Procrastination

by Jane B. Burka

  Of the possible goals you’ve considered, select one—and only one—to use as your behavioral goal for your one-week experiment. Choosing one and only one goal should make this experiment less aversive and therefore more approachable. It doesn’t have to be the most important goal in your life or the most challenging task you face. Which goal you select is not as crucial as the process of defining and working toward one goal of your own choosing.

  We realize that asking a procrastinator to select only one goal is like asking a dieter to eat only one potato chip. It’s hard to limit yourself to just one, but having more than one is dangerous. For most procrastinators, trying to do everything is part of the problem.

  List the Steps. Break your behavioral goal down into its component parts. Each part is one step, a minigoal. Start with the first step and work forward, or start with your last step and work backward. An example of how one procrastinator broke his one-week goal down into small steps is shown below.

  Write down your one behavioral goal, the steps involved to achieve it, and when during the next week you plan to take each step. Don’t forget to consider other time commitments and obligations you have in the coming week.

  Goal: Spend two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday reorganizing and cleaning my home office (total of four hours)

  STEPS:

  A. ORGANIZE PAPERS AND PRINTOUTS

  1. Sort through piles on the desk and the floor; throw away nonessentials without reading them!

  2. Move clothes and shoes to closet, cups and glasses to kitchen, books to the bookcase, magazines to the recycle bin.

  3. Put all bills to be paid in a box. (Do I have a box?)

  4. Put receipts in another box. (Do I have enough boxes?)

  5. Buy file folders.

  6. Sort through articles, photos, and clippings.

  7. Make files for items I want to save, and throw the rest away.

  B. CLEAN THE ROOM

  1. Clean computer screen and keyboard.

  2. Dust file and bookcase.

  3. Empty wastebasket.

  4. Vacuum.

  Reality check: Can all this be done in four hours?

  Don’t forget to buy file folders on Friday.

  Your First Step. Now that you’ve identified a behavioral goal (and perhaps revised it to be more realistic) and the steps you’ll take toward achieving it during the next week, how do you get started? What is the very first step you will take? It should be something very small and easy, like finding last year’s tax return, buying a notebook, or finding some empty boxes. Exactly where and when will you begin? No matter how small an effort it is, you are moving in the right direction. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” as the saying goes.

  Get Feedback. Your one-week behavioral goal may seem clear and realistic to you. We suggest, however, that you ask someone else for feedback. You may find that what seemed clear may be too vague; what seemed realistic may still be too much; what seemed broken down into steps may still be too broad. In particular, ask your partner to help you consider whether the goal you’ve selected is really your minimally acceptable goal. In our example, maybe it would be better to start with one hour on Saturday or Sunday than to aim for two hours on each day.

  The Start-Up

  Now you have a project you want to work on, and you’ve defined it so that it is clear and realistic. It’s actually possible that you can get this done in the next week. How does this prospect make you feel? What thoughts are going through your mind? Here are a few of the reactions we’ve heard from procrastinators as they’ve looked ahead to the prospect of an accomplishable goal: “I feel a sense of relief, because I finally have a way to start.” “I’m very anxious. What if I fail again?” “I feel like I’m in prison. I want to run away!” Notice your reactions as you anticipate your experiment. The thought of getting started is a trigger, a stimulus that sets off a whole chain of internal reactions—images, feelings, thoughts, expectations, and memories of past experiences.

  Visualize Your Progress. It may be helpful to visualize the specific steps and the exact circumstances of progress made toward your goal. Imagery is used to reduce stress and increase relaxation, to practice assertive behavior, to cope with anxiety, to aid physical healing, and to improve performance in academics and sports.

  Imagine yourself taking your very first step, going through the motions you would actually make. Then see yourself continuing through each of the steps toward your goal. If your pessimism intrudes and you anticipate a snag, try to imagine yourself finding a way to cope with the problem. Eventually you’ll watch yourself coming to the end of the process and accomplishing your goal. Imagery of this sort—best done when you are comfortable, alone, and relaxed—can prepare you for the real moment of action and make it easier for you to cross the threshold between thinking and doing.

  Optimize Your Chances. Even if you have a well-delineated behavioral goal and a manageable first step, where and when you plan to begin can be crucial. The circumstances you set up can either greatly increase or significantly decrease the probability of success. Trevor, a twenty-year-old undergraduate student, decided to complete a term paper on Middle Eastern politics as his behavioral goal. His first step was to spend from 9:00 to 10:00 P.M. the next evening reading one book. So far so good. He planned to read the book in his room at the fraternity house. Not so good. The fraternity was an extremely social, distracting environment, and as 9:00 P.M. approached, Trevor was having too good a time hanging out with the guys to go into his room alone to read. He put it off until nine-thirty, then ten, and at ten-thirty, he gave up because “it was too late by that time.” Trevor made his first step more difficult by trying to achieve it under less than optimal circumstances. He thought he would—and should—be able to overcome the social temptations, but he just made things harder for himself.

  The next day, Trevor revised his plan and decided to read the book in a campus library. In order to increase his chances of actually getting to the library, he arranged to go with Peter, a studious fraternity brother. Instead of going to the undergraduate library where he might run into friends and yield to social pressure again, he chose the law school library, where “people are really serious.” Trevor didn’t change his first step, but he did alter the circumstances to maximize the chances that he would actually take it.

  Stick to a Time Limit. Another way to make getting started less aversive is to set a limited period of time to work toward your behavioral goal and stick to it. Don’t go over the time limit. If you decide to spend thirty minutes on your project, and you stay with it for that length of time, you’ve been successful, regardless of how much you accomplished or how well you think it turned out. Your success is based on following through with your intentions and honoring an agreement you made with yourself. This builds trust and confidence in yourself, valuable feelings that many procrastinators have lost.

  The shorter the time frame you set, the easier it is to begin. Most procrastinators find that an initial period of fifteen minutes to a half-hour works best. And if fifteen minutes feels like more than you can stand, set a limit of ten minutes, five minutes, or even one minute!

  It is absolutely necessary at first to stop when you reach the end of your time limit. It’s tempting to think, “If I’m doing well, I should capitalize on it and keep up the momentum.” But if you get carried away and work for two hours the first time, going well beyond your set limit, next time you’ll expect that you should again work for two hours. That’s a set-up for discouragement and avoidance.

  Don’t Wait Until You Feel Like It. If you wait until you feel like starting, you may never get started. Many procrastinators expect to feel unafraid, totally confident, completely prepared, or inspired at the moment they take their first step. Kelly, a thirty-three-year-old nurse said, “I keep thinking I should really be ready before I apply to go back to school. I should feel calm and completely together, not have any doubts about myself. Once I stop feel
ing anxious, school should be no problem.” Kelly has been waiting for three years to feel “completely together.” But she’s been out of school for a long time—how could she not feel anxious about going back? Waiting until she’s anxiety-free may mean she’ll never do it.

  Others expect they should want to start, so they wait for desire to develop. There are some things, however, that are inherently unpleasant, tedious, or boring. Take taxes, for instance. We don’t know anyone who looks forward to doing his or her taxes. If you wait until you want to do something, you can wait forever.

  However, you can start, even if you’re not in the ideal mood or frame of mind.

  The Follow-Through

  Once you do get started, how can you follow through beyond the first step to give yourself a chance to complete your goal? Procrastinators are all too familiar with the cycle of making early efforts and then slowing down or giving up altogether. They are typically suffused with optimism at the beginning and then, at some point, they get stuck and stay stuck.

  How can you keep from being disappointed by yet another incomplete project? Here are some guidelines for following through instead of giving up.

  Watch Out for Your Excuses. Inevitably, many of the excuses you’ve identified in Chapter 11 will come up during your one-week experiment. Remember that an excuse means you’re at a choice point: you can procrastinate or you can act. Instead of delaying automatically, you can transform your excuse—change your conclusion of “So I’ll do it later” to “So I’ll just spend fifteen minutes on it now.” You can always use your excuse as a reward after you’ve taken some steps toward your goal. “It’s a beautiful day, and I’ll go for a walk after I spend a half hour paying bills.” Keep in mind that an excuse is also an invitation to explore your feelings about the goal—are you ambivalent, afraid, rebellious, angry? Taking a few minutes to pay thoughtful attention to what is going on in your thoughts and feelings when you start making excuses can help you learn something important about yourself.

  Focus on One Step at a Time. In the process of writing this book, there were many times when we felt depressed by thoughts such as, “There’s so much left to do,” or, “We’ll never finish on time,” or, “What if it doesn’t turn out well?” The task seemed enormous, and we felt overwhelmed. At these moments, one of us would say to the other, “Don’t think so far ahead. Just take one step at a time.” It diverted us from our fears of a disastrous future and brought us back to making a plan of action for the immediate present. If you focus on one step at a time, you are shortening the length of time before reaching your interim goal, which is one of the important factors in reducing procrastination.

  Work Around Obstacles. Even if things go smoothly at the beginning, at some point you will certainly encounter a bump in the road. Maybe the person you want to talk to is not available, or you can’t figure out how to solve a logistical problem, or it rains on the first day of your new jogging program, or you just don’t feel like it. At that point, you have reached a critical moment: the first obstacle, the first of many. Procrastinators are likely to come to a halt when an obstacle can’t be easily removed or overcome. Any snag, large or small, can become a source of frustration and humiliation if you take it as proof of your inadequacy and evidence of your failure. If you feel defeated by an obstacle, you will have trouble returning to the problem and grappling with it again. It is easier to work around an obstacle if you view it as an interesting puzzle to be solved or something that takes more effort, a reflection of the task—not of you. An obstacle is just an obstacle : it is not an indictment that you are completely stupid, incompetent, or unwanted.

  Sometimes when you face an obstacle, it might be in your best interests to take a break. At the end of a long day of writing together, we sometimes found ourselves getting irritable with each other and arguing about wording to such an extent that we could not agree. After a few fights, we learned that our irritability was a signal that it was time to stop for the day and didn’t mean that the other person was stupid or incorrigible. Miraculously, the next day, finding the right words and reaching agreement came easily.

  If you decide to take a break, set a specific time and place to approach the situation again. Identify as concretely as you can what action you will take at that time. If you are in the midst of a writing project, jot down a sentence or a few thoughts or phrases before you take your break. That way you’ll have a place to start when you come back. If you temporarily retreat from an obstacle, consider whether there is any other part of your goal that you can work on. If it’s raining outside, can you do indoor exercises? If someone you need is out of the office, can you make other calls? Although you might stop momentarily in one area, you don’t have to stop completely. The danger for procrastinators is not in withdrawing temporarily; the danger lies in giving up altogether.

  Reward Yourself After You’ve Made Some Progress. The notion of giving yourself a reward may be foreign, because procrastinators are much more likely to punish themselves than to praise themselves. It’s very sad to see that, in almost every case, procrastinators are highly skilled at beating themselves over the head but are not very good at being kind to themselves when they deserve it.

  Scott, for example, was mad at himself at the end of his one-week experiment. He’d selected the goal of paying three long-overdue bills that had been plaguing him for months. He reported with regret that he’d only taken care of one of them—he’d covered his unpaid parking tickets, so that now he could reregister his car—but he castigated himself for not also paying off his dentist and the credit card company. Scott was unable to appreciate the benefits of what he had accomplished. By paying his tickets and registering his car, he stopped the penalties from accruing, and he could now drive without having an anxiety attack every time he saw a police car. But, as is the case with most procrastinators, it never occurred to Scott to feel good about what he had done, because he continued to focus only on what he had not accomplished.

  When you do make progress, even if you don’t accomplish as much as you’d ideally like or don’t do it as you had imagined, give yourself some reinforcement. A reward can be anything that you enjoy or that makes you feel good: dinner at a favorite restaurant, watching a movie, a weekend trip to the mountains, a game of racquetball, talking to a friend, or reading a book. A reward could also be praise from other people or private acknowledgment that you give to yourself. Try to make the reward commensurate with the accomplishment. After you do an hour of work toward your behavioral goal, take a walk, not a two-week vacation.

  Rewards are most effective when they occur just after the desired behavior. “I’ll go to a movie and then settle down to work” is not as effective as doing some work first and going to the movie afterward. Rewards work as positive reinforcement, increasing the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated. Your brain also helps you repeat successful behavior. When you achieve a goal, there is a release of dopamine, the feel-good neurotransmitter. Dopamine connects the neuronal networks responsible for those behaviors that led to your accomplishment, making it more likely you will repeat those behaviors in the future.2 Success generates more success.

  Be Flexible about Your Goal. As you progress toward your goal, you may discover that your initial reality checks weren’t realistic enough. Perhaps you forgot to allot time for important commitments, like the theater director who set up an ambitious one-week goal but forgot that her college roommate was coming for a visit. Or you may find that things take longer or are more complicated than you’d anticipated. You may be disrupted by circumstances beyond your control: your child becomes ill or your car breaks down. (Of course, if you’ve been putting off long-overdue car maintenance . . .) In some situations, it may be necessary to alter your goal.

  Revising your goal is not necessarily a sign of failure. In fact, it may be a sign that you are being flexible rather than rigid, an important characteristic of healthy, integrated functioning. Revising a goal can be a response to realistic co
nstraints, indicating that you are able to evaluate what is actually possible and adjust to it, instead of holding onto an impossible ideal.

  It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect. If you are a perfectionist, you may get caught up in a struggle to do all things absolutely right, even when there is no real need for such a high standard. It’s more important that your holiday cards be sent than that each person receives a unique, well-written personal note about how you are, what you’ve been doing all year, your current philosophy of life, and a photo that makes you look younger and thinner. With that ideal as your goal, those cards may sit untouched until next year’s holidays roll around.

  If you can let go of your need for perfection at each step along the way, you’ll probably be able to accomplish a lot more in the long run. As you’re waiting for the perfect time, hoping for the perfect outcome, remind yourself, “It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be done!”

  Looking Back

  At the end of your one-week experiment, look back over what happened. This may be difficult for procrastinators who hate to be reminded of what they did—or didn’t do. Some people feel it’s a waste of time to look backward. “What’s done is done. It’s over, and I can’t change it, so why should I spend my time thinking about it?” But a thoughtful looking back is an important form of self-monitoring—how else can you learn from your experience?