Procrastination from the mind - how to stop putting everything off until later?

Procrastination is the voluntary postponement of important tasks, despite possible negative consequences.

Watch a TV series instead of studying for an exam? Procrastination. Do you read social networks instead of working on a project? Procrastination. This is the third time you’re going to have some tea, just to avoid starting the spring cleaning? Procrastination. Do you keep telling yourself “I’ll do it tomorrow”? Well, you understand.

Why do we procrastinate and how to deal with it? Today we will look at the neurophysiological reasons.

Content

• 1 Definition 1.1 Russification of the term

Test

To determine whether a person suffers from procrastination or not, various tests are used.

Tuchman test

Assignment: Read each statement carefully. Express your attitude towards them using the following phrases:

• I completely agree;
• agree;
• Don't know;
• disagree;
• I completely disagree.

Calculate your points according to the given answers to the questions without an asterisk:

• completely agree - 5 points;
• agree - 4;
• I don’t know - 3;
• disagree - 2;
• I completely disagree - 1.

Points for answers to questions with an asterisk are counted backwards.

Interpretation of results:

Definition

Procrastination manifests itself in the fact that a person, realizing the need to perform very specific important tasks (for example, his job duties), ignores this need and diverts his attention to everyday trifles or entertainment.

Procrastination differs from laziness in that in the case of laziness the subject does not want to do anything and does not worry about it, and in a state of procrastination he realizes the importance and urgency of the work, but does not do it, perhaps finding one or another self-justification. What distinguishes procrastination from rest is that when resting a person replenishes energy reserves, and when procrastinating, he loses it[3].

To one degree or another, this condition is familiar to most people and is considered normal to a certain level. Procrastination becomes a problem when it turns into a normal “working” state in which a person spends most of his time. Such a person puts off everything important “for later”, and when it turns out that all the deadlines have already passed, he either simply abandons what was planned, or tries to do everything postponed “in a rush”, in an unrealistically short period of time. As a result, things are not completed or performed poorly, late and not in full, which leads to corresponding negative effects in the form of troubles at work, missed opportunities, dissatisfaction of others due to failure to fulfill obligations, and the like. This can result in stress, guilt, and loss of productivity. The combination of these feelings and overexpenditure (first on unimportant matters and dealing with growing anxiety, then on working at an emergency pace) can provoke further procrastination.

Russification of the term

In the Russian language, procrastination as a phenomenon was noted back in the 19th century. Then the proverb became widespread in Russia: “Tomorrow, tomorrow, not today!” - that’s what lazy people say”, which arose from the poem “Delay”, translated by Boris Fedorov (1794-1875), which ended up in pre-revolutionary gymnasium anthologies [4][5].

As of 2014, tracing paper from English is used to denote the concept, but scientists are thinking about localizing the term. Options are offered: “breakfast”, “carryover”, “posterity”, “delay”, but, among others, the term “ delay”

"as the most acceptable[6]. When translating A. Kukla’s book “Mental Traps: Stupid Things Smart People Do to Ruin Their Lives,” the term “delaying” was used to refer to this phenomenon[7]. This corresponds to one of the meanings of the word “delay” and the phrase “delay the matter.”

Consequences

The problem with procrastination lies in the negative consequences that it entails for a person’s health and his life in general. Here there are missed deadlines with low quality of completed tasks (the result is bad grades, a frozen career ladder), and nervousness (over time turning into neurasthenia).

The most obvious consequences of procrastination:

• a constant feeling of shame and guilt, which over time turns into complexes (“I am weak-willed”) and intrapersonal conflict;
• stress due to the fact that there is a risk of not being able to complete the work on time;
• decreased performance, attention and motivation (aimless scrolling through social networks and shopping just for fun is very relaxing;
• problems at work: constant disruptions and procrastination lead to negative influence from bosses and colleagues, and over time even to reprimands and dismissal;
• Constant worries about deadlines lead to insomnia and loss of appetite;
• psychosomatic diseases develop: vegetative-vascular dystonia, hypertension, neuroses, metabolic disorders, neurasthenia;
• the accumulated heap of unresolved problems can ultimately become a dead end.

Overcoming your own procrastination is a necessary condition for returning to a normal life without deadlines and stress.

Reasons for procrastination

There are many theories that try to explain this phenomenon, but none of them is generally accepted or universal.

Low self-esteem

The obvious reason for postponing things until later is low self-esteem, self-doubt, uncertainty that this thing will work out, will be accepted by people, whether there is any point in this waste of energy, effort, time, money. Once a person increases his self-esteem, he begins to work much faster, without postponing things until later [ source not specified 977 days

].

Perfectionism

The cause of procrastination is also perfectionism, which manifests itself in an attempt to achieve perfection, focusing on details and ignoring time limits and associated with the fear of possible imperfection, “imperfection” of the results of the work that needs to be completed. Perfectionists also often enjoy deadlines, even greater pressure from circumstances, and working “on the last night”; they are consciously or subconsciously convinced that the quality of their work depends on pressure from above, and the greater the pressure, the better the results.

Self-restraint

According to this theory, a procrastinator limits himself due to a subconscious fear of becoming successful, standing out from the crowd and showing himself better than others (becoming, for example, a possible object of inflated demands, criticism, envy); in addition, a subjectively low-rated personal ability to act in changed (after the start or completion of a business) conditions may play a role. In any case, as in the first theory, the key word is “fear.”

Disobedience (spirit of contradiction)

According to this theory, we are irritated by imposed roles, programs, plans, and we put things off in order to demonstrate (to others, management, the world) our independence and ability to act in accordance with our own decisions. Being subject to external pressure, we come into conflict with the masses or leadership. In this way, “rebels”, anarchists defend their own opinion. They are always dissatisfied with their position and easily fall into the trap of not doing - they spend their whole lives proving their independence from public opinion, which makes them slaves to ideas; As a result, their activity is limited precisely to the generation of ideas.

Temporal motivation theory

All of the above theories do not fully explain the problem. Opponents highlight two main flaws in them: they explain the reason for avoiding tasks, but not the reason for postponing them, and they do not explain the main thing - the relationship between procrastination and anxiety (for example, perfectionists are less susceptible to procrastination than other people). The theory of temporal motivation is considered more substantiated.

According to this theory, the subjective usefulness of an action (Utility), which determines a person’s desire to perform it, depends on four parameters: confidence in success (Expectancy), value, that is, the expected reward (Value), time until completion of the work (Delay) and level impatience, that is, sensitivity to delays (G). A person considers a task more useful if he is confident in its successful completion and expects a large reward from its results. On the contrary, things that still have a lot of time left to complete seem subjectively less useful. In addition, the more we experience delays, the less rewarding we find tasks that take time to complete.

Following this theory, we can conclude that the lower the level of procrastination, the higher the expectations from the business and the more valuable its results are for the person personally, and the higher, the less persistent the person (thus, impulsive people are more susceptible to procrastination) and the further to achieving the goal (the closer the goal, the harder we work). In other words, work is best done when expectations and personal commitment are high and time to completion is kept to a minimum.

Focus on the process, not the result

In this case, the procrastinator performs the task in such a way as to gain satisfaction from the process of doing the task itself, and not from achieving the result (goal). The goal for him is only a direction, a plan, a vector, but the process itself is the most important thing.

Types of condition

There are different types of procrastination. There are many different classifications.

Milgram classification:

• daily - postponing everyday tasks for later;
• neurotic - postponing until later vital decisions concerning, for example, health;
• compulsive - postponing tasks that require effort, replacing them with a more comfortable pastime;
• academic procrastination - putting off completing academic assignments.

Eun Hee Seo classification:

• passive - unconscious postponing of important matters, almost automatically;
• active - conscious procrastination for the sake of receiving adrenaline as the deadline approaches.

Classification by J.R. Ferrari:

• indecisive - dictated by the fear of making a mistake;
• avoidant - arises as a result of fear of evaluation by other people.

Tim Urban's classification:

• short-term - limited to certain periods;
• long-term - not limited in time, but having important life consequences.

Tim Urban considered long-term procrastination to be postponing such tasks as climbing the career ladder, renovating an apartment, losing weight, getting treatment in a sanatorium, proposing to a girl, etc. Since deadlines are not pressing, a person is in no hurry to do all this, although he knows perfectly well what is needed. This continues until some critical moment. For example:

• the patient was confronted with a fact: if he doesn’t lose weight, he’s only one step away from diabetes;
• One of the family members needs an expensive operation and urgently needs to find funds for it.

What was previously in the “Must Be Done” folder is instantly transferred to the “Absolute Necessity” folder, when it must be done at any cost, by any means.

Techniques to combat procrastination

Since procrastination directly depends on the degree of motivation (interest in work and positive expectations from its completion), in some cases the problem can be solved by changing jobs (quitting school), but these are not universal and very radical measures, and most people are not ready for them. In addition, if a high level of procrastination in a given person is associated with increased anxiety and lack of planning skills, then there is a high probability that changing the type of activity will not help (or will only help at first).

There is no specific recipe that guarantees getting rid of procrastination. However, within the discipline of time management, there are a number of techniques that can, to a greater or lesser extent, reduce the level of procrastination and, thus, increase the real return on work, which entails increased satisfaction with life and relief from stress.

Categorization of time use

Usually, people who can draw a line for themselves that unambiguously divides tasks into urgent ones and those whose completion can wait do not have any special problems with procrastination. Lucy McDonald[8], citing the ideas of Dwight Eisenhower as a source, as well as Stephen Covey, author of the Franklin Time Management methodology and the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” suggest dividing all matters according to two criteria: importance and urgency. Thus, there are only four categories of things that take time:

1. Important and not urgent (Important and Not Urgent - Priority Principle) These are the things that have the greatest impact on a person’s life as a whole, while procrastination primarily affects them. This includes everything for which a person lives, his most promising goals and objectives, what gives meaning to his whole life. Therefore, it is necessary to be aware of the presence of this category of affairs and remember them as things that determine the direction of movement. On a daily level it looks like this:

• What is consistent with life goals and values ​​is how a person should start his day: when getting out of bed, remind himself that he has a life project.
• When doing important and urgent things from category 2, you should remember that all this is done for the sake of “important and not urgent” life goals, and be aware of which ones: I work because I want a healthy family, I take English classes because I want to open the door to Europe, pulling out a bad tooth, because my health is important to me. That is, this is your minute-by-minute filter for any business.
• In this category, you need to take into account time for rest and allow yourself to give it. Without health and strength, the following categories will not be needed.

2. Important and Urgent (Crisis Management) This includes all truly urgent matters: emergency, illness, deadline, family crisis, threat to life. As a rule, there are no particular difficulties with their implementation. 3. Not Important and Urgent - Distractions as Denial All sorts of supposedly urgent, but in reality little things that do not affect life. Neighbors invited, mother-in-law's 52nd birthday, daily conversations during lunch, 5-time meeting with buyers, daily cleaning of the house. The unimportance of these tasks does not mean that all of them can not be done at all, but a person must realize that they are not too significant and abandoning them in favor of tasks of categories 1 and 2, if necessary, should be easy and natural. 4. Not Important and Not Urgent - Busy with the “Trivial Many” This “trivial many” is a category of daily activities that make very little or no contribution to quality of life, but take up time. These matters are given time when a person does not know in which direction it is better to move: answering all calls, chatting with relatives during working hours, protracted tea parties, business and personal spam, Internet blogs, playing cards, gatherings until late at night.

Nurturing hard work

Success breeds success. Based on this, a person should maintain a positive attitude, finding pleasant consequences in any previous action and, as a result, making them an incentive for further active activity. It is necessary to reward yourself for success and maintain a sense of your own worth. When starting a new business, be sure that there were successful actions in the past, celebrate small daily victories, but do not dwell on them, track the ratio of victories to tasks.

Productive awareness that running away from unpleasant experiences, the desire to make your life extremely easier through entertainment is not justified and only aggravates the situation. Since experiences become unpleasant only when a person evaluates them as such, he should learn to enjoy work and avoid the displeasure of evaluating its quantity.

To get rid of the “spirit of contradiction”, the feeling of imposing duties from the outside, one should replace the formulation “I am obliged” (to do) with “I choose” (to do) - subjectively turning the obligation into an act of good will. A variation of this technique would be to create a schedule in which the central place is occupied not by tasks with rest breaks, but by rest interspersed with tasks.

Planning things

It is necessary to plan your day and allocate time for each job, taking into account rest, possible delays, and so on. Instead of completing tasks sequentially, where you cannot start the next one until you finish the previous one, several different tasks are completed simultaneously - in parts. You can set aside short blocks of time (from 5 to 30 minutes) to do something and then switch to something else, or plan to do something specific and small in volume in this block. The schedule must be drawn up in advance; It’s better to spend some time on this in the evening so that the next morning you know what to do and how to use your time wisely. When your to-do list is clear, even if you put something off for later, you are still doing useful work. The list can be compiled by ranking things by priority, but it is not necessary to do them in order of importance; you can do what is easier first.

One of the useful planning techniques for combating procrastination is [ source not specified 1062 days

]Getting Things Done, developed by David Allen. The basic idea of ​​the technique: stress arises, among other things, due to the need to constantly remember a large number of things of varying importance and urgency and the constant problem of choice: “What to do right now?” Therefore, it is necessary to unload the brain by transferring all plans to external media (paper records, electronic calendars and planners, and so on), distribute them into categories (current affairs, projects, permanent responsibilities, etc.), importance and urgency, clearly defining what what needs to be accomplished at a specific time, and recording deadlines where they matter. As a result, at each moment in time it is clearly known which things need to be done first, and you can concentrate on work, allocating special time for periodic adjustments to plans and no longer returning to the problem of choosing between current affairs.

Allen insists that every task, no matter how small, must be included in the plan. The purpose of this, however, is not to draw up an unambiguous “calendar of the future” and adhere to it with all possible scrupulousness, but exactly the opposite. When planning their affairs, people tend to include in their plans, first of all, complex, important and time-consuming tasks that require a lot of time to solve, as well as matters that have an unambiguous chronological reference (meetings, conferences, official events). Other activities fill empty spaces in the work schedule. But life is full of accidents: a planned meeting may start 10 minutes later, a meeting agreed upon a month in advance may fall through... A “window” suddenly appears in the schedule. If a person has a list of things ready that he can complete under given conditions in the free time (and the time is usually small, and “big” tasks cannot be squeezed into it), he uses this time. If you don’t have a list of “small” tasks at hand, time will most likely be lost. Allen also advises, when planning “large” tasks (projects), not to be limited to “large block” planning (allocating time for the entire project), but, on the contrary, for each large project, always have at least one specific task planned (for example, within the framework, perhaps, multi-year project “Development of system X for customer Y” in the task “Approval of technical specifications”, for which a month is allocated, something like “Call Semyon Semyonich’s secretary and arrange a meeting to approve the technical specifications”) should be planned with a specific critical date. For a procrastinator, such planning allows one to overcome the fear of starting specific actions on a project, since a vague plan to “do something on a task” turns into a completely specific action that does not require additional explanations and thoughts.

John Perry, a professor of philosophy at Stanford, introduced the concept of “structured procrastination.” According to his theory, procrastination can not be suppressed, but turned into an aid for work. Since most procrastinators, shirking important things, still do something, you just need to direct their activities in a more important direction than, for example, browsing the Internet. Professor Perry suggests building the structure of tasks so that important and urgent things, of course, are at the top of the list, but after them come slightly less important, but nevertheless, work that requires completion. An avid procrastinator will naturally miss the most important task, but will do something useful instead. Perry notes that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since, in essence, it is the substitution of one task for another.

However, if there is a category of tasks that a given person persistently and constantly puts off, then in order to cope with procrastination, it is imperative to understand what is unpleasant and impossible to accomplish in these particular matters. It is possible that these tasks can be delegated to someone else, or made so that they do not need to be performed at all. Perhaps, having realized the reason, a person will be able to get rid of the problem himself. In any case, you need to look deeper into unpleasant activities.

Effort Distribution

This technique is familiar to all athletes - you need to learn to distribute your forces, plan your activities so that everything planned is accomplished without strain.

It is noteworthy that in eastern practices [ which?

] things that are planned and not executed are equated to an unbearable burden. Energy is wasted when we don't accomplish what we set out to do and plan for what we will never accomplish. Guilt eats up our internal energy reserves. The more unfinished things remain, the less energy there is to complete them.

Therefore, the essence of the technique can be expressed in the following words - do not plan ahead if there are unfinished matters. Before you start, distribute your strength in advance, leaving time for a complete breakdown. Hold your breath so you don't become a cornered horse.

Goal management

The above-mentioned “Franklin management” and GTD systems recommend arranging tasks according to priorities, and both the deadline and the significance of the task can be signs of special importance. At the same time, planning should be carried out at several levels, from the global (“lifelong goal”), through determining the stages of achieving the goal, and so on - to specific plans for 3-5 years, for a year, for a month, for the coming days. At each level, basic values ​​must be defined, attributes by which it will be possible to determine the degree of achievement of the goal, skills that must be mastered, the most complete picture of oneself, of what the person personally intends to achieve.

From the point of view of fighting procrastination, all this is necessary so that when performing any action, a person at least remotely, in the long term, imagines why (on the scale of his entire life) it is being done and what it affects. A person learns to understand what he wants, what he strives for, what needs to be done for this, each action is filled with specific personal meaning for him, as a result, he is less likely to put off truly important things.

At the same time, this does not solve the main problem if a person is disoriented in life and cannot determine the right goal.

Instead of procrastination, you need a different reward for the brain

“The brain is always looking for a pleasant reward. If you have a habitual procrastination loop, but you haven't found a better reward, your brain will continue to do the loop over and over again. Until you find better rewards,” says psychiatrist and neuroscientist Judson Brewer , director of research and innovation at Brown University's Center for Mindfulness.

To change a habit, you have to give your brain what Brewer calls a "bigger, better deal." The kind of reward that can relieve your negative emotions now without harming your future self.

But the problem, Dr. Brewer notes, is that there are an infinite number of substitute actions, which are still a form of procrastination.

Therefore, you need to develop for yourself an internal solution to the problem that does not depend on anything other than yourself.

Notes

1. Dvoretsky I. Kh.
   Latin-Russian dictionary. - M.: Bustard, 2009. - 1062 p. — ISBN 978-5-358-07096-7.
2. Procrastination: the disease of the century, 2014, p. 25.
3. Ludwig, Peter, 2014, p. 18.
4. Vadim Serov
   Encyclopedic dictionary of popular words and expressions. — M.: “Lockeed-Press”. 2003.
5. Afonkin Yu. N.
   Russian-German dictionary of winged words. - M.: “Russian language”. 1990., 288 pp., edition 50000, ISBN 5-200-01226-0
6. ↑ 123
   Procrastination: the disease of the century, 2014.
7. Kukla A. Mental traps: Nonsense that reasonable people do to ruin their lives / Andre Kukla; Per. from English — 2nd ed. - M.: Alpina Business Books, 2008. - 146 p.
8. Lucy Macdonald, " Learn to make time
   " (2006)

Literature

• Peter Ludwig.
  Beat procrastination! How to stop putting things off until tomorrow = Petr Ludwig. Konec ProKrasTinace. Jak Přestat Odkladat A Začit Žit Naplno. - M.: Alpina Publisher, 2014. - 263 p. — ISBN 978-5-614-4709-5.
• Oakley B. Think like a mathematician: How to solve any problem faster and more efficiently / Barbara Oakley; Per. from English - M.: Alpina Publisher, 2015. ISBN 978-5-9614-3080-6
• John Perry.
  Structured Procrastination
• Procrastination (English) // Oxford English Dictionary. — 1989.
• Neil Fiore.
  Psychology of persuasion. An easy way to stop procrastinating. - M.: Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2013. - ISBN 978-5-91657-573-6.
• Grigory Tarasevich.
  Procrastination: the disease of the century // Russian reporter: magazine. - M.: PunaMusta Oy, 2014. - No. 14 (342). — P. 20-29. — ISSN 1993-758Х.
• Procrastination (dictionary-reference book). psyfactor.org. Retrieved May 12, 2014.
• Maxim Kotin.
  5 rules of procrastination // slon.ru: online magazine.
• Henri C. Schouwenburg, Clarry H. Lay, Timothy A. Pychyl, and Joseph R. Ferrari (Eds.) Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2004.