Procrastination

by Jane B. Burka

  Assess Your Progress (or Lack Thereof). If you actually finished your goal, you may be reluctant to look carefully at how you got there. Some people are almost superstitious about it, worrying that if they examine a good thing too closely, they’ll see the hidden flaws and then won’t feel good about it anymore. “Even though I finished my project,” said an accountant, “there were a lot of times along the way when I goofed off. I’d rather just hold onto my pride and not remember those bad times.” She sounds ready to let her regret over her struggles outweigh the satisfaction of her success.

  Many procrastinators tend to underestimate how much they’ve done. Perhaps you took some steps that weren’t part of your original plans, but they moved you along. These steps count. Perhaps you aren’t giving yourself credit for some steps because they seem so small. These steps count, too. You may feel like you didn’t do enough, but if you recount exactly what you have done, you may be pleasantly surprised.

  It’s also possible that as you review your steps you’ll be unpleasantly surprised to find that you have fooled yourself into thinking you did more than you actually accomplished. That’s important to discover as well. If you didn’t accomplish your goal, you may be even more resistant to examining what happened. If you are already critical of yourself for not finishing what you started, you may not want to add to your self-recrimination.

  Whether you completed your goal is less important than how you think about what happened. If you have begun to understand your successes and your setbacks, you are helping prepare yourself to procrastinate less next time. Keep in mind that self-monitoring is a valuable executive function, and with practice, you can get better at it.

  Examine Your Feelings. We’ve heard a wide range of reactions from procrastinators at the end of their experiments: “I feel relieved because I got somewhere, but I’m disappointed that I didn’t go all the way.” “I did a heck of a lot more than I thought I’d do.” “I was sneaky. I took short cuts. I don’t feel good about it because I didn’t stick to the plan.” “I’ve failed again.” “I was really off base in my planning.” “I did what I said I would do—finally!”

  How are you feeling as you look back on your own experience? Are you disappointed because you didn’t do anything, or are you disappointed because you didn’t do everything? Are you wounded because you didn’t accomplish a project that was really too big in the first place? Or are you relieved because you learned how to live with progress one step at a time? Whatever your feelings are, try to observe them without judgment. Feelings—even powerful ones—come and go, so you won’t feel this way forever.

  Review Your Choice Points. In the past, you may have made the choice to procrastinate automatically, without even realizing it. Perhaps you accepted your excuses unquestioningly or ran away from your goal on impulse. If you accomplished nothing else during your one-week experiment, we hope that you procrastinated more consciously. Undoubtedly, there were times when you were tempted to put something off and wavered on the brink, debating whether to take the next step or avoid it, times when you could either move toward your goal or away from it. These choice points are important moments. The decisions we make at such times affect not only our performance but also the way we feel about ourselves.

  Try to recall one of those choice points from your week. If you can remember a time when you wavered but decided to move toward your goal, what helped you to take the plunge? What did you do or say to yourself that helped you to make progress? Raj, a systems engineer, was a science-fiction fan. Just at the time he’d planned to begin organizing the tools in his workshop, he started instead to read a terrific sci-fi book. Although tempted by the world of the future, he was also nagged by his guilt. “Finally, I saw that I wasn’t enjoying the book because I was so conflicted. So I decided to spend ten minutes in my workshop and then return to my book. I was surprised that I actually rather liked straightening out the workshop. When I went back to reading, I felt I’d earned it.” Two things helped Raj move forward. First, he decided to take a small first step so that he wouldn’t feel imprisoned in his workshop; second, he rewarded his progress by really enjoying his book.

  Perhaps you can remember a time when you weren’t so fortunate, a choice point when you decided to move away from your goal. What were the circumstances? What thoughts, feelings, or images made it difficult for you to move ahead? Abby, a freelance writer, went folk dancing instead of working on the article her editor was expecting. She explained, “I just felt restless and at loose ends and had to get out of the house.” With some further thought, Abby realized, “I was feeling sort of lonely. I didn’t want to stay home by myself. When I was folk dancing, I was with a lot of other people, and that made me feel better.” What was making her feel lonely on that particular day? She remembered that she was scheduled to have lunch with a friend who’d called and canceled. “I’d been looking forward to seeing him, and when he canceled I felt rejected.” It took a lot of hard thinking, but Abby was able to see how procrastinating was her attempt to replace the social contact she’d missed. Had she realized that what she really needed was companionship, perhaps Abby could have called another friend either to join her for lunch or to spend the evening working together.

  What Have You Learned? Think back on how you handled the process of approaching your project, from defining your behavioral goal to getting started and following through. What one thing would you do differently next time? Like Trevor, who discovered that the fraternity house was not conducive to studying and decided to work in the library instead, what one change do you want to make that will increase your chances for success next time?

  We hope you have also learned things about yourself this week. What one thing do you know now that you didn’t know before? Whatever you have learned should help prepare you for the next round of your battle with procrastination. So don’t devalue any aspect of your one-week experiment, because no matter what you did or didn’t do, you can learn from it.

  13

  Learning How to Tell Time

  On the surface, procrastination appears to be a rather straightforward problem of poor time management. If you organized your time better and used it more efficiently, you wouldn’t be procrastinating. Right? With this in mind, many procrastinators turn to experts in time management for advice. You may have already read some of the extensive literature that exists in this area and checked the Web sites of authors, experts, and coaches who are part of the enormous time management industry. You can probably see the wisdom in their recommendations about adopting calendar systems, using to-do lists, setting priorities, and making good decisions. Most time management experts include a brief exhortation to stop procrastinating. But if you’re reading this book on procrastination, you’ve probably found it difficult to put these reasonable recommendations into practice. If you could, you would. Why can’t you?

  As we noted in Chapter 6, time is one of the great challenges for procrastinators. They are preoccupied with time, counting the hours and minutes or pretending that time doesn’t matter at all. A procrastinator plays games with time, trying to outsmart it: “I’ll watch a movie tonight and still have my report ready tomorrow morning.” “There’s always more time; time is no object.”

  Yet for all their experience at playing with its constraints, procrastinators’ views of time are quite unrealistic. They have a relationship more akin to “wishful thinking” when it comes to time; they hope to find more of it than there really is, almost as if time were a quantity that could be extended instead of being one that is limited.

  Perhaps it is this aspect of time—that it is fixed, measurable, and finite—that is so difficult for procrastinators to accept. Procrastinators, as we have observed, prefer to remain in the vague realms of potential and possibility and do not like to be concrete, measured, or limited. When they are ultimately caught short of time, they are surprised, disappointed, and even offended. In order to implement the time management techniques in this and other books, you
may have to confront your own wishful-thinking approach to time.

  TIME TO THINK ABOUT TIME

  If you have chosen a behavioral goal for the next week, have you thought about when you are going to work on it? In order to think more realistically about using your time to achieve a goal, it helps to plan ahead. We know that many procrastinators resist this idea. We are not suggesting that you give up your spontaneity and become an on-time machine. Nor are we encouraging you to spend so much time planning that it becomes another means of procrastination, because at some point, you have to shift out of planning and into working on your goal. But we are suggesting that you take some time to think about time.

  We know that planning may be particularly difficult for people with ADD or executive function problems. For you, planning should be approached with extra care and attention, taking into account the challenges of your particular brain. For techniques tailored specifically to those with ADD and executive dysfunction, see Chapter 16. The ideas in that chapter may help you implement the suggestions that follow.

  When you plan ahead, you have the opportunity to use your brain in relative calm, before the panic of meeting an approaching deadline takes over. Compare how well you plan when you are relaxed to the frantic thinking that gets you into trouble at the last minute. As we have seen, increased stress interferes with the cognitive functions that are essential for planning, so you are more likely to plan effectively if you start before you are stressed out. Conversely, lack of planning increases the chances that you will become more agitated as you run out of time. As Alan Lakein, the original time management expert, said, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”1

  People may resist planning because it seems to be about the future, and they want to live now, in the present. They can feel trapped by committing themselves to an activity in the future, as if their freedom is being constrained. Planning does not necessarily mean committing to use every hour of every day; you have to expect the unexpected, and you also want to have time for spontaneous fun and rejuvenating relaxation. Procrastinators may feel so guilty for lost time that they pressure themselves to use every minute productively, only to find that they have set up impossible expectations. It’s not the plan that’s the problem, it’s the pressure.

  However, a time plan can be your best friend, a link to your future. To quote Alan Lakein once again, “Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”2 In order to be your friend, a time plan should be realistic and compassionate. Planning your time hinges on getting real about what you actually do, not just programming what you should do.

  As you plan to work toward the behavioral goal you have chosen, let’s look at how you’re going to make the time to take those incremental steps. When you think about the coming week, do you know how much time is available for you to use? Are you aware of the commitments you have already made? Have you planned for activities you usually spend time on, like watching the news or blogging? Is something unusual happening this week, such as houseguests visiting, a weekend seminar, or a sports tournament?

  THE UN-SCHEDULE

  Psychologist Neil Fiore was our colleague on the staff of the Counseling Center at UC-Berkeley when we were designing our Procrastination Workshops. He understood that many people set up schedules for themselves that they never fulfill, then become disappointed, and eventually give up. So Dr. Fiore developed a method of keeping track of time that is not based on what people should do. Instead he created the un-schedule.”3 We have found the un-schedule to be very helpful to our clients and to participants in our Procrastination Workshops.

  The un-schedule is a weekly calendar of all your committed activities. It can help you accomplish your goal in two ways. First, in looking ahead to see how much of your time is already committed, you will see the maximum amount of time you have left over to work toward your goal. Second, it helps you at the end of your week to look back and see where your time has actually gone, another example of self-monitoring.

  “I Don’t Know Where My Time Goes.” Think about the next seven days, starting with tomorrow. Using the blank un-schedule on pages 198-199 as a model, write down all of the activities you can predict you will do in the coming week, however trivial they may seem. Mark on your un-schedule the hours when you most probably will be doing things you already know will occur in the next week. If you know exactly when you will be doing something, write it down in the appropriate box—for example, a lunch meeting, Tuesday, 12:00-1:30 P.M. If you don’t know exactly when you will do something, estimate the amount of time it will take and then mark it down on a day when you might do it. Include any special commitments you have scheduled for this week, like an evening meeting or a social date. In addition, mark off time for routine activities, such as grocery shopping or filling the gas tank of your car, that happen each week.

  Consider the whole variety of activities in your life: work hours; scheduled meetings and appointments; classes and social events; time for exercise; time for meals, including preparation and cleanup; time given to household chores such as cleaning, laundry, and shopping; time set aside to spend with your friends, spouse, or children; time that you spend sleeping. If you always watch the evening news, Monday Night Football, or other favorite television programs, put them down as well. Anticipate the extra time you spend reading the newspaper on Sundays. Don’t forget to include your commuting and travel time, too. Use a calendar to remind yourself of your commitments, because it’s easy to forget something. It’s hubris to think you can keep track of everything in your head. On pages 200-201 is the un-schedule for Sonya, a high school history teacher who is behind on grading midterm papers for her students.

  Remember, we are not asking you to write down what you should be doing. Don’t put down when you hope you’ll get around to starting on your behavioral goal or when you think you’ll send an e-mail to your old friend. If you are a student, don’t put down the times when you hope you’ll be doing your homework. We are not asking you to promise yourself to try to do anything extra; we are only asking you to acknowledge what times are already spoken for in the coming week.

  When you have finished filling out the un-schedule, look it over. This page represents your life for the next week. When you project yourself into the next seven days, how do you feel? Are you overwhelmed by all you are going to do? Anxious about how you are going to fill your uncommitted time? Depressed because you have so little free time? Examine how you feel as you visualize yourself going through this week, and consider what it is about your schedule that leads you to feel that way.

  What can you learn about how much time you have available to work on your project? The un-schedule shows you the maximum amount of time you could use; the blank spaces reflect all of your uncommitted hours. Of course, no one will use all of the uncommitted hours to work on a project, but the un-schedule shows you how much time is potentially available.

  A design engineer selected delivering a design to his client as his one-week behavioral goal, and he planned to spend three hours a day working on his project. When he filled out his un-schedule, he saw that he didn’t even have three uncommitted hours a day! Given his present schedule, his goal was unattainable. By underestimating how much of his time was already spoken for, he was setting himself up for failure. He either had to revise his goal or revise his schedule.

  Perhaps you are one of those people who have a lot of unscheduled time. Many people who work from home or work part-time or who are self-employed or unemployed find that they face large blocks of unstructured time. For procrastinators, this “free” time can generate a lot of anxiety, because it means they have to create their own structure in order to get anything done.

  The un-schedule can also tell you something about how you are currently managing your time. A brilliant graduate student did not realize until he filled out his un-schedule that waking up at 8:50 for a 9:00 A.M. class was cutting it too close. No wonder he was always late for everything!


  Sometimes people examine their commitments and discover how much of their time is taken up with social engagements and recreation. These procrastinators have planned their excuses ahead of time, so that when the moment comes, they feel they are meeting their obligations, and they may not recognize that they’re procrastinating. “I keep planning so many social events after work that I never even have to decide if I’m going to start writing my book or not,” said a magazine editor. “I just barely have time to get where I’m going.”

  Look closely at your un-schedule. Is there anything missing from your life? Some procrastinators don’t allow themselves any recreation; since they’re always behind, they feel they don’t deserve any downtime. And those who do hop from one recreational event to another may not experience genuine pleasure in their frenetic activity if they are using fun events to escape their work. Amy, a realtor, realized, “I haven’t included any fun! I feel so guilty about all the work I have to do that I don’t think I should take any time out just to enjoy myself. No wonder I’m so tense all the time.”