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Procrastination!

9 years ago1,365 words

I've been really struggling with procrastination recently. Funnily enough, one of the things I've been putting off is a research report I have to write about procrastination. I've started on it now, though, and I've learned some interesting things that I thought I might as well write about here.

I feel that procrastination is ruining my life at the moment. There are so many things I want or need to do - games development, uni work, responding to messages or trying to make new social connections - but I feel so fatigued all the time that I just end up wasting my precious time instead. So if there's anything I can do to remedy this, I want to give it a try.

∞ This study ∞ (which might only be accessible to me because I'm at uni) found some interesting - if harrowing - factors that affect procrastination. It says:



Since all of those apply to me, no wonder I'm struggling!

It suggests that younger people struggle more with procrastination because the younger generation has been spoiled by the internet, which offers numerous easy distractions, they've yet to have firmly established 'ego roles' in the world ("I am a secretary") which results in indecisiveness, and their daily structure is less controlled (especially applicable to students). And they've yet to develop effective coping strategies.

I suspect that males struggle more because females are more likely to have partners or social connections that compel them to get things done, or give them the energy and motivation to do so.

Speaking of procrastination and social connections, my wandering mind just jumped to another tab to search for and do a ∞ loneliness quiz ∞, just out of curiosity. I got a score of 40, the maximum. 'Extreme loneliness', apparently. "Most college students, nurses and school teachers score between a 19 and 20", it says. I know that my isolation is the biggest reason I struggle to get anything done; the body just stops functioning when deprived of social contact in the same way it does when deprived of food, water or air. And yet loneliness seems far harder to remedy.

Many studies find a correlation between depression and procrastination, but it's not clear whether procrastination results in depression, or whether depression causes you to procrastinate. Probably both are intertwined. Depression and loneliness are connected, too, obviously.

Hmm. Rather than wallowing in misery at the poor hand I have to work with, I'm going to try compiling a list of suggestions about how to overcome procrastination.



(I wanted to find an image to use for this post, but since I lack the energy to make one myself right now, I searched in Google... and spent ages looking at the various comical flowcharts and diagrams and comics and such that people have made about this far-too-common problem. So that was productive. Most of them just seem to make light of it rather than trying to address possible solutions, though.)

Just start!

There's apparently something called the ∞ Zeigarnik Effect ∞, which essentially says that once you start something, your brain wants to finish it, and gets bothered if you don't. So once you take the first step, the rest - in theory - flows relatively easily. I've experienced this to be true... but it's little use since procrastination is all about an inner barrier preventing you from taking that first step. Motivation seems to be a key factor, too; the effect is weaker if you don't actually care about completing the particular task.

Do the hard tasks first!

I've read about this one a lot and understand why people would suggest it, but again I feel that mental processes that produce procrastination prevent you (or at least me) from doing any tasks at all. I know in my mind I should do my work as soon as I get up, but that doesn't mean I actually do it.

Believe you can do it!

I scoff internally at this one, yet I know that belief affects a whole lot. In ∞ Derren Brown's stage show that I saw the other day ∞, he performed some faith healing (while being open about how it was psychological manipulation rather than divine magic), and the effects were quite astounding. People who'd had aches and pains for years suddenly felt fresh and limber, and were able to demonstrate it by carrying huge weights or stretching in ways they were unable to before. One woman who needed glasses had her eyesight apparently healed, and was able to read small writing to prove this. A man who was incredulous about the veracity of this was called up on stage, and had his eyesight reduced and became unable to read huge words right in front of him. The story you tell yourself about yourself really does make all the difference in the world, and I know that - while it's a trite cliche - 'believe you can succeed and you will!' does seem to be true. However, those people were affected by an external influence; it's harder to summon up forces to improve your ∞ self-efficacy ∞ by yourself (or maybe that's just a good example of how I'm trapped by my own poor belief system; I believe it's difficult, so it is).

Manage your environment

Tidy up, get rid of distractions, etc. Since the internet is the biggest distraction, and it's also necessary for me to do all of my work, I don't know if this would help me all that much.

Set yourself short deadlines

It is true that deadlines are a great motivator (I'm one of those people who starts and finishes assignments the day before they're due in a mad, frantic rush which at least keeps me focused), but if there's no real consequence of failing to meet the deadline, then it's so easy to just put it off.

Make the task harder!

This seems like a silly suggestion to me. In behavioural psychology, there's a term called 'response effort', which refers to how difficult a behaviour is to perform. Reduce the response effort, and the behaviour becomes more likely to occur. For example, you might want to improve at playing the piano, but it's in a room of your house you rarely venture into, so the response effort of moving to that room is often too great for you to bother. Moving the piano to a room where you spend more time would reduce the response effort and mean that you'd probably practise more often. So I wouldn't call this good advice!

To-do lists

This is a fairly obvious one, and I've been using to-do lists for years with mixed results. It helps more than having nothing at all, but just having a list of things to do doesn't mean I'm able to start on any of them.

Break tasks down

However, something that I think is good advice is to break big, vague tasks down into smaller, more manageable chunks. Rather than simply having 'finish research report' on my to-do list, I have a list of things like 'write rough draft of introduction', 'revise introduction', 'write rough draft of method section', 'find a journal article' (repeated four times). I can do each of these relatively quickly and tick them off. It's like climbing a mountain one comfortable step at a time rather than in one impossible leap. Again, though, starting tasks at all is tough, even if they're small.



...Actually, while reading through a bunch of snazzily-designed and professionally-written blogs and things about these topics, I've decided it's probably best to devote separate posts to certain techniques so then I can talk about them in more detail and attempt them, rather than just collecting a whole bunch at once and dismissing them all. So I'll end this now and do that... later.