Procrastination

by Jane B. Burka

  Progress of any kind deserves to be recognized and rewarded. Effort counts, too—not only the outcome—so be sure to give lots of praise to any effort your procrastinator makes. “You’ve worked hard preparing for your presentation.” “You’ve put in so much effort on this. Good for you.”

  You can also participate in activities that reward the procrastinator at points along the way. Take your procrastinator out to lunch or dinner for accomplishing a difficult step; arrange an evening at the movies after she has spent two hours working; have the procrastinator take a break with you and go for a walk. (But don’t let the break go on too long!) Your procrastinator will begin to value and appreciate what she has done, even before reaching the final goal. This is an invaluable lesson, because it makes working toward a goal a reinforcing experience rather than a demoralizing one.

  Tell the Procrastinator Directly If You Do Get Angry. There will certainly be times when the procrastinator’s delaying irritates or frustrates you. Let the procrastinator know specifically what she has done that upsets you and discuss how the delay has affected you. Be clear, but try not to be punitive. You could say, for example, “You told me you would compile a list of people to contact and have it ready for this meeting. You haven’t done it, and it’s holding up everything else we want to do. I am annoyed that you didn’t do your part.” Indirect expressions of anger such as sarcastic comments, emotional withdrawal, or nonverbal behaviors, such as rolling your eyes or using a harsh tone of voice, won’t get you anywhere.

  Let Procrastinators Know That They Are More to You Than Just Their Performance. If you really want to be of help to procrastinators, let them know that you value other qualities besides productivity. What about his boundless generosity or insatiable curiosity, her great sense of humor or sensitivity to the personal dilemmas of other people? Your procrastinator may have a talent for cooking, an eye for design and color, or a knack for repairing anything that isn’t working.

  Procrastinators can appreciate these qualities in other people, but they have trouble valuing the same qualities in themselves. They believe they are what they do. Their worth as people depends solely on how well—or poorly—they perform. You can let procrastinators know that your esteem and respect for them extend beyond their success or failure, perhaps even helping them come to a new definition of what success and failure actually mean.

  Consider Yourself. An important question to ask yourself is: What could happen to you if the procrastinator doesn’t get around to doing something? Are there substantial consequences that could significantly impact your life or put you at risk? If the procrastinator is your business partner, for example, you may stand to lose revenues and clients, be the target of a lawsuit, or damage your professional reputation. Or if your spouse is an unreliable partner and unable to move forward in life, your own life progress may be compromised.

  In such situations, you need to think about how to take care of yourself. If you’ve tried everything, and your procrastinator’s behavior still leaves you at risk, you may have to take unilateral action—you either do the work yourself, hire somebody else to do it, or in extreme cases, end the relationship. You might dissolve the business partnership or fire an employee if you feel the procrastinator is too unreliable. You might decide to break up a close relationship or leave your marriage if you feel that the procrastinator’s delays have caused more trouble than you can bear. Although it may be very difficult to end a relationship with someone who’s been an important part of your life, sometimes it’s the best option you have.

  We know it can be difficult to live and work with procrastinators, but it can also be wonderful. Many procrastinators are intelligent and creative; many have a strong independent streak and want to put their individual stamp on things. All are sensitive and anxious about being good enough, strong enough, or capable enough. If you can remember that under the surface there is a vulnerable, uncertain person who wants to be accepted and loved, perhaps you will find it easier to make room in your heart for someone who is struggling with human imperfections.

  Epilogue

  So, procrastination really is like a dandelion, isn’t it? Lots of tangled roots and very difficult to eradicate completely. To help you untangle the roots of your procrastination, we’ve offered many perspectives on why people procrastinate. We hope you will take a close look at those psychological roots that are relevant for your unique story.

  But as we’ve said, it’s not enough to untangle procrastination’s roots. You still have to do something to keep it from dominating your life, and for this, we’ve made a variety of suggestions on how you can take action. Our hope is that you will embrace the opportunity to try something new—play with a fresh way of thinking and experiment with different approaches to those projects that await you. We’re not advocating a grand relandscaping, but rather pulling out the dandelions, one at a time, so that your garden isn’t completely taken over, and there’s space to grow other plants you will enjoy.

  We hope that, after reading this book and trying out new behaviors, you will feel less plagued by procrastination and that it will no longer be a central organizing principle of your life. But we also hope that your drive to overcome procrastination will not rule out pleasure, fun, and simple enjoyment. We are reminded of a tombstone epitaph:

  Got everything done.

  Died anyway.

  We have no illusions that ending procrastination guarantees happiness. Happiness comes from living well, according to your values. It comes from being connected to other people and to your innermost self. It comes from being able to accept that you are who you are and that what is, is, whether procrastination is part of your life or not, like being able to enjoy your garden—even with a few dandelions.

  APPENDIX A

  Procrastination Twenty-five Years of Research

  When we published the first edition of our book, ours was only the third self-help book on procrastination, and there were virtually no research studies on the subject. Since then, procrastination has been the focus of hundreds of social psychology research studies and is being explored in other related fields such as neuropsychology, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. Psychologists have typically been concerned with identifying individual personality traits of procrastinators and the characteristics of tasks that are put off. Behavioral economists have tried to explain why so many of us postpone making good economic decisions and doing things that are clearly in our best financial interests, like saving money or paying bills on time. The Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, maintains an updated bibliography of relevant research, which is available on the Internet.

  A comprehensive review of procrastination research was published in January 2007 by Piers Steel, a psychologist at the University of Calgary Haskayne School of Business.1 After integrating the results of hundreds of psychology research studies, most of which were done with college students, Steel proposed four factors that are likely to increase the tendency to procrastinate:• low confidence in one’s ability to succeed;

  • expecting that the process and/or outcome will be unpleasant;

  • the reward is too far away to feel real or meaningful;

  • difficulties in self-regulation, including impulsiveness and distractibility.

  Steel summarizes, “We are more likely to pursue goals that are pleasurable and that we are likely to attain . . . and we will most likely procrastinate any tasks that are unpleasant in the present and offer recompense only in the distant future.”2

  CHARACTERISTICS OF PROCRASTINATORS

  Poor Self-regulation. The personality traits that researchers find to be most strongly correlated with procrastination seem self-evident, part of what defines the very nature of procrastination itself. The three characteristics that bear the strongest statistical relationship to procrastination are:1. the “intention-action gap,” which refers to a failure to act upon one’s intentions (even though procrastinators plan to work as hard as any
one else, or harder);

  2. low “conscientiousness,” which refers to not doing one’s duty, having difficulty with purposeful planning and perseverance, and experiencing low motivation for achievement unless work is intrinsically engaging; and

  3. poor self-discipline, referring to a lack of self-control in planning and organization.3

  Also closely correlated with procrastination are distractibility (being easily derailed by distractions) and impulsiveness (making unplanned decisions to procrastinate and not being future-oriented). Taken together, these traits constitute what Steel calls “self-regulatory failure,” which he found to be the single factor that is most significantly related to procrastination. Procrastinators repeatedly choose “short-term benefits over long-term gains, reflecting a core component of poor self-regulation.”4

  Although self-regulation helps us ignore distractions and temptations, it is difficult to achieve and maintain. Self-regulation is the central problem for people with ADD and executive function difficulties,5 which is why these disorders and procrastination so often go hand in hand. But even people who don’t have ADD struggle with self-regulation. One study related self-regulation to the experience of autonomy. In questioning college students, researchers found that the more a task was felt to be intrinsically rewarding, that is, students experienced pleasure and satisfaction while doing it, the more likely they were to maintain consistent progress. When the motivation for doing a task was less autonomous—if it was being promoted by someone else, or if it was difficult to see the point of doing it—the more likely students were to procrastinate.6 Even believing that something was important to their own future did not make it intrinsically rewarding. “No matter how important students consider their courses to be for achieving their future life goals, they are still likely to procrastinate if they are not genuinely interested in the course material. Thus, procrastination appears to be a motivational problem that requires that a very high threshold of autonomy be reached before it can be overcome.”7 You have to be highly motivated to do the things in life that you are not really interested in, and it’s easy to make excuses and put off these less compelling tasks.

  Another perspective suggested by research on self-regulation is that we have a limited capacity to control our behavior, and this capacity can be depleted after we have had to exercise a lot of self-control.8 As you exert self-control to deal with one difficult thing, you lessen the amount of self-control available for handling the next difficult thing. If self-control is a limited resource, there are bound to be failures in self-control, especially if you are coping with stress, managing negative feelings, or resisting temptations that occur closely together in time. There have to be periods when self-control is relaxed in order to build up your strength for the next time. It’s difficult to maintain self-control all the time—just ask anyone on a diet or in a 12-step program! Although “self-regulatory failure” carries judgmental connotations of a lack of will power, overindulgence, and general moral lassitude, it’s important to remember that there are many explanations for why someone might have poor self-regulation, none of which relate to moral failings.

  Worry, Anxiety, and Mood. A cluster of personality traits that can affect self-regulation involves worry, anxiety, and mood. Steel9 found these factors to be less strongly correlated with procrastination than the self-regulatory factors just described, but they were related nonetheless. Depressed mood can lead to procrastination, since the lethargy and low energy associated with depression interfere with taking action.10 Depression is also linked to low self-confidence, and both low self-confidence and low self-efficacy (doubting your ability to do well) have been shown to be related to procrastination.11 Fear of failure, which appears to be a combination of low self-confidence, anxiety, and perfectionism, is also repeatedly linked to procrastination.12 With less confidence in themselves and in their ability to complete projects, especially when being evaluated, procrastinators are more likely to give up when they encounter an obstacle. 13 Ironically, procrastinators create their own obstacles all the time, an example of what some researchers call “self-handicapping.”14 Waiting too long to start a task is an example of self-handicapping, as is the tendency to spend too much time on impossible projects. Procrastinators are much more likely than nonprocrastinators to persist on projects if they are likely to fail.15

  In contrast, some procrastinators are too optimistic; they worry too little. They may be overly optimistic about how long it takes to complete a task, consistently underestimating how much time they need.16 Some are “socially active optimists”17 who use the distraction of social activity to procrastinate and have fun doing it. Outgoing and extroverted, they are overly confident about postponing now and being successful later.

  There has been some controversy about how perfectionism is related to procrastination. Most clinicians observe that procrastinators are likely to be perfectionists. Yet after Steel’s overview of the procrastination research, he concluded that perfectionism was inconsistently and weakly related to procrastination.18 Few people reported that perfectionism contributed to their procrastination,19 and in some studies, people who scored high as perfectionists scored the same or lower than nonperfectionists on ratings of procrastination.20 Steel notes that this finding is discrepant with clinical observations and is not in agreement with the consistent finding that fear of failure, which is correlated with perfectionism, is indeed a factor in procrastination. Steel’s conclusion that perfectionists procrastinate less because they do better and avoid delaying was widely covered by the media when his review of the research on procrastination was published in 2007.21

  We think this discrepancy between clinical and research findings may be due in part to the fact that clinicians see people who come for counseling, and who are more likely to be what Dr. Kenneth Rice refers to as maladaptive perfectionists.22 Steel seems to be describing Rice’s adaptive perfectionists,23 people who recognize that they have high standards and believe their performance lives up to their standards, so they are satisfied with their performance and with their lives.24 By contrast, maladaptive perfectionists have high standards but they are disappointed with their performance; they experience self-criticism, self-doubt, and excessive concerns about making mistakes and are less satisfied with their lives.25 With these anxieties, they are more likely to seek professional help.

  In addition, the majority of studies in Steel’s overview used questionnaires that relied on the respondents to identify whether or not they were perfectionists. In our experience, most procrastinators don’t identify themselves as perfectionists, and therefore, when they are answering a questionnaire, they are unlikely to endorse items that reflect perfectionism. They invariably protest, “I’m not a perfectionist; I never do anything perfectly.” These procrastinators don’t recognize that the attitude of perfectionism comes through in their very disclaimer. Over and over again, we find that when we look below the surface, perfectionism is alive and well in the procrastinating mind.

  Personality Traits That Are Not Related to Procrastination. Some personality traits have been found to have little or no relation to procrastination. “Rebellion against control” was found to be unrelated to procrastination, acknowledged by fewer than 5 percent of respondents.26 Other traits unrelated to procrastination include “openness to experience” (intellectual curiosity, creativity and imagination, appreciation of art and beauty), “agreeableness” (cooperation, consideration for others, concern with social harmony, optimism, honesty, trustworthiness), “sensation-seeking” (there’s a weak link here with risk-taking), and intelligence.

  We wish to offer an important caveat here about the nature of statistics in research that draws conclusions based on collective data from large numbers of people. For example, when Steel says that rebelliousness has not been found to relate to procrastination, he means that this is true in general for most of the people who were studied. However, he is careful to note that for the individual for whom rebelliousness is an i
ssue, everything becomes a battle, and procrastination is one way to express rebellion.27 As clinicians, we can’t emphasize this point enough. We know someone who feels rebellious about nearly everything, including brushing his teeth (flossing is out of the question, as is doing his taxes—he is years behind). So, if you are an individual who feels your independence is threatened by any request, then for you, rebelliousness is indeed related to procrastination. Statistical conclusions don’t apply to everyone.

  TASK AVERSIVENESS

  Many research studies have focused on the nature of the task as a way to understand procrastination. There is strong, consistent support for the finding that tasks that are seen as aversive trigger procrastination.28 In the workplace, people procrastinate when they feel their jobs don’t allow them enough autonomy, when they don’t see the significance of what they’re doing, when they don’t get much feedback about their work, or when they feel frustrated, resentful, or bored with the task.29 In academia, students procrastinate when they find a task unpleasant, boring, or uninteresting. “The more people dislike a task, the more they consider it effortful or anxiety producing, the more they procrastinate,” concludes Steel, so “one possible reason why some people procrastinate is simply that they find more of life’s chores and duties aversive.”30