The real reasons we procrastinate

If you are one of the 10-15% of people who claim they don’t procrastinate, stop reading and go and do whatever you’re avoiding!  Anyone else, congratulations on your honesty! That’s a good start.
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What we tell ourselves
Here’s how it works with me. Tasks I procrastinate over are typically big (grant applications, papers), boring (administration), or not obviously beneficial to me or my team (reviewing). The conversation in my head starts: “I must get on with this, I’m feeling really guilty holding someone else up”. Or: “If I don’t start soon, I’ll end up super-stressed doing it at the last minute, so why can’t I just do it?”. 

The answer comes back: “I need a clear mind first and I won’t have that until I’ve got these other niggling tasks out of the way. Otherwise, I’ll worry about people chasing me for them”. Or: “I’m here to do science, not administration. Filling in that form is just depressing!”.

​How about you? Similar thoughts? Others?

​It's about pain management, not time management
Our culture is full of myths about what causes procrastination: bad time management, poor prioritisating, laziness or lack of willpower. All this beating ourselves up just makes it worse. We looks for apps and make resolutions to solve these, but the problem always resurfaces like a bad penny. 
 
Nir Eyal’s book Indistractable gives us a different, and provocative message, also summarised in this podcast interview. It’s not about time management, it’s pain management. Building on Kahneman and Tversky’s theory of loss aversion, which suggests we are more motivated to avoid pain than to gain pleasure, Eyal argues that our task will only happen when the pain of not doing it outweighs the pain of doing it.

​​Let’s unpack this in a research setting. 
 
What pain?
Consider my grant writing as an example. If I tell myself I can only write after I’ve tamed my to-do list, that’s a high bar! Another blog in this series will explain why it’s normal, sometimes even healthy, for to-do lists to be essentially infinite. Unless we are both expert at saying “no” and devoid of ideas we will, sooner or later, have more on our list than we can possibly ever do. 
 
It is painful to admit to ourselves that many important tasks will have to stand still for several weeks while we write. How much fuller will our inbox be afterwards? How much more guilty will we feel about actions we promised but haven’t done yet? And if we are already overwhelmed with ideas, how will we cope when our grant-writing sparks a dozen new ones?

But as the deadline looms, when further delay brings the very real prospect of missing it, the balance shifts. It takes just one look into the funding abyss, the thought of having to ‘let people go’, and the panic monster is well and truly out. Other examples could be the abyss of never getting your PhD, or never submitting your paper. Once we are forced to stare this in the face, concerns about overdue responses on other issues, unfilled forms and untested ideas drop away, overwhelmed by this greater threat.
 
So where do you see the pain? Is it having to postpone an exciting new experiment to do an essential but tedious task? Is it fear of what reviewers might say about your paper? Fear that a task may be too big? The emotional scar of the last grant rejection as you write your new application? Could coming to terms with these be your key to not procrastinating?
 
Can’t we use gain, not pain?
Waiting for stress to force us into action is inefficient and draining. Can’t we harness good feelings instead, such as the satisfaction of submitting early, or the thrill of reaching inbox zero? Some communication platforms like Spark mail app and Slack understand this and harness that motivation with a simple, but surprisingly effective message. The principle of keeping a ‘done’ list, not just a ‘to-do’ list, is similar. 

​Those positive sentiments certainly have a role to play in tipping the balance but avoiding pain will probably always play a dominant role. Spark’s ‘empty inbox’ message often incentivises me to clear the last few messages, but it’s not the primary reason for tackling the mountain of messages when I return from a conference.
 
Commitment
There is another way. Steve Peters’ book A Path Through the Jungle describes a new way of finding commitment. Motivation fluctuates when it relies on uncontrollable external events. Commitment does not. But if we use commitment to get started, motivation often follows anyway and gives us more energy to see it through.

Crucially, commitment is not about willpower. Willpower is a futile attempt to force our unwanted emotions into submission. It will either fail, or succeed temporarily at a huge cost to our energy and overall output. What Peters suggests instead is to acknowledge all our emotions, and notice any conflicts among them. We'd like to eat the chocolate and stick to our diet, submit the grant early and avoid saying 'no' to someone else. We have to accept that we can't have both and ask ourself, both emotionally and rationally, which matters more to us. 
 
Once we are clear on this, we can also accept that we will have to deal with setbacks and frustrations to get there and know it is worth it. We've made the decision, that conversation is over. Our inbox will fill up, there will be tedious steps in the submission process, and our computer might crash. We even may receive another paper or grant rejection while writing, a particularly cruel blow that derails almost anyone’s motivation.
 
Commitment, on the other hand, is a process driven by purpose, values and intrinsic motivations that remain unaltered, especially if we first anticipate the kinds of obstacles we will face and the emotions they will trigger. We accept there will be setbacks, frustrations, inefficiencies, and even unfairness. Life is unfair, the world is imperfect and the research world is no different. Equipment will break, mistakes will happen and, whether we like it or not, a few people will behave unreasonably. But once we dig deep enough, none of these changes what we want or our determination to get there. 
 
So let’s get clear on what that is, exactly why we want it, and get started!