Procrastination Is More Than Anguish-Producing and Annoying . . .
It’s Sneaky, Too
Is procrastination all bad?
Ask most people and they will tell you that procrastination is one thing they hate about themselves. One thing they wish they could overcome. One thing they would give anything to change.
It makes sense.
Data from multiple big data sources demonstrate unequivocally that procrastination not not only costs individuals but it costs society as a whole. Procrastination is associated with:
More personal and organizational stress
Less engagement in healthy behaviors
More acute health problems
Lost creativity, innovation, and productivity
Huge financial costs
If you’re someone who procrastinates, you know that the stress from putting stuff off can be overwhelming and almost intolerable, and you’re not alone.
Procrastination: A Common Problem With Big Costs
Procrastination plagues 20-25% of American adults and a full 50% of its college students.
It costs employers almost $9,000 per employee each year and almost $600 billion a year. That results in a loss of five days of productivity a month.
For you, that cost is poorer health, lack of wellbeing, and less satisfaction with life.
Procrastination Is Not Just One Thing
A few years ago, we worked with a brilliant person early in his career who had graduated from a great university at the top of his class in computer science.
He was just about to take a demanding position at one of America’s top technology universities, but was overcome with worry that he would fail because of his chronic procrastination. It was that “bad!
We were able to help him, but not as he–or you might have expected. It wasn’t by giving him tips, tools, and techniques for conquering and crushing his habit. He’d already tried “everything.”
Was the problem that he hadn’t found the exact “right” tip, tool, or technique?
We didn’t think so.
You see, considering how accomplished he was and how much he already had achieved as a young professional, we had to ask ourselves (and then him), “Is there another way to understand your procrastination?
Turns out there was because as one saying goes, there’s a front side and a back side to everything.
When you’re struggling with procrastination, beating yourself up, sweating bullets in fear that you’ll not be able to pull off what you need to do, feeling miserable and maybe even paralyzed, it’s easy to fail to recognize alternative perspectives.
But the good news is that procrastination is not just one big, awful, horrible bad habit like most people think.
Procrastination has many facets. In fact, there’s even one kind of procrastination that researchers have defined as positive.
Before we share that awesome perspective, let’s get all our ducks in a row by first taking a hard look at what procrastination is and what contributes to it.
So what is procrastination?
We like to joke by asking rhetorically, “Why do today what you can put off ‘til tomorrow?” (This is our adaptation of what Mark Twain wrote in his 1882 Advice to Young People.)
That’s the essence of procrastination: Pushing off into the future what can (and often, should) be done today.
But that’s not all there is to procrastination, which is why it is such a problem.
Procrastination Is Sneaky
There are as many ways to procrastinate as there are procrastinators. Getting sucked into social media, playing video games, having to finish that page-turner of a book, going out with friends, and binge watching the latest streaming series are all familiar behaviors that people use to put off doing stuff they don’t want to do.
Those behaviors are obvious avoidance strategies. No question about it.
But procrastination is sneaky, too.
You can put off doing one thing (ie, the dreaded thing) in place of doing other things that are valuable and useful, like clearing out the fridge, mowing the lawn, deleting old emails, and even doing academic or professional research.
On the surface, those substitute behaviors seem perfectly reasonable.
But, procrastination is sneaky because while we pat ourselves on the back about our accomplishments, what we’ve really done is pushed aside the task that’s more important and more urgent.
We can look with satisfaction at our clean fridges, manicured lawns, tidy email inboxes, and impressive research findings while our stomach is churning, shoulders and back are so tight they’re killing us, and we feel a deep sense of doom and dread.
If you’re like a lot of people, you might be a victim of “sneaky” procrastination.
Do you ever find yourself filling your time with tasks that look good on the surface but leave you feeling worse off because you pushed off what was more important or urgent?
If procrastination is a problem for you, don’t feel bad.
Not only are there effective, reliable ways to address your procrastination, there’s actually a kind of procrastination that can open the door to greater productivity, creativity, and personal satisfaction.
Three Kinds of Stressors Lead to Procrastination
Procrastination isn’t just any response to a task we find distasteful.
It’s actually our response to stressors: demands that take us out of our comfort zone.
By procrastinating, we avoid facing the stressors that make us feel bad–uncertain, insecure, fearful, etc.
What do we mean by stressors?
Researchers define three kinds:
Challenge
Hindrance
Threat
These three stressors–challenge, hindrance, and threat–produce different behavioral responses related to procrastination and yield different outcomes, a lot negative, as you might expect.
But surprisingly, some outcomes of procrastination are positive.
First, it’s important to understand the nature of these stressors.
They’re easy to understand when you look at them in the context of work, although they also apply to life at home.
Challenge Stressors
The first kind of stressor–challenge stressors–is related to workload, responsibility, and job complexity. In other words:
You have a lot to do.
The weight of responsibility falls on your shoulders.
The task has a lot of moving parts–it’s complicated.
Hindrance Stressors
The second kind of stressor–hindrance stressors–is associated with role ambiguity, role conflict, and red tape. This means:
It’s unclear who's responsible for what and who should be doing it.
You’re faced with inconsistent or incompatible demands–you’re pulled in different directions trying to do your job and may not have everything you need to do it with.
There are a lot of external hoops to jump through to get anything done.
Threat Stressors
The third kind of stressor–threat stressors–is about future personal harm or loss. This kind of threat jeopardizes a person’s psychological need for belonging, trust in others, and self-worth. Threat stressors include:
Bullying and harassment
Abusive supervision
Job insecurity
Lack of influence
Having to hide your true thoughts and feelings
On the job, it turns out that challenge stressors actually can also boost your motivation and produce better outcomes in terms of wellbeing and performance than hindrance or threat stressors.
With challenge stressors, research reveals that people rise to the occasion because they can use three important methods to help reinforce autonomy and mastery, key ingredients for wellbeing:
Use creative problem-solving that reflect active cognitive processing to come up with unique ideas or solutions
Apply planning, and decision-making skills to plan and structure how they spend their time and handle the tasks demanded of them
Determine priorities on their own
Hindrance stressors, on the other hand, do not lend themselves to the kinds of processes that foster a sense of autonomy and mastery, nor foster wellbeing. These stressors are the kind that can wear you down, lead to frustration and angry outbursts, or cause a lot of sleepless nights.
Finally, threat stressors can produce a lot of anxiety and lead to inauthenticity and burnout.
As with most things in life, these stressors and their effects are not absolute. There are many factors that can increase or decrease their effect . . . and help you manage them.
Start Crushing Procrastination With a Personalized Procrastination Profile
But for now, let’s go back to our story about the early-career professional we worked with.
One thing that he had never done, but which turned out to help him was for him to create his own procrastination profile.
A procrastination profile gives you a detailed understanding of the what, when, where, how, why, and with whom procrastination occurs in your life . . . and the resources you have already, or may need to develop, that can help you crush the habit.
Our first question was about the kind of stressors that tripped him up the most and that triggered his procrastination.
Were they challenge, hindrance, or threat stressors?
It turned out that almost all of our young professional’s stressors were challenge stressors–too much work, too many complications, and too little time.
Sound familiar?
Stressors come in many forms, but the sense of too much to do with too little time to do it in is probably one of the most common.
By working on his procrastination profile, our professional gained valuable insights into what drove his procrastination.
But by creating his own procrastination profile, he also discovered–to his surprise–that certain kinds of procrastination he engaged in actually helped him tackle his work . . . and get it done on time.
Ask yourself what kind of stressors might lead you down the procrastination path: Are they challenge, hindrance, or threat stressors?
To help you examine the stressors in your life as a first step to developing your own procrastination profile, click here.
Read the other articles in the Be Your Own Best Coach series on getting things done without procrastination:
Get Things Done Without Procrastinating gives you everything you need to take a big step toward crushing procrastination. Instead of being filled with stress, anxiousness, or nauseating dread, you can face each stressor, regardless of the kind, with a sense of possibility and optimism.