Why Procrastinators Procrastinate - source

• It seems the Rational Decision-Maker in the procrastinator’s brain is coexisting with a pet—the Instant Gratification Monkey.

• Procrastinators love planning, quite simply because planning does not involve doing, and doing is the procrastinator’s Kryptonite.

• Do’s of planning

  1. Effective planning takes a big list and selects a winner: A big list is perhaps an early phase of planning, but planning must end with rigorous prioritizing and one item that emerges as the winner—the item you’re going to make your first priority.

  2. Effective planning makes an icky item un-icky: We all know what an icky item is. An icky item is vague and murky, and you’re not really sure where you’d start, how you’d go about doing it, or where you’d get answers to your questions about it.

  3. Effective planning turns a daunting item into a series of small, clear, manageable tasks

• A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.

• BE A gritty construction workers, who methodically lay one brick after the other, day after day, without giving up, until a house is built.

• So this diagram represents the challenge at hand anytime you take on a task, whether it’s making a PowerPoint for work, going on a jog, working on a script, or anything else you do in your life. The Critical Entrance is where you go to officially start work on the task, the Dark Woods are the process of actually doing the work, and once you finish, you’re rewarded by ending up in The Happy Playground—a place where you feel satisfaction and where leisure time is pleasant and rewarding because you got something hard done. You occasionally even end up super-engaged with what you’re working on and enter a state of Flow, where you’re so blissfully immersed in the task that you lose track of time.

  Those paths look something like this:

Here’s a procrastinator who gets started on the task, but she can’t stay focused, and she keeps taking long breaks to play on the internet and make food. She doesn’t end up finishing the task:

• Warning: monkey sees the playground when in the woods (working, doing the hard stuff. laying bricks). There will also be times when you bump into a tree—maybe the jog is taking you on an uphill street, maybe you need to use an Excel formula you don’t know, maybe that song you’re writing just isn’t coming together the way you thought it would—and this is when the monkey will make his boldest attempt at an escape.

• The other thing that might happen when you pass the Tipping Point, depending on the type of task and how well it’s going, is that you might start feeling fantastic about what you’re working on, so fantastic that continuing to work sounds like much more fun than stopping to do leisure activities. You’ve become obsessed with the task and you lose interest in basically everything else, including food and time—this is called Flow. Flow is not only a blissful feeling, it’s usually when you do great things.

  The monkey is just as addicted to the bliss as you are, and you two are again a team.

• You need to prove to yourself that you can do it.

  1. Try to internalize the fact that everything you do is a choice.

  2. Create methods to help you defeat the monkey.

  Some possible methods:

• Solicit external support by telling one or more friends or family members about a goal you’re trying to accomplish and asking them to hold you to it. If that’s hard for whatever reason, email it to me—I’m a stranger ([email protected])—and just typing out a goal and sending it to a real person can help make it more real. (Some experts argue that telling people in your life about a goal can be counterproductive, so this depends on your particular situation.)

• Create a Panic Monster if there’s not already one in place—if you’re trying to finish an album, schedule a performance for a few months from now, book a space, and send out an invitation to a group of people.

• If you really want to start a business, quitting your job makes the Panic Monster your new roommate.

• If you’re trying to write a consistent blog, put “new post every Tuesday” at the top of the page…

• Leave post-it notes for yourself, reminding you to make good choices.

• Set an alarm to remind yourself to start a task, or to remind you of the stakes.

• Minimize distractions by all means necessary. If TV’s a huge problem, sell your TV. If the internet’s a huge problem, get a second computer for work that has Wifi disabled, and turn your phone on Airplane Mode during work sessions.

• Lock yourself into something—put down a non-refundable deposit for lessons or a membership.

  And if the methods you set up aren’t working, change them. Set a reminder for a month from now that says, “Have things improved? If not, change my methods.”

  1. Aim for slow, steady progress—Storylines are rewritten one page at a time.

  In the same way a great achievement happens unglorious brick by unglorious brick, a deeply-engrained habit like procrastination doesn’t change all at once, it changes one modest improvement at a time. Remember, this is all about showing yourself you can do it, so the key isn’t to be perfect, but to simply improve. The author who writes one page a day has written a book after a year. The procrastinator who gets slightly better every week is a totally changed person a year later.

  So don’t think about going from A to Z—just start with A to B. Change the Storyline from “I procrastinate on every hard task I do” to “Once a week, I do a hard task without procrastinating.” If you can do that, you’ve started a trend. I’m still a wretched procrastinator, but I’m definitely better than I was last year, so I feel hopeful about the future.

  Why do I think about this topic so much, and why did I just write a 3,500-word blog post on it?

  Because defeating procrastination is the same thing as gaining control over your own life. So much of what makes people happy or unhappy—their level of fulfillment and satisfaction, their self-esteem, the regrets they carry with them, the amount of free time they have to dedicate to their relationships—is severely affected by procrastination. So it’s worthy of being taken dead seriously, and the time to start improving is now.

Don’t fight the monkey, allow him to guide you

What was classic procrastination in college morphed into a bizarre form of insanity once I entered the real world. On a day-to-day, micro level, there was still always an element of the normal “RDM tries to do something, monkey makes it difficult” thing, but in a broader, macro sense, it was almost as if I were chasing the monkey. After he defeated me so soundly in college, I wondered if fighting against him in the first place was my mistake. He’s born from some inner, primal part of me, so wouldn’t it make sense to pay attention to his inclinations and use them as my guide?

So that’s what I tried to do—when he’d be continually drawn to something, I’d eventually take his lead and build my life around that. But the problem was, he was almost like a mirage—once I’d get to where he was, he wouldn’t be there anymore. He’d be somewhere else. This was confusing—was he there before because he actually wanted to be, or was he just there because it was where the RDM was not? Did he actually have passions of his own, or was he just some elusive evil contrarian inside of me with a mission to hold me back from ever doing anything great with my talents and energies?

Last year, I came across a little diagram that I think holds the key to these questions. It’s called the Eisenhower Matrix:

At its deepest level, it comes down to a battle of confidence. The RDM and monkey each have their own idea of how to spend your time points, and whichever of them is more confident—whoever has a stronger belief that they’re the alpha dog in the relationship—ends up prevailing. The difference between a procrastinator and a non-procrastinator is simply that the procrastinator’s monkey and RDM both believe that the monkey is the alpha dog, and the non-procrastinator’s pair both believe that the RDM is the boss.

Really. Just. Read. The. Blog

8. Distinguish between urgent and important

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix: How to Distinguish Between Urgent and Important Tasks and Make Real Progress in Your Life