues. You’re busy presenting an image to the world, maybe even lying about how you spend your time, hiding the truth of what you go through. Procrastination breeds feelings of fraudulence, a precarious way to live. We encourage you to reduce your reliance on procrastination, so that you can lead a more authentic life.

  It’s important to know yourself apart from your procrastination. Then you can begin to accept yourself as you are, not as you wish you were or think you should be. This is by no means easy to do. It involves knowing yourself honestly, evaluating yourself realistically, and ultimately, accepting what you find. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung said, “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”2 Yet this “terrifying” process of accepting oneself—warts, scars, scabs, and all—can also bring relief.

  GETTING REAL

  We all have aspects of ourselves that we wish we could change, but they are intrinsic to who we are. As long as we avoid or deny them, they can’t be understood or integrated, nor can they be the basis for change.

  Biological Realities

  We are each born with a unique temperament. You may be someone whose temperament makes you shrink from loud noise and boisterous activity, or someone who needs constant action and lots of company. Maybe you thrive on novelty or need time to get comfortable in new situations. If you need quiet time to think, then working in a café may be fine for your friends, but it isn’t productive for you. If you think you should be able to stay up all night, but your body never makes it past midnight, maybe your body is telling you something you should listen to. There isn’t a good or bad temperament; there is only your temperament. And that’s where you have to start. It’s important to accept your biological reality and deal with it, not procrastinate because of it.

  Every brain has strengths and weaknesses. Some functions come easily, and some are a struggle. Jane, for example, can do a lot of things well, but when it comes to spatial relations, she is in the bottom .03 percent! She used to get mad at herself for always getting lost, and her struggles with solid geometry were a stain on her high school transcript. So it was tempting to put off things that involve her weakest skill, like any kind of repair project or packing the trunk of the car, because it was so frustrating and made her feel stupid. But if you accept the reality that you have weak brain functions in some areas, then you can make compensations. Jane now has a GPS system, checks Map-quest before she sets out, and tells people she needs explicit directions. Fortunately, as a psychoanalyst, she has little need for solid geometry. You can help yourself and your brain if you pay respectful attention to your weaker areas, treat yourself with compassion, and practice your weaker skills or arrange for compensations that will help.

  Our areas of brain weakness can get us into trouble if we deny them or if we hate ourselves for having them, but accepting them has important advantages. You can work on improving those areas with focused attention and sustained practice, so that, over time, your brain will make new connections, and the weaker areas will become stronger.3 Even so, with some things, there’s only so much you can do to compensate. Therefore, accepting that your brain is what it is can help you live life without hating yourself and wishing you were someone else.

  Emotional Realities

  Accepting yourself completely involves knowing and living with your emotions—all of them—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Love and excitement, hatred and self-hatred, envy and gratitude, desires and regrets, all are part of the spectrum of human emotions.

  Knowing your feelings, whatever they are, will help develop what author Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence, “the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, for managing emotion
s well in ourselves and in our relationships.” 4 Emotional intelligence is not about being book smart or fact smart, but being people smart, starting with knowing your own feelings. Not only is it important for successful relationships, but research has also suggested that emotional intelligence is more important than the traditional measures of IQ in determining career success.5

  Procrastination may trigger emotional reactions, like self-criticism and disgust. But, as we have suggested, it may also be helping you avoid other, more anxious, feelings. When you spend a lot of time and energy avoiding tasks and projects, you are also probably avoiding the uncomfortable feelings associated with those tasks. For example, people may put off doing taxes because they feel bad about not earning enough money in the past year, or because they are so disorganized that they can’t find what they need and will have an attack of self-hatred as they rummage through piles of papers, or because they feel anxious about doing the math. The feeling of anxiety associated with doing a task is usually a signal that there are other feelings involved as well, which ultimately lead you to avoid the task.

  Feelings don’t have to be mysterious enemies that keep you from getting what you want. When you notice feelings of hesitation, discomfort, or anxiety that usually lead to procrastination, you have an opportunity to get to know yourself better, to discover more about your procrastination, and to take steps that will help you feel better.

  Many people believe that feeling uncomfortable is a good reason to procrastinate. But the assumption that you can take action only if you are comfortable is very limiting. It’s a version of perfectionism to believe that your emotional state has to be “just so” in order for you to take action. If everyone waited to feel comfortable before taking action, there would be no risk-taking (because there is some anxiety associated with the unknown), and there would be no learning (because some anxiety motivates learning, though too much anxiety interferes with learning).

  Even if your anxiety about a task feels overwhelming, we encourage you to pay close attention to it rather than wish it away. Notice your feelings; observe them with a compassionate attitude. Try to understand them, and try to act anyway, so that anxiety and procrastination no longer dominate your life. Psychologists George Eifert and John Forsyth observed that “clients have spent their energy trying to manage their anxiety, almost as if anxiety management were their occupation.” 6 We would say that the same holds true for many procrastinators, and we respectfully suggest that if this is the case for you, perhaps it’s time to make something other than managing procrastination the central focus of your life.

  If you allow, accept, explore, and try to manage your feelings, they don’t have to stop you from taking action. When you are anxious about confronting a dreaded task, try to calm yourself down. This may require a conscious effort to breathe deeply, to reassure yourself that you are not, in reality, facing total disaster and ruin at this moment, and to regain a more balanced state in which you can actually think again. Remember that the signals from the fear center of the brain to the thinking part of the brain move very rapidly, whereas the pathways from the thinking part to the fear center are much slower, so don’t expect to calm yourself as quickly or as thoroughly as you became overwhelmed.

  The Reality of Your Values

  Accepting yourself as you are also means getting real about your values. Values represent the attitudes that are most important in your life. “A goal is a destination. A value is a direction for living.”7 Knowing your values helps you connect to your core self. It is not possible to see values directly, but they are reflected in your actions. Whether you aim to make a lot of money or to donate most of what you have to charity, to work for yourself or to work for your community, to wield power or to avoid power struggles, these goals express your values. If you are putting off things that would move you along your chosen direction for living, then procrastination is interfering with the fullest expression of who you are. If you value achievement, for example, then putting off your work is interfering with your living according to that value. If you value relationships, then procrastinating at work may be a sacrifice you’re willing to make in order to spend more time with your family. Some other examples of values are helping others, living according to spiritual or religious beliefs, maintaining physical well-being, and developing personal insight. Values—like biology and feelings—are idiosyncratically yours.

  Identifying your own values and priorities may require you to separate yourself from some of the ideas and roles you have incorporated over the course of your lifetime. If you come from a different culture than the one you’re in now, there may be a conflict between the values of your original culture and the values that are prominent in the new country. We encourage you to identify what’s important for you and whether or not it matches what’s important to other significant people in your life. Sometimes delaying behavior reflects the discrepancy between what you think is expected of you and what you really want to do.

  Your procrastination may be warning you that you are trying to pursue a course that raises some moral or ethical questions for you. For example, a carpenter berated himself for always arriving late to the construction site on his new job. When he thought it through, he realized that he questioned his boss’s business practices. The contractor who hired him was involved in several shady business deals, including using illicit monies to build houses. The carpenter’s tardiness was a sign that he was compromising his values.

  At times, you may find that your values and priorities are congruent with those other people have transmitted to you. You may want for yourself exactly what someone else wants for you, yet you procrastinate as a way of resisting the influence of others, giving up what you value in the process. Is it really more important to rebel by denying your values than to pursue what matters to you?

  If your procrastination in one area is helping you express your values in another area, then it’s communicating something important that you should try to translate. But if procrastination is interfering with your being able to live according to your values, then you are depriving yourself of the solid feeling that comes from living in harmony with your core self.

  Integration

  This feeling of harmony reflects the functioning of a healthy system. A healthy system is one that is coherent and integrated, neither too rigid nor too chaotic.8 The coherence of a system can be observed in any type of organization, whether a business, a family, a body, or a self. When your self-system is too rigid, you hold yourself fast to the perfectionist demands that lead to procrastination; you keep doing the same thing over and over, whether it’s working or not; your expectations of others are unyielding; and you experience inner turmoil when you assume life will be a certain way, and it just isn’t. At the other extreme, a chaotic self-system reflects disorganization. When you’re confused about who you are and what you want, torn by distress and conflict, or lost in the last-minute frenzy of procrastination, you are not functioning in an integrated way. If you’re being either too rigid or chaotic, you lose genuine freedom and spontaneity. Either way, you compromise your vitality; it’s deadening.

  If instead, you aim for a coherent self-system, you move toward an experience of aliveness, of harmony and balance. That will help you develop the resilience to experiment and explore, with the belief that you can handle what comes, whatever that might be. A belief in your resilience will help you be more confident, and that confidence becomes the cornerstone of your self-image. When you define yourself as someone who is resilient rather than someone who must perform, you are breaking the self-worth equation we presented in earlier chapters, so that neither performance nor ability defines your value as a person.

  THE INNER PROSECUTOR AND THE DEFENSE ATTORNEY

  Getting to a state of resilience is not easy. Procrastinators tend to judge their feelings and actions harshly and rigidly. They constantly compare themselves with some standard that seems to reflect the right way of being a person and the right way of doi
ng things—as if there were in reality one (and only one) right way. Procrastinators are very hard on themselves. In fact, for some, their own “internal judge” is often so critical, so biased, and so impossible to please, that it is more appropriately called a “prosecutor” than a judge. A judge hears evidence from all sides and tries to make a fair decision. A prosecutor wants to prove guilt and only produces evidence that will help fix blame. An inner prosecutor has free rein to make vicious personal attacks whenever it likes. It acts as no friend would, hitting hard in the aftermath of disappointment, pouncing on weaknesses, predicting failure while offering no consolation or encouragement for the future.

  The inner prosecutor’s specific criticisms vary, depending on the issues most sensitive to the procrastinator. Someone who is afraid of being too successful might hear his inner prosecutor saying, “Who do you think you are, anyway? What makes you think you can take the pressure of having your own company? Who are you to take business away from people who have been your friends?” Someone who resists feeling controlled might hear, “Only a weakling would go along with that order. Next thing you know they’ll be walking all over you.” Unfortunately, for many people, the critical voice of the inner prosecutor dominates their lives and goes unchallenged.