Procrastination — A time or emotion-management issue?

That's the reply I got from a friend when I asked him what he has been up to lately. My phone screen flashed with his text as I was trying to finish off this article (which is due on Tuesday). Watch me typing as I get away from my laptop, pace towards the fridge and open it for the 1569308th time to ensure that my apple juice and asparagus remained the same in the past 3 minutes. Then, I stare out of the kitchen window wondering whether cats can see colour.

All the while, the clock is ticking towards my looming deadline.

Realising that I did everything but confronting the annoying blinking cursor on my PC, looking for a distraction to get that dopamine burst and defeat my crappy mood, I've compiled the W- and How questions that encompass procrastination. Procrastination is the alleged notorious thief of time, but is it about time per se? Let's get this show on the road to find out!

What is procrastination?

A research conducted in 2013 shed much-needed light on procrastination, defining it as

the primacy of short-term mood repair […] over the longer-term pursuit of intended actions.

Put otherwise, procrastination is about going after the immediate urgency of easing negative feelings over a task we find boring or overwhelming, shoving any problem under the carpet rather than dealing with it in the present moment.

Who procrastinates?

A pernicious storm of procrastination breaks out when an unpleasant set of tasks hits an individual who's highly impulsive, prone to interruption and with little to no self-discipline. When your mind recognises a vibrating phone as a cue to start scrolling through social networks, do you take immediate, intentional action and shut the device off? Probably not. Yeah, me neither.

When do we procrastinate?

One of the first studies to excavate the site of procrastination was published in Psychological Science in 1997. APS Fellow Dianne Tice and APS William James Fellow Roy Baumeister rated college students on a scale of procrastination by supervising their academic performance, stress, and overall well-being throughout the semester. At first, there was a seeming advantage to procrastination, as the students displayed lower degrees of stress, presumably as a result of scheduling their work for a later, indefinite time to pursue more pleasurable activities. Towards the end, however, the burden of procrastination was palpable and far outweighed whatever was initially joyful. Procrastinators received lower grades compared to others and reported higher levels of stress, frustration, worry and suffering. Therefore, not only did procrastinators complete their undesirable assignments later, but they've also impacted their health.

Thus, despite its apologists and its short-term benefits, procrastination cannot be regarded as either adaptive or innocuous […] Procrastinators end up suffering more and performing worse than other people.

Nearly a decade later, scholar Fuschia Sirois confirmed that chronic or “serial” procrastinators are more likely to be afflicted by adverse physical and mental illnesses ranging from anxiety and depression to colds and flu, and even more severe conditions like cardiovascular disease.

Whereas economists are inclined to attribute procrastination to time management issues, psychological surveys have proven that procrastinators present a corresponding sense of guilt, anxiety, and/or shame alongside a tendency to delay. This emotional imbalance implies that there’s much more to task avoidance than the lack of a better grip of time. Timothy Pychyl pointed out the relation of mood and emotions with procrastination in a study published in the Journal of Social Behaviour and Personality.

Not alike Tice's and Baumeister's foregoing experiment, the researchers distributed coursework to 45 students and measured their performance for 5 days leading up to the deadline. The participants were expected to report the intensity of their procrastination along with their emotional state every time they heard a beep. As the preparatory assignments increased in difficulty, the students tended to put them off, chasing after more enjoyable activities and quick mood fixes. When they did so, however, they confessed high levels of guilt — an indication that beneath the façade of relief there lingered dread about the work tossed aside.

Pychyl concluded that procrastinators are fully aware of the consequences and the temporal harm in their behaviour, but they're unable to conquer the impulse towards a diversion. Essentially, procrastination is a way of coping (not in the healthiest way) with taxing emotions induced by certain tasks.

Emotional regulation, to me, is the real story around procrastination, because to the extent that I can deal with my emotions, I can stay on task […] When you say task-aversiveness, that’s another word for lack of enjoyment. Those are feeling states — those aren’t states of which [task] has more utility.

Moreover, procrastinators focus on ways to attenuate stressors and make themselves feel better short-term at the expense of eliciting insight from what made them feel bad. Siding with Pychyl's view about dealing with a nagging conscience that refuses to stay on task, Sirois contends that

The mood regulation piece is a huge part of procrastination […] If you’re focused just on trying to get yourself to feel good now, there’s a lot you can miss out on in terms of learning how to correct [attitude] and avoiding similar problems in the future.

Procrastinators console themselves in the present with the fallacy and self-deception that they’ll be more emotionally prepared to deal with a burdensome, cognitive task in the future. She adds that

The future self becomes the beast of burden for procrastination […] We’re trying to regulate our current mood and thinking our future self will be in a better state. They’ll be better able to handle feelings of insecurity or frustration with the task. That somehow we’ll develop these miraculous coping skills to deal with these emotions that we just can’t deal with right now.”

Why do we procrastinate?

My friend wasted his lockdown hours "cyberloafing" and voluntarily ignoring set time constraints not because of social media. To be precise, procrastination is no stranger to our ancestors. People have wrestled with regular hesitation since antiquity. Ancient Greek philosophers even came up with a term for it – akrasia – which means to lack self-control and act against your better judgement by doing something while you know you should be doing something else. What is more, the Greek poet Hesiod, being a prolific artist around 800 B.C., advised not to

put your work off till tomorrow and the day after.

This innate propensity to overlook our better judgement and delay necessary action has seeped into modern civilizations. What's the deal here then? Is procrastination a product of laziness or an unbeatable fear of failure, fear of a flawed end result, fear of change, fear of disappointing others, fear of choosing the wrong life direction?

Possibly, a jumble of everything...

My friend might not know where to start.

He might foresee or presume failure.

He might be missing the intrinsic motivation to execute the stages of his training and reap the benefits of his earned knowledge afterwards with, say, a promotion or an increased salary.

He might regress to perfectionist traps to overcompensate for the above.

A plausible explanation as to why we struggle to get on with our duties and projects — especially the ones that don't fascinate us as much (yes, the meh stuff) — are varied and complex. But the underlying cause of task initiation issues comes in the guise of executive dysfunction. Executive dysfunction wounds your prioritisation skills, causes time blindness, and an inability to orchestrate simultaneous tasks — all crucial for navigating a healthy and functional daily routine.

Present Bias

Procrastination is also a great representation of present bias.

Present bias defines the notion that even though we can set as many goals for our future self as we can, it's our present self that has to take the initiative to get there. Though, our brains aren't designed to appreciate long term rewards, and our present self will invariably favour short-term pleasures of instant gratification, which can be detrimental to later outcomes.

One common herald of procrastination is the belief that you should wait until inspiration strikes you, or until you’re in the right mindset to get something done. Don't buy into this; it's a mind trap. When we put things off until some point in the future, i.e., tomorrow or next month, the tension and discomfort we feel dissolve. We're just delighted that we've given a timescale to get the task done, even if that time is at some point in the future. The seduction of distraction and the bent to make excuses to ourselves illustrates an ability to offload a bunch of tasks onto our future selves.

And yet we acknowledge that procrastination is a slow death to us... And yet we postpone them. Logical, huh? Delaying tasks we supposed to be attending to is going to catch up with us sooner or later. Especially if those tasks are bound to deadlines or drag a string of consequences along with them.

How to overcome procrastination?

In an attempt to trace the psychological roots and causes of procrastination, Laura Rabin and other evangelists of ways to cure procrastination propose a series of interventions for unwanted delay.

Start small, but just start!

If you feel off at the prospect of a chain of disliked tasks that you have to bring to completion, just take one micro step today. BOOM! You've done it! Tomorrow, take another oh-so-tiny one. The forward-guided path that baby steps carve out is encouraging, and before you know it, you’ll catch yourself accelerating toward completion. For a seamless workflow and less hair-pulling, nail-biting and whining a couple of hours before an impending presentation, set the threshold of procrastination low; break down the workload into smaller, manageable increments so you can work through a more actionable sequence of tasks.

Check the trivial things off your agenda first

John Perry, a Stanford University professor of philosophy, recommended adding minor wins to your to-do list, such as “make tea” or “brush teeth,” just to give yourself that boost which will fuel you into winding up more daunting tasks for the day.

He wrote in his original essay:

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimi[s]e their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this approach ignores the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be, by definition, the most important. And the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is the way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

Seek help

Isn't that what adults do? When you're a child, you feel immortal — a real-life superman! Counselling under the auspices of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) paves the way for treating procrastination, as it might help sufferers accept that they’re compromising lasting achievements for quick mood lifters and bursts of pleasure. An innovative approach based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, aka ‘ACT’ and a sister technique and coping mechanism to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, is particularly fruitful here. ACT demonstrates the sustainable benefits of psychological flexibility – namely, being able to tolerate uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, remaining in-the-moment despite of them, and prioritising decisions and actions that propel you closer to what you most value in life.

Sirois writes that

You’ve got to dig a little deeper and find some personal meaning in that task […] That’s what our data is suggesting.

Do some inner work with yourself and stop relying on uncritical, knee-jerk reactions that don't take you anywhere in life.

Don't beat your procrastinating self down!

Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago, prompts us to reframe the way we perceive a situation and normalise past mistakes. (Let's face it, we're all default to self-critical, aren't we?). Albeit counterintuitive, he goes as far as to voice a different opinion from that which condemns lateness to the one that forgives or even praises the early starter in his book, Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done. Among a series of hacks, he suggests that the federal government incentivised early tax filing by giving citizens a small break if they file by, say, February or March 15th.

Conclusion: Don't over-analyse paralyse

Remember that most decisions don't entail hours of painstaking research, as your trusted escape (procrastination) has convinced you. The majority of them lie at the top of your head awaiting you to turn the switch and kick your brain in motion, even if you have to steel yourself to start a challenging project for 15 minutes. An unexpected yet positive turn of events may astound you during that stretch of time!

I say, time travel to your future self and think: the fleeting pain of avoidance versus the limitless, durable satisfaction of a job well done; the sight of your book on the airplane seat as you make your way back from the loo; you getting in shaping by opting for the stairs to work; the quality time you spare for leisure or a hobby; your own money in the savings bank account... the list of benefits is truly endless. So, isn't it worth it?

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