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Two Harvard Professors Reveal Why We Procrastinate
Changing your environment=the most powerful way to change your behavior
In a normal situation, you might choose to eat a cookie rather than eat vegetables. What if the cookie wasn’t there to begin with? It is much easier to make the right choice if you’re surrounded by better choices. Remove the distractions from your environment and create a space with better choice architecture. - James Clear
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Key Ideas
Procrastination is a lifestyle
20% of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. For them, procrastination is a lifestyle, albeit a maladaptive one.
It cuts across all domains of their lives...
Not taking procrastination seriously
There may be more of it in the U.S. than in other countries because we are so nice; we don't call people on their excuses ("my grandmother died last week") even when we don't believe them.
Not a planning problem
Procrastinators are not different in their ability to estimate time, although they are more optimistic than others.
Telling someone who procrastinates to buy a weekly planner is like telling someone with chronic depression to just cheer up.
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Key Ideas
Why you procrastinate
Procrastination is fundamentally an emotional reaction to what you have to do. The more aversive a task is to you, the more you’ll resist it, and the more likely you are to procrastinate.
Make a task less aversive
When you notice yourself procrastinating, use your procrastination as a trigger to examine a task’s characteristics and think about what you should change.
By breaking down exactly which attributes an aversive task has (boring, frustrating, difficult, meaningless, ambiguous, unstructured), you can take those qualities and turn them around to make the task more appealing to you.
Unproductive responses
... people have when they procrastinate:
- Distracting yourself, and thinking about other things
- Forgetting what you have to do, either actively or passively
- Downplaying the importance of what you have to do
- Focusing on your other values and qualities that will solidify your sense of self
- Denying responsibility to distance yourself from what you have to do
- Seeking out new information that supports your procrastination.
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Key Ideas
Our brains are programmed to procrastinate
To make the benefits of action feel bigger and more real:
- Visualize how great it will be to get it done.
- Pre-commit, publicly.
- Confront the downside of inaction.