Back in November, Recogna held a workshop on procrastination for a group of participants, mostly executives and decision-makers who need to keep their day-to-day business running smoothly in order to do business well. And while there is the phrase “everyone is procrastinating”, we didn’t know how relevant the topic would be to this group. Well, it really was.
When we talk about procrastination (whether in our personal lives or in day-to-day, typically non-operational business tasks), there are a few things we need to be aware of if we want to manage it effectively.
The first is that procrastination is an emotional self-regulation problem with evolutionary roots. The brain is not wired for well-being but for survival, and tries to avoid negative things because it perceives them as a threat – and let’s face it, activities that guarantee a good quality of life in the long term, such as self-improvement and sport, require a large energy investment and are therefore perceived as negative by the brain.And that’s when we put short-term mood-boosting ahead of long-term goal-keeping, even if we’re already aware of the negative consequences of doing so the moment we decide not to go out running in this chilly wind, we’ll rather go tomorrow, on the other hand, someone has just commented on a post we’ve put on Facebook, so it’s a great time to respond to them straight away.
The other important fact is that it is never the activity that makes us procrastinate but the negative emotion associated with it, which is universal.
It is also crucial that procrastination – which so often hinders the picking up of useful/healthy habits etc – is such a trap because if you go for a run or listen to an Italian dialogue to learn the language just one time, the results are not immediately visible, and not only does it take a long time to see spectacular results, but progress is not even linear. But the reward we give ourselves for successfully avoiding a “painful” attempt at something that will take months to show results, that reward is immediate and tangible, and then we are back to the basic idea of evolutionary wiring.
The good news is that there are ways to break out of the loop, there are little tricks to beat procrastination, and we’ll look at them in a future article. Spoiler alert: if you are not committed to the goal, none of these techniques will work, not even in the medium term.
(In the meantime, for those who want to read or listen to more about the latest scientific findings on procrastination, I recommend the works of Timothy A. Pychyl, PhD, who is considered by many in the profession to be the leading expert on the subject.)
