I think it worked out to the extent that they had a one point increase on this measure, so it was a self-report measure that we use. Look at the cognitive distortions that came with the thought. And thats kind of useful for everybody, because we all tend to think of one way we could approach something and start down that track. Its the idea that you can use your emotions as fuel for your goals, that you dont need to reduce your negative emotions. A conversation with former psychologist Alice Boyes about why we keep postponing our work. They're ones that we find unpleasant, aversive and that can range the full spectrum from just simply boring to gut wrenching, nerve wracking and anxiety provoking. Its something that is potentially really harmful. For Dr. Brammer, Imposter Syndrome came from his ability to excel in school, despite consistently cramming for assignments and tests. ALICE BOYES: Yeah. Sirois is the author of Procrastination: What It Is, Why Its a Problem, and What You Can Do About It, published by APA Books in July 2022. In addition to studying procrastination, she also researches perfectionism, self-compassion, gratitude, time and loneliness. If you live and breathe video games, Procrastination Podcast has you covered. According to some psychologists, the answer is not that people are lazy or have poor time management skills. Yes. Theres no pictures. CURT NICKISCH: How do you know when theres a good reason for procrastinating or when its actually just being counterproductive? This Web site provides access to my research group and academic publications, as well as my iProcrastinate Podcasts and "Don't Delay" blog for Psychology Today. Procrastinators may find themselves unable to start something because they dont know how to start, but they dont want to show weakness by needing to ask for clarification. Well, thats really helpful. To re-enable, please adjust your cookie preferences. And we all want to think, Oh, well, I dont know anything about air conditioners. Try to place your willpower-hungry tasks at the beginning of the day. The research psychologist, author and DePaul University professor sits down for a truly delightful exploration of why we procrastinate, how prevalent it is, when it becomes harmful, some myths about procrastination, why it's similar to gambling, how decision-making can feel paralyzing, how to trust your own abilities, and most importantly -- what And I think it has to do with deadlines and how flexible those are. Im an anxious person. ALICE BOYES: Yeah, so its quite complicated. Being unwilling to ask for help can relate to Impostor Syndrome, and can fuel procrastination. And I think the people that I've spoken to who really struggle with procrastination, they are in a bad way. We ask people about how often they procrastinate or if they're putting things off to tomorrow. And then also, cut yourself a little bit of slack about some of the creative procrastination, like recognizing that weve got this image of a productive person being this person who is never distracted, whos always focused, who never procrastinates, whos just hustling all the time. More specifically, cognitive behavioral therapy will help you identify your cognitive distortions. And the research bears this out. And so I think we really do have to make that distinction between delay and procrastination. Because all of those things have bidirectional arrows between them, what it in essence means is that even if you see your procrastination as being primarily emotional or primarily cognitive, or primarily about habits. What tasks are they most likely to avoid? For more than 20 years, she has researched the causes and consequences of procrastination as well as how emotions play a role in explaining why people procrastinate. Some people find it easier to do things for other people than themselves. So there are some sort of useful forms of it but obviously it can also tie people in knots and lead to lots of self-criticism. But I think this was the first time I really understood how identifying emotions could lead to something in the article you call psychological flexibility. And we all have personal examples something felt really yucky at the time, but it ended up being really, really fruitful. And so we actually conducted some research a couple years ago where we did this thing called a meta-analysis, which is just basically a review of all the research that's ever been done looking at the associations between perfectionism, both perfectionism dimensions there, and procrastination. Its about identifying the forms of procrastination that cause problems for you, like where youve got a sense of a possible problem in your mind, and you just keep putting off thinking about it, putting off dealing with it. The variable task or system-based factors are: This can become paralyzing, especially when we are unwilling to ask for help. You can find her article, How to Stop Procrastinating in the May/June, 2022 issue of Harvard Business Review and at hbr.org. Mills: So a moment ago you mentioned the couch and the screen, being able to get away from those things, and I'm wondering whether does the ubiquity of social media and electronic devices have an impact on procrastination or have procrastinators always been able to find excuses to put things off? And I think, yeah the digital media makes it easier for certain generations and I think that other generations might equally find other types of distractions and activities to engage in. How do you define procrastination in your research? And when were on alert more, thats often what sparks creativity. Maybe with the exception of form filling and really basic things, but most things that we procrastinate we can approach through the perspective of our strengths. Mills holds a bachelors degree in biology from Barnard College and a masters in journalism from New York University. Why is procrastination so tied up with guilt and shame, even though it's something nearly everyone does? From exploring the different types of procrastination to decoding the fascinating neuroscience behind it, we'll equip you with the knowledge and tools to help your clients (or yourself!) Im not advocating anyone adopt my system. It has an impact on our immune system, makes us more vulnerable to catching bugs and flus and colds and all kinds of other stress-related illnesses. Sirois: Well, I think that's really key. However, we can strengthen our willpower through routine exercise. And again, estimates there range between 15% to 25%, which is still quite a few people who are really engaging in procrastination as a fairly regular way of dealing with tasks that they don't want to deal with. It's basically saying, Hey, yeah, I'm struggling with this task. Habits, emotions, and thought patterns. Advancing psychology to benefit society and improve lives. Procrastination thrives in secrecy and isolation. The presence of ambivalent emotions tends to put us on alert. You'll gain practical knowledge you can put into action right away. So that's one project that I'll be working on and looking at sort of existing research out there to see if the mean levels of procrastination, chronic procrastination that is, have gone up, especially in student samples over the last couple of decades. Mills is senior director of strategic external communications and public affairs for the American Psychological Association, where she has worked since 2007. If you force yourself to think of three different ways, then you can assess which is the best of those. And that is a real challenge. Sometimes its a much deeper seated thing than that. When you can't figure out how to tackle a project or feel insecure about your abilities, you might find it easier to put it off. Thank you for having me. It's not like procrastinators are sitting around lazy, they're doing other things. And then yeah, what we see that as procrastination. So whats a good way to overcome that, to accept that this friction-filled work, as you put it, is good for you and may help you? On a level, thats useful. And its this notion of accepting that work will be filled with friction that is actually a productive step in getting past procrastination. And this is what I'm saying, sort of the tolerance for procrastination, I think, differs across different cultural contexts. And thats something that people with psychological flexibility are able to do. So rather than frame it in terms of productivity, which I think feeds into a lot of our social norms about what we should and shouldn't be doing and how much we should and shouldn't be doing, I'd rather frame it around whether you're reaching your goals or not or do you have all these things you started and never finished, do you have all these unfulfilled goals that you just never got round to doing because of fear of failure or just worried it wasn't going to be good enough or worried whether you could manage maybe some of the challenges that you might face when you engage with that task? I mean, if you bring people in to be observed and to be experimental subjects where you tell them to procrastinate, I mean how do you do this? My guest today is Dr. Fuschia Sirois, a professor of psychology at Durham University in the United Kingdom, and author of the book Procrastination: What It Is, Why It's a Problem and What You Can Do About It, published in July by APA Books. So what does that mean? Identifying the role of procrastination in your life. Were all prone to it. So you hear a lot of different things. "There hasn't been any convincing scientific evidence to say procrastination is the result of poor time management. And we can all do that with everything basically. Doer is the science -based guide to overcoming procrastination. Then, merely focus on starting the tasks, not completing them. To even begin to change, we have to become aware of the problem, then accept it. So the classic example is the student who the only time they ever clean their dorm room is when they should be studying for exams. Mills: Well, the crux of your research is that procrastination is not, as so many of us think it is, a problem of laziness or poor time management. Were you procrastinating in that time? She explains the different causes of procrastination and shares three approaches to beat it: through habits, emotions, and thought patterns. You cant just white knuckle it through things. Other people have struggled with this task too. Repeat. You're going to hand in things late or you're not going to do your best work. Far more than a productivity hack. So that just prevents premature foreclosure one route. When youre doing work that has more potential to be impactful, its usually more uncertain. So the evidence, it's a little mixed. And I think, yeahI mean, I would go back to, well, were they really procrastinating or were they engaging in some other form of delay? And then some of the other work I'm doing is just, again, trying to maybe get some more hard indicators of the health effects. So I think it can be quite mixed. Because being on alert, partly were alert for our usual associations between things. Speaking of Psychology is an audio podcast series highlighting some of the latest, most important, and relevant psychological research being conducted today. If we want to address any type of problem, we've got to know what the core cause is. And how can we be more conscious of that? So theres a great HBR article about how diverse teams tend to do better work, but they also tend to feel like they have more conflict. Mais si cette procrastination tait en fait tout simplement de la rsistance au changement ? Its been a popular topic. And I'll mention one final thing too. Far more than a productivity hack. Save the MP3 file linked above to listen to it on your computer or mobile device. I think especially if it's a task that's really creating a lot of stress and really frustration or anxiety or anticipated anxiety, sometimes that's not how we feel right now, but we're anticipating that as soon as we start working on those tasks, we're going to get frustrated and that's enough to keep us from going with it. And they should have an explicit system. They tend to also have more insecure job status, in other words, they're jumping from job to job and they never really advance much, and they actually make less money than people who don't chronically procrastinate. How do you do that? But I dont always do those six or seven steps. And then only later maybe realize that a different way of approaching it wouldve been more useful. So when an emotion comes up, like when someones feeling doubt or someones feeling embarrassment, thats what people who function well do. It's really about the emotions that are associated with the task and not necessarily the unpleasantness of the task. In Canada or U.S., it would've been That's not an issue.. So anxiety is both the strength and a weakness for me in that Im good at foreseeing problems. Its not necessarily just about thought processes and habits, but it is such an emotional process too. Danny draws on the expertise of clinical psychologists, physicians, psychiatrists and researchers in his new podcast, and he has already taken on a variety of challenging and interesting topics. This automatically undercuts any excuses youll have because ultimately, the task, if youve signed up for it, aligns with your values. So you've chosen to delay and there's no really good reason to. For good! And then back to the psychological flexibility concept of using the difficult emotions that arise. Making things easier on people, like finding out if theres some sort of basis to the procrastination, learning how to support people. Download a good meditation, or use the app Headspace, and practice it daily to develop a habit of mindfulness. Its probably going to be really expensive. Because putting off those kinds of things tends to cause big problems, like if your air conditioner breaks in the middle of summer or whatever it is, its useful to have a generic system that you can use for approaching tasks that you dont do frequently, tasks that feel out of your wheelhouse, novel tasks. We all want to pick up little tips and tricks from people about their morning routines or whatever it is. And since productivity hacks never go out of style, let me recommend another IdeaCast episode, Boost Your Productivity with Micro Breaks. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Knowing what the strengths of people are or knowing how to discover them from conversation. So doing compassionate self talk is useful about the feelings that youre having. Students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on academic work were found two weeks later to actually procrastinate less. There is a gap between your intention and action, You feel overwhelmed by tasks at the last minute, You always feel rushed to complete a project, Youre hesitant to truthfully update someone on your progress. And so procrastination becomes a way to cope with that negative mood and those negative emotions, especially if you're someone who hasn't had a lot of experience managing your negative emotions effectively, or maybe you've got a lot of other stressors going on in your life that you've sort ofyour resources, your inner resources for coping with a task that might be really unpleasant or stressful or frustrating or creates a lot of worry for you, in those sorts of situations, you might resort to procrastination. How do you think about separating emotions from tasks? And this is where some people can get caught in the trap of procrastination as almost a chronic habit or way of dealing with these unpleasant tasks. She has appeared on CNN, Good Morning America, Hannity and Colmes, CSPAN, and the BBC, to name a few of her broadcast engagements. Mills: Given that these famous alleged procrastinators maybe weren't procrastinators at all, I thought it was interesting that there weren't a lot of women on the list that I saw. Well, I want to thank you for joining me today, Dr. Sirois. And so thats useful. Sirois: Yeah. I just need to work through that rather than getting hard on getting hard myself or beating myself up about this and making it worse, which actually can make it worse, the more that you get more critical about yourself about procrastinating, that can actually increase the chances that you'll continue to procrastinate. So we think about having systems for tasks we do all the time, but we often dont think about having a system for novel tasks. But we all know that a lot of these things with uncertain outcomes are the things that have the higher potential for reward. You build a lot more skills. I find I do some of my best work when Im procrastinating doing something else. When we shift over and we look at adults who are now out in the workforce, they've got their degrees and they're out there just getting on with their lives, it's still fairly high in terms of the chronic procrastination. And when we're faced with the temptation to put something off, how can we change our mindset and our environment to help us buckle down and do what needs to be done? It's a delay that's voluntary. I just think of one to mitigate against each and that keeps it contained and it satisfies my anxiety. You actually can't because if we look at the definition, it's got to be something they intended to do. It's just not that thing that they should be doing right now that's looming and important and will have negative consequences if they don't get it done. And we all know that it helps to identify emotions. For a lot of tasks, Ill just do one or two of them. People who chronically procrastinate or procrastinate regularly don't progress through their company as well. This podcast is for those who have creativity bursting within but work hard on other people's dreams they fail to pursue their own. And then it turns into a big problem that could have been avoided. For further reading on procrastination, check out some of Timothy Pychyls research. Sometimes its just making sure you dont make that cognitive error, or catching the cognitive error when youre making it, as recognizing that its almost like theres an inverse correlation there between how awkward and yucky things feel. Sometimes we just overestimate how much we can focus in the day. And there might be some generational influences there too. So if I frame it like that, Im a lot more willing to do it. ALICE BOYES: Yeah, it absolutely is. And then I try and address each of those things that could go wrong in a specific way. I'm going to start with a quote that a colleague and friend of mine who got me into this area of research, Tim Pychyl at Carleton University in Canada, one that he often uses to make the distinction between procrastination and delay. So even though I dont like providing tech help, I like the idea that I will compensate for her weaknesses and she will compensate for mine, and that well support each other through that. And so this is one of the reasons why, at least with my research anyways, what I've defaulted to is looking at people who have a chronic tendency to procrastinate, because that'sin a sense we're holding that procrastination constant and we're looking at what are the sort of thoughts that they have? Your four chunks might be: (1) write out your feedback, (2) schedule the conversation, (3) deliver the feedback, and (4) schedule a follow-up conversation. And really that sort of perspective is more of looking at the symptoms of procrastination rather than the causes. Is the task actually stupid, or is it something you should do, youre just afraid to do it, so youre demeaning it in case you fail? He doesnt do video. So we talk about sagacious delay where on the surface when somebody puts something off, we might look at them and say, Hey, they're procrastinating, or we might even look at our own behavior and just because it's a delay and we're not doing what we know we should be doing, we might say, Well, I'm procrastinating. But if you sort of look below the surface, it may be that maybe you haven't started that report because you're waiting to hear back with some key information that's essential for you to get going on this and if you started without that information, you actually would be wasting a lot of time. People often come to therapy wanting to change somebody else. It's a habit of putting off tasks that we know we need to complete, and it often leads to stress, anxiety, and missed deadlines. So think, again, using your values is a really good thing there. So are we all in some sense a product of our culture when it comes to procrastination? Mills: In prepping for this conversation, I of course had to go to Dr. Google and find out who are famous procrastinators, and there are lists, as you've probably seen them, and they include luminaries like the Dalai Lama, Frank Lloyd Wright, Herman Melville, Leonardo DaVinci. 135 episodes Dr. Timothy A. Pychyl, associate professor of psychology and director of the Procrastination Research Group (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada), provides a series of short talks, interviews and question/answer podcasts that explain why we procrastinate and what we can do about it. CURT NICKISCH: One of the really fascinating things that jumped out at me in your work was this idea of emotional granularity. If you need help finding a therapist, check out this episode of Life Kit. Such as, This is stupid, I dont even care about it.. Hidden Brain helps curious people understand the world-- and themselves. Lower conscientiousnesslower drive to be organized and accomplish. That if you notice a funny mole or you notice a funny lump or something, or change in your bowel habit of it or whatever it is, that is an area where procrastination can be deadly. He approaches the platform of Instagram through his strengths and his posts get like 40-50,000 likes each post. And it's usually on a task that we said we're going to do. So there's this thing called perfectionistic concerns, which is of a self-critical type of perfectionism where the person has really high standards for themselves and is really driven to try and please other people. If we dont try and we fail, there is less reflection on the self than if we try our hardest and fail. Boyes wrote the book Stress-Free Productivityand the HBR article How to Stop Procrastinating.. overcome the tendency to put things off. 6 Depression can also lead to self-doubt. You might procrastinate in your health, but you may not procrastinate at work, for example. How can we create better habits to avoid procrastinating? Its really been great to have you on the show to talk about it. Perceptions of procrastination range from being the topic of jokes to being associated with mental illness (Svartdal, Granmo, & Farevaag, 2018). We think about the immediate damage it can cause. In the Hardcore Self-Help Podcast, psychologist Robert Duff discusses what its like to live with and effectively treat mental health conditions. World's Leading Expert On How To Solve Procrastination - Dr Tim Pychyl Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal Jordan Peterson: How To Become The Person You've Always Wanted To Be | E113 The Diary Of A CEO 1. We feel guilty about it. Understanding the psychology of procrastination is key to overcoming it and achieving success in our personal and professional lives. What theyre much better at is actually using their emotions as fuel for their goals. When we pay attention to ourselves through the gentle observation of mindfulness, we arent striving to fix or self-judge. CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. But that's the closest we can get to it. Keeping your goals realistic and reassessing goals and strategies as needed. So often what we put off is stuff thats novel. It is the act of delaying or postponing tasks that need to be accomplished. Lets start with better habits. So ambivalent emotion is when youre feeling fearful and exhilarated all at the same time or any combination of intense positive and intense negative emotions. But it makes sense though too, because if you're stressed all the time and you're not looking after your health, these healthy behaviorsand stress and health behaviors are two key pathways to good health and when you don't engage in them, we know that they are risk factors for poor heart health. I think about what I think could go wrong with the task. One of the findings I really like is about ambivalent emotions. These include relationships, being assertive, struggling with guilt and/or procrastination, children and teenager's behavior, anxiety disorders, anger management, kids and divorce, self-esteem, child visitation, weight control, forgiveness, ADHD, addictions, and my latest, mood disorders. Just coming out of the situation we're coming out of now, many more people working from home and having to deal with a lot of distractions they didn't have to deal with before. And I guess here we're talking about chronic procrastination as opposed to procrastinating from time to time. Emotions all have an evolutionary purpose. And how to stop procrastinating. You'll gain practical knowledge you can put into action right away. We wont discover our true potential if we dont give ourselves ample time.I have plenty of time, I'll do it later.We are undervaluing the future self when we think this way.

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