You know how it goes: you sit down at your desk, fired up for a new day, ready to conquer the world. One minute you’re perusing your calendar and/or to do list, the next minute your phone has slipped into your hand and you’re watching llamas singing to each other on YouTube. Welcome to procrastination station my friend: it’s a bitch! Having worked on my own tendency to procrastinate, and also supported my clients with theirs, I decided it was high time I wrote a blog on the subject. I started with some research. Tying this question into Google revealed lots of language like ‘Eat the frog’, ‘Mind hacking’, ‘Hyperfocus’ and ‘Fear of failure’. Instantly a tonne of tips were surfaced to help me overcome procrastination, to stop once and for all, to turn into some sort of lean mean productivity machine. I don’t know about you, but I instantly switched off!
So what is procrastination? Before we uncover the secret sauce to overcoming it, let’s be sure we know what we are talking about. According to https://solvingprocrastination.com/why-people-procrastinate/:
"Procrastination is the act of unnecessarily postponing decisions or actions.”
Basically, we tend to rely on our self-control and motivation to provide us with the necessary oomph to get something done. However, if we experience demotivating or hindering factors, they can interfere with this, delivering us swiftly to procrastination station.
The thing is, as I sat there researching procrastination, there was one glaring omission in all that scary content. It took me a while to find any reference to it, and even then the ensuring prompts weren’t awfully helpful. For me, the real secret is pausing to ask yourself ‘why?’
Why am I procrastinating?
Why haven’t I started or completed this task?
Why do I feel unmotivated, or like I can’t get into this piece of work?
We can try all the tricks in the world to ‘hack’ our brains into getting something done, but if we don’t know what is behind our need to procrastinate, how can we go about fixing the problem rather than just the symptom?
So I’m here for you with a trusty old reframe to help you out: what if we saw our urge to procrastinate as a message, rather than a reason to beat ourselves up? Now there’s a question worth asking! If you’d like to start treating the root cause of your procrastination sessions, here are three simple steps:
Step one: identify what factors lie behind your procrastination - are you feeling demotivated or is something getting in your way? The factor/s at work could be a mixture of external and internal. It could be just one thing, or several. Take the time to explore why you’re feeling the way you do about this work.
If it’s something to do with you, you may need one, some or all of the following: rest, food, a nap/more sleep, to move your body, create a more comfortable working environment, more background noise, or less (or music!), to limit your interruptions (e.g. putting your phone in another room)
If it’s something to do with the task, consider how you feel about: the type of task or work you’re doing, how much you’re being paid for it, how you feel about the stakeholders or clients you’re doing it for/with, how much or how little you enjoy the work, whether the allocated time for the task is fair or not, stories or beliefs you hold about this piece of work and your ability to complete it, and of course your sense of achievement/recognition for this task - is the reward too far away, or is there none at all?
Step two: the next step is to consider what do you do when you procrastinate and what could you do instead. The key here is to be kind to yourself. What can you do about it vs what is outside of your control? Give yourself permission to release what is outside of your control and focus on what is within your power to change. For example, can you push back on a timeline or the scope? Alternatively you could try some hacks or tricks (a Google search will reveal many such as the Pomodoro Technique!) For example set a timer to give yourself a fake ‘deadline’ to complete the task, take regular breaks to rest your brain or reward yourself for completing something, break large tasks up into small tasks to complete across a longer timeframe.
Step three: Assess what you could do differently overall and consider cultivating healthy time management and self-care habits to take into the future. If you’re constantly tripping up on the same task, is there a different approach you could take to it, such as delegating or outsourcing? If you’re constantly distracted by your phone could you set limits on your screen time or limit interacting with it to certain time of the day? Tracking your time for a couple of weeks with a tool like Toggl can be a real eye opener if you’re looking efficiencies, but you’ll have to be honest with yourself about where you spend your time!
To recap, the most important thing to remember is that procrastinating is in our nature, but if you reframe it as your body or mind trying to tell you something, you’ll be much better placed to make long-term moves towards feeling more productive and motivated. In parenting, ‘negative behaviours’ are much easier to understand when we view them as unmet needs. So it’s worth remembering that your procrastination could just be a sign of something!
It’s also important to remember that a certain amount of procrastination might actually be normal for you and that there’s an argument for accepting a little bit of it. Much like our need to acknowledge and honour our emotions, before we can move through them, perhaps allowing a bit of procrastination time at the beginning of each day is kinder to yourself than working to eradicate the behaviour altogether? After all, we are humans, not machines!