Overcoming Procrastination

Why do we put off unpleasant tasks, especially when we know that we’re going to have to do them anyway? Procrastination is a universal human behavior, and it’s one that makes no logical sense. If you delay an unavoidable action, you’re still going to have to do it anyway; all you gain is a mounting sense of frustration or worry as the undone responsibility haunts you. When you finally get around to completing whatever it is you’ve been dodging, the experience is either worse because you put it off or not as bad as you feared, making you wonder why you procrastinated in the first place.

In the October 11, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, James Surowiecki reviews The Thief of Time, a book of essays about procrastination written by economists, philosophers, and psychologists. He summarizes procrastination as a “complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict.”

The weakness lies in the mismatch between our immediate desires and long-term goals. While we may have very laudable plans for the future (be fit, eat right, and live in a clean, uncluttered house, for example), these goals are often overriden by our short-term impulses. As we shift our attention to pleasures today, we mislead ourselves and pretend that we won’t feel just as avoidant tomorrow.

Ambition and perfection also lead us to procrastinate. Surowiecki writes about the Civil War general George McClellan, who delayed engaging in battle, convinced his army wasn’t perfectly positioned. The combination of lacking confidence in what we can do, coupled with high expectations can be paralyzing. Rather than taking action and risking failure, it can feel safer to embrace the fantasy that if we wait, whatever we do will be great. Meanwhile, nothing gets done. A painful portrait of this is the recent movie Greenberg, in which Ben Stiller plays a man in his 40s who turned down a record deal in his 20s because it wasn’t exactly what he wanted, torpedoing his career.

So how to combat procrastination? I think first we have to recognize that we have what Surowiecki describes as “competing selves” with conflicting goals, and which need to be tamed and managed (a familiar notion to anyone who has read a little Freud). We can acknowledge that our short- and long-term goals can conflict, and we can learn strategies for focusing on the long-term goals we’re tempted to avoid. These strategies include things like breaking things down into more manageable tasks, setting deadlines, and rewarding ourselves with pleasurable experiences for completing less-than-pleasurable jobs.

It’s also important to gain some better understanding of one’s feelings about the task being avoided. What makes it procrastination is that you are acting against what you rationally know to be your own self-interest. Understanding your motivations behind self-defeating behavior can help you overcome it.