Moving from procrastination to productivity
In a landscape dominated by distractions, here are some actionable steps to break free from procrastination’s chains and unlock newfound productivity.
Procrastination has been described variously as ‘a war against your time’ and ‘the grave in which opportunity is buried’.
One definition is ‘putting off intentionally the doing of something that should be done’.
The Economist estimates that social media distraction at work costs the American economy US$650 billion every year. This cost estimate rises when you include the general impact of an internet connection, scrolling through emails and consuming an endless stream of data.
Udemy’s research also found that over a third of millennials and Generation Z employees admit to spending two hours or more checking their smartphones for personal activities during the workday. That represents more than 10 hours of lost productivity every week.
In bottom-line terms, we’re spending more hours on the job and getting less done. In human health terms, severe procrastination can also lead to stress, anxiety and relationship problems.
What causes procrastination?
Procrastination isn’t just about avoiding what you have to do; it’s also about finding ways to distract yourself.
A 2009 study of adolescents from Canada and Singapore revealed that a lack of ‘self-efficacy for self-regulation’ was the strongest predictor of procrastination.
Meanwhile, researchers in Germany and Turkey separately concluded that low self-regulation and perceptions of self-efficacy (as well as life satisfaction) were the main contributors to academic procrastination among students.
University of Colorado research suggests that people also procrastinate partly due to genetic factors, like a propensity to be impulsive.
The role of self-efficacy
For some, this is the key psychological ‘hack’ to improving focus and motivation.
A term coined by psychologist Albert Bandura in 1977 (Stanford University, California), self-efficacy describes one’s confidence in and judgement of their own capabilities to successfully perform given tasks (like a piece of coursework at university). In other words, a person’s belief in their ability to overcome obstacles and find success in a given situation.
According to Bandura’s study in the 1990s, those people with a high sense of efficacy can visualise success scenarios that provide positive guides and support for performance. While those who doubt their efficacy in carrying out a particular task usually rehearse the opposite in their minds and preoccupy themselves with self-defeating thoughts.
Why do we procrastinate?
One of the world’s leading experts on procrastination, Professor Tim Pychyl (Carleton University, Ottawa), explains that people procrastinate as a way to cope with negative emotions associated with an assignment, such as anxiety, boredom or frustration. He says: ‘It’s not a time management problem. It’s about really dealing with our feelings… [it] is the misregulation of emotion. We think that by putting things off, we’re going to feel better.’
This is supported by Fuschia Sirois (University of Durham, UK) who says that our brain is soothed temporarily by the pressure of a big or complicated task when we put off doing it for as long as possible. ‘The problem with that,’ adds Professor Sirois, ‘is you get rewarded for it — you feel good when you put off this thing that’s making you all anxious.’
The first step to managing procrastination is to understand that it’s a coping mechanism for dealing with unhappy feelings.
Practical tips to be more productive
As aforementioned, just understanding procrastination is a start. A 2013 study in Sweden found that a 10-week online therapy course explaining why people do it and techniques for changing the behaviour substantially helped perpetual procrastinators.
Measure
After understanding comes self-awareness. Austrian author Peter Drucker, the ‘father’ of modern business management, told us that ‘what gets measured gets managed’. So roughly measure how much you put off things during your day, the time you’re losing and the lost opportunities from being off purpose. You’ll then have the intrinsic motivation to help you slowly diminish and then defeat the problem you weren’t initially able to see. For example, I’m tracking how many Pomodoros I complete every day (see below).
Monotasking
The first practical tip is ‘monotasking’ — literally taking one thing at a time. Multitasking is something increasingly asked of employees, but it involves switching between tasks, meaning you are essentially doing several things poorly and frying your brain (as well as your productivity and career). Studies show it can take around 20 minutes to find your focus after an interruption (likely caused by task-switching). Instead of doing everything at once, do one thing until it is finished.
The fallacy of multitasking is that everything is so important that it must be done at the same time. There is sophistication, but also simplicity and clarity of mind that come from deciding on priorities. As the Russian proverb goes: ‘If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.’ And there are several techniques one can use for sorting and prioritising the order of your work (once you’ve listed everything you need to do first).
Ivy Lee Method
If monotasking appeals to you, then the Ivy Lee Method is worthwhile. Simply put:
- List six tasks for tomorrow (in order of importance).
- Start your day with task 1; work until it’s finished.
- Move onto task 2; complete it, then task 3, and so on.
- At day’s end, move leftover tasks to the next day and repeat.
Practise the Pomodoro Technique
One mechanism for staying on task is the ancient Pomodoro method. It is 25-minute stretches of focused work broken by five-minute breaks. After four consecutive work periods (a pomodoro — the Italian word for tomato), you will take a longer break, typically 15 to 30 minutes. The idea is that working in concentrated bursts means you can accomplish tasks more efficiently while also incorporating regular breaks to recharge.
Time-blocking
Georgetown University Professor Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, advocates time-blocking for particular activities and projects — for example, allocating time to work, study, play and rest. Elon Musk and Bill Gates are also known practitioners of time-blocking, which protects concentration time and stops distractions (and wasting time on tasks) from carrying over into your other responsibilities.
Making a to-do list is a start. But the next step is making your day and your schedule for attacking it. Another advantage of time blocking is that it reduces the number of choices you’d have to make in a day (for example, in deciding priorities) while maintaining your willpower to tackle your most important duties.
Defeating distractions
Cal Newport will also tell you that distractions are the enemy of deep work. There are many ways you can experiment with having fewer of them:
- Switch off your smartphone and put it in another room. To see the phone is to be distracted.
- Close email app/turn off notifications while working.
- Close your office door, block out your shared calendar, and turn your status to ‘do not disturb’.
- Play music through noise-cancelling headphones.
- If you work in an office, get to your desk earlier to eat that frog before most people come in.
Set small goals
The author of The Procrastination Equation, Professor Piers Steel (University of Calgary) recommends setting small goals for yourself to overcome lethargy. The more defined the goal, the better, such as writing 400 words by the afternoon.
‘You want something that is almost like you are telling another person what to do,’ adds Steel.
Procrastination can be a mental resistance or preparation for meeting a high standard (and not wanting to fail), rather than beginning the work. Smaller goals can help lower the bar and minimise your expectations so you don’t overthink what you’re about to start, and so even a tiny task will feel like a win.
Deciding priorities
Only one thing
In Gary Keller’s 2012 book, The One Thing, he invites us to ask ourselves regularly when considering our priorities: ‘What’s the ONE THING I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?’ In other words, on a given day, this is deciding what single thing needs to get done — if hypothetically — you can only achieve one thing.
Do it easy or hard; just get it done
There are several schools of thought when it comes to organising your to-do list. One approach is to start with the easiest, low-hanging fruit tasks to build momentum. The other way — what is known as the ‘eat the frog’ approach — is to start the day by tackling the hardest job first.
Eisenhower Matrix
The method is explained in this table.
US president and five-star general Dwight Eisenhower presented this idea in a 1954 speech, quoting a Northwestern University president: ‘I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.’
Getting into the right state
The last piece of advice is perhaps the most extreme and, therefore, the most effective of all.
American neuroscientist Andrew Huberman (Stanford University School of Medicine) outlines a number of options for those days when you are simply demotivated but have stuff that needs to get done.
From least to most impactful, you can choose to wait it out and hope you soon feel different — a closer deadline could trigger a more activated, anxious state for forcing action. You could also decide to engage in a tangential task like housework to get some motivation.
An expert in the brain’s reward system, Huberman encourages doing something ‘more painful’ (ie putting the mind and body into discomfort, rather than damaging them) than being in this procrastinating state to quickly get you into a motivated state.
Engaging in something safe that ‘really sucks’ — like an ice bath, a cold shower, or intense exercise — will allow you to rebound out of a depleted dopamine trough quickly. This works, and works swiftly, precisely because the energising activity is so cringeworthy. In other words, it is the difficulty of enduring it that builds the steepest, shortest ladder back to your baseline dopamine levels.
First published at Student Accountant: https://studentaccountant.accaglobal.com/2023/11/23/wellbeing-procrastination/content.html
