Some procrastinators schedule too much socializing and leave out time to be alone. Others withdraw from people and allow themselves too little social contact. What have you scheduled too little of? Time with your family? With friends? Physical activity? Leisurely reading?
Record and Reward
As you work on your behavioral goal or on any project, use the un-schedule to record your progress. After you have finished thirty minutes of work toward your goal, block off one-half of the appropriate hour on your un-schedule. If you work for an hour, block off the entire box. (Some people who really enjoy charts use different colors to track progress on different projects.) Then add up the blocks to get the total amount of time you spent that week working toward your goal. For example, Sonya worked toward her goal for an hour on Tuesday, a half-hour on Wednesday, and two hours on Saturday and Sunday, for a total of four and a half hours. (See pages 202-203 for Sonya’s completed un-schedule.) If it’s better for you to work in smaller increments of time, mark off a quarter of a box for every fifteen minutes you spend toward your goal.
Remember to record your progress after you have completed time spent toward your goal. You may find that your week does not develop quite as you’d predicted, so your blocks may appear at times you’d expected to use for something else. Keeping track of your progress toward your goal in this simple way has several benefits. First, when you record progress after you’ve made it, you focus on what you have accomplished. Instead of making a promise to yourself about when and how much you’ll work, which can leave you feeling like a failure if you don’t live up to it, you record what you have actually done, which is more likely to give you the experience of success. Monitoring your progress in this way helps you to see your glass as half-full, not half-empty. Second, the darkened blocks serve as a reward for your productive behavior. The sooner you record your progress after your work period, the more reinforcing the blocks become. One of the factors that has been shown to reduce procrastination is making a reward more immediate. Working for fifteen minutes or half an hour and then recording your effort provides a prompt reward after a short period of time.
As the week goes by, and you watch the number of blocks increase, you may feel motivated to continue. “These marks work like gold stars in grade school,” commented one procrastinator who found the un-schedule especially helpful. “I get a sense of satisfaction every time I fill in a block, and I feel like doing more.”
Rewarding progress after thirty minutes of work is also a good way to recognize that even a half hour of effort is worthwhile. You don’t have to wait until you have all the time you need to finish a project in order to start the project. The un-schedule shows you when you have small bits of time available and helps you reward yourself for every half hour you use toward your goal.
Keeping track of the number of hours you worked toward your goal is a form of self-monitoring. Self-monitoring has been shown to increase the time spent on work and also to improve achievement.4 Self-monitoring also helps procrastinators be more realistic about time. Counting up the number of hours you worked toward your goal is facing reality. You can’t fool yourself into believing that you’ve accomplished an enormous amount when you see that you spent a half hour during your week on your goal. You also can’t pretend that you haven’t gotten anything done if you count up ten hours of effort. You may find that your feelings about what you’ve done don’t match what the numbers tell you—you can work for ten hours and still not feel a sense of accomplishment. But if you’ve made a record of those hours, at least you have tangible proof before you to counter your disappointed feelings. This is an objective alternative to your subjective interpretation of how you spend your time.
TECHNIQUES TO IMPROVE YOUR TIMING
Practice Telling Time. Can you accurately predict how long things actually take to accomplish? Sometimes people underestimate, thinking, “I can read War and Peace in two nights,” or, “My tax return will only take a couple of hours.” Sometimes procrastinators overestimate how much time is needed, putting off a project such as cleaning out the basement because they think, “I can’t do that now—it will take forever.” In both cases, the result is that they do nothing.
Brain chemistry affects our capacity to tell time accurately. When the neurotransmitter dopamine is in short supply, the clock in your brain that tracks time intervals is thrown off. The capacity to estimate how much time has passed also diminishes with age.5 If your timing is off, you may have to practice telling time.
One way to counter wishful thinking and improve your ability to tell time is to compare your predictions about how long things take with what actually happens when you do them. For example, estimate how long it takes you from the time you hear the alarm in the morning to the time you leave your house, and then clock yourself. Or guess how long it will take you to answer your e-mails when you get to work, and then see how long it actually takes. Or measure how long it takes you to drive across town. One procrastinator, a New York City businessman, planned his drives to Long Island using the timetable, “It takes forty-five minutes without traffic.” This might be true, but had he ever driven to Long Island without traffic?
Learn to Use Little Bits of Time. Alan Lakein made a great suggestion for procrastinators when he described the “Swiss cheese”6 method of time management in his book How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. He recommends “poking holes” in a large task by using little bits of time instead of waiting for one large block of time. This technique can be an extremely helpful way for you to make a start on a project or to keep up some momentum once you have begun.
The significance of the Swiss-cheese technique is that it values any amount of time, no matter how small. The fact that your goal will require ten hours to accomplish does not mean you have to wait until you have a ten-hour block of time before you can start. There are a lot of crucial steps you can take in just fifteen minutes, or ten minutes, or even five minutes. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you can use one minute to make a list. If you’ve been avoiding the room where all your unfinished projects wait, you can just stand inside it for fifteen minutes, keep breathing, and get used to being there. If you have a lot of organizing to do, use a few minutes to locate your box of file folders. Any step toward your goal is one more step than you would have taken if you’d continued to avoid it.
You may find small bits of time by surprise. If a colleague cancels an appointment that was supposed to last for a half hour, you have just been given thirty minutes. If you finish your phone calls ten minutes before you have to leave the office, those ten minutes can be put to use.
The Swiss-cheese method has several advantages of particular benefit to procrastinators. For one thing, it’s realistic. It is more likely that you can find fifteen or thirty minutes here and there than a big block of free time. If you’re waiting for a large chunk of free time, you can wait forever.
In addition, if you use a little bit of time, you have a natural limit. Setting a time limit for yourself is good practice for procrastinators. It helps you to counter the magical notion that one day when you have a lot of time you’ll summon up all of your energy and just do it, until it’s all done. This kind of time and this kind of effort rarely occur and even more rarely coincide.
Limiting your time working on a goal also makes it more tolerable. As difficult, unpleasant, or tedious as your task may be, you can probably stand anything for fifteen minutes. Horrible things can seem less horrible if you realize that getting started is not the beginning of an endless experience. And if you do manage to get even a little bit of a task accomplished, you’re likely to feel good about it. Then the satisfaction you get from making progress can function as a reward. Remember that feeling good about accomplishing something releases chemicals in your brain that increase your sense of well-being. 7 You may be drawn to repeat the experience of working, so that you’ll feel good again.
The Swiss-cheese method can be quite a contrast to the way you may have been u
sing work to punish yourself. If you’ve put something off, you may sentence yourself to solitary confinement for a whole weekend in order to catch up. But the mere thought of such confinement can conjure up feelings of being chained to your desk while everyone else is watching football or going to the beach. The prospect of a lonely, arduous Sunday is aversive, so you avoid it. Experience confirms what research has shown: punishment is not a motivator. 8 You’re better off using a little carrot rather than a big stick.
Working in small amounts of time is an especially helpful technique when your procrastination is a sign that you’re involved in a battle of wills, as we discussed in Chapter 4. If you put things off because you don’t like feeling pushed around or controlled, your procrastination is saying, in effect, “You can’t make me do this.” Your sense of freedom and autonomy is threatened if you go ahead and do the work. But if you decide that you will be the one to set your own time limits, that you will work for ten minutes or five minutes and no longer, you can regain the sense of control you need and still move forward.
Using small bits of time is effective. A college professor was so pleased with this technique that she said, “I set my kitchen timer for an hour and use this method for all kinds of projects, from grading papers to cleaning closets. It gets me going, yet I know there’s an end in sight!” Others are not so easily converted. If you don’t see tangible results right away, you may discredit your initial steps, as if you’d taken none at all. You may find that doing a little at a time is inglorious. It’s not as thrilling as being able to attack and conquer in one magnificent effort. A lawyer who had difficulty implementing this technique told us, “I refuse to start anything unless I have enough time to finish it. I can see that thinking big is counterproductive, but I do everything that way.” Once again, we are reminded that the “all-or-nothing” view is a constant obstacle for procrastinators. Using small portions of time is effective if you let yourself accept the value of “something.”
Expect Interruptions and Disruptions. According to Murphy’s Law, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” But many procrastinators don’t believe this rule of thumb will apply to them once they have finally made up their minds to get down to work. You probably can recall incidents when you’ve procrastinated and then been in a real jam because things failed to go smoothly at the eleventh hour. Unexpected obstacles, like a phone call or a misplaced paper, can really throw you off balance. Why haven’t you planned for the possibility that something could go wrong? Why assume that your effort is the only factor to consider? Once you finally overcome your own resistance and are ready to work, you may expect the rest of the world to cooperate. Unfortunately the world doesn’t always go along with your plan.
Tyler had a job interview at two on Monday afternoon. The week before the interview he knew he should take his suit to the cleaners, but he didn’t get around to it. On Monday morning, after a late night spent looking over the financials of the company that might hire him, Tyler got up early and rushed his suit to the cleaners to meet the 7:30 A.M. deadline for a 1:00 P.M. pickup. At one-thirty, on the way to the interview, wearing his dress shirt, tie, good shoes, and jeans, Tyler stopped at the cleaners. They could not find his suit; maybe it was still in process, or maybe someone misplaced the ticket. Tyler rushed behind the counter to the cleaning area, frantically searching for his suit. The result: he had to cancel his interview at the last minute. Of course, he didn’t get the job.
Unfortunately, the world doesn’t always take notice of your burst of resolve, and things go wrong at their usual rate. There are limits to what you can control. You can’t get to the airport on time if there is a big traffic jam. You can’t get your data to your manager in time for his big meeting if your computer crashes, especially if you have also procrastinated on backing up your files. You can’t study effectively all night if you’re catching a cold. If you acknowledge in advance the possibility of random disaster, you are in a better position to take obstacles in stride instead of feeling frantic and thwarted, furious at the bad-luck gods or hating yourself.
Delegate. Delegating is one way to increase your time efficiency. If you give some of your workload to someone else, then your burden is reduced, and you are free to concentrate on other tasks. The process of delegating involves identifying tasks you alone don’t have to do, finding the best person who could do it, making clear what needs to be done, and keeping track of how they’re progressing.
A consistent recommendation by time management experts is to prioritize your tasks and spend your time on only the most important things. Less important things can be delegated (or even set aside). Peter Drucker, the famous management expert, said, “First things first; second things, not at all.”9 Stephen Covey’s third habit of highly effective people is, “Put first things first.”10 You should be spending your personal time on the most important things that require your attention and delegating things that are not your top priority.
This consistent advice makes sense. You’d think procrastinators would leap at the chance to lessen their burdens. But when we ask people to think specifically of a project they could actually give away, they usually object rather than feeling relieved. Why? Here are some reasons procrastinators have given for why they don’t delegate.
“I should be able to do it all myself.” Perhaps in your pursuit of perfection you believe you should never have to ask for help. So you interpret delegating to mean that you have failed to meet your responsibility or that you are less competent. “I thought of hiring someone to clean my house while I was involved in an important court case,” said an attorney, “but I know other women who are organized enough to do it all, and I should be, too.”
We don’t think delegating is a failure. It’s a skill. The real failure lies in stubbornly holding on to every item in your life, which results in only half of them getting done.
“I’m the only one who can do this right.” This is another perfectionistic pitfall. Although there may be some things that you—and only you—can do, is that really true of everything on your list of unfinished chores? Even if someone else wouldn’t do it in quite your way, it would be better to have it done in a different manner than to leave it undone altogether. If you delegate, you will not have total control. You may have to stand that loss for the sake of accomplishment.
“Delegating is a cop-out.” You may feel too guilty to ask for help. You may believe that because you’ve been Very Bad, you now have to be Very Good to make up for it. You may feel that you don’t deserve to be helped, so you can’t delegate or rely on others.
Refusing help is a good way to procrastinate yourself into martyrdom. “I was the only person on my committee who wasn’t prepared for the meeting,” reported a board member of a charitable organization. “I felt so terrible that I wouldn’t talk to anyone about it. They did their work; why should they have to help me with mine? I wanted to be especially prepared the next time, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t go to the meeting. Then I left the board.”
This stoic and self-punitive approach does not increase your productivity; it only increases the pressure and, thus, your suffering. Adding pressure is adding problems.
“I might delegate the wrong thing to the wrong person.” Even if you agree in principle that there are some matters you could shift to someone else, you may procrastinate in deciding what to delegate and to whom. It’s best to delegate to someone who has the ability to help you, who doesn’t hold a grudge against you, and who isn’t a procrastinator or a perfectionist. It also helps to release tasks that don’t require your constant supervision, or you’ve defeated the purpose. But if you assume there is one right way to delegate, you will be unable to make a decision while you consider every possible angle, looking for the perfect solution. Anything you pass along will lighten your load, whether it’s mundane or important.
“I’d run out of distractions.” Imagine yourself getting help with many of the tasks that now bog you down. What then? Without the pressure of
all those urgent demands, you’d have less standing between you and the really important things you’ve been avoiding. You’d be brought face-to-face with your fears. So if you are able to pare down your list of things to do, be forewarned that you may at first feel more anxiety than relief. But if you persevere, and if you confront and address your underlying fears, relief will probably come later.
Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin. We knew a college student, Ethan, who took eighteen course units, marched in the school band, played on an intramural soccer team, and frequently traveled home to see his girlfriend. He’d squeeze in studying while he commuted or between band practice and soccer practice. Although Ethan claimed that school was his top priority, he behaved as if it were at the bottom of his list.
Clearly, if Ethan really wanted to do better in school, he’d have to give something up—perhaps drop band or soccer and take fewer academic units. But when we suggested this to him, he refused. Ethan wanted to do it all.
Is being too busy the same thing as procrastinating? It can be, if like Ethan, you use your busyness to avoid something more important. When you make lots of commitments, not only are you setting the stage for procrastination, but you’re also giving yourself a ready excuse: “I’m not really procrastinating; I’m just too busy to get everything done on time.”
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