End Procrastination Now! (13 page)

Double troubles say more about what you think about yourself than about what you think about a delayed task. Powerless thinking is a common double trouble. If you think you are powerless to deal with negative emotions and procrastination, powerless thinking can layer an added sense of anxiety and vulnerability over an already challenging situation. However, if you thought you could contain and control unpleasant emotions, thoughts about these unpleasant feelings would reflect this tolerance.

Learning to tolerate tension can defuse fear of feelings. If you don't fear tension, then you are less likely to experience tension as a trigger for procrastination. Building emotional muscle and flexing that muscle can have a profound impact on dispatching a double trouble that can be significantly worse than the original tension. Here are a few tips:

• You can start with a question: why can't I stand what I don't like?

• Watch out for Catch-22 procrastination thinking, such as, “I can't change.” Respond with a question: where is the evidence that change is impossible?

• Beware of developing an inner voice that encourages you to give in to unhealthy urges, telling you to go ahead and have that extra piece of cake—you deserve it; or you don't have to work today—now is a better time to play. Use your long- and short-term procrastination analysis grid to put this kind of short-term thinking into a rational perspective, and to resist harmful urges.

Double troubles bring you into the realm of cyclical thinking. For example, if you're stuck with Catch-22 procrastination thinking (“I can't change”), look carefully and you can see the cycle: I can't change, and because I can't change, I'll be stressed and procrastinate forever. Take out one element in the circle and define it as an assumption, and you've taken a step toward breaking the circle. Assumptions are not the same as facts!

In this chapter, you saw how to build your emotional muscle when it comes to procrastination. As long as the procrastination lure glistens by increasing your ability to withstand various emotional procrastination traps, you're likely to resist following the lure.

Knowledge without know-how is like living in an ivory tower. Know-how is the collection of skills that you've learned that you apply to produce a productive outcome. Know-how is what brings home the bacon. Harnessing emotional knowledge is a big part of this know-how.

What three ideas for dealing effectively with procrastination have you had? Write them down.

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What three top actions can you take to shift from procrastination toward productive actions? Write them down.

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What three things did you do to execute your action plan? Write them down.

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What did you learn from applying the ideas and action plan that you can use in other areas? Write this down.

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You can't avoid stress—it occurs in every facet of your life. Any major change, such as the birth of a child, taking on new responsibilities, or retirement, can disrupt your equilibrium. Stress is a general term that can be more specifically defined as being frazzled, pressured, nervous, anxious, worried, strained, or tense. Stress is a by-product of your perception of situations and of believing you are short on resources to emotionally cope with a situation. The three-pronged cognitive, emotive, and behavioral approach directly applies to addressing stress and to reducing your use of it as a catalyst for procrastination.

What happens to your body when you feel stressed? Your brain engages your autonomic nervous system (ANS), which involuntarily releases the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. When the challenge passes, the body returns to balance (allostasis). However, with excessive stress, your hormones no longer protect the body, but instead rip away at it. Persistent stress is costly to your health. Stress elevates your blood sugar, eventually putting you at risk for type 2 diabetes. When persistent stress routinely disrupts your sleep, this limits your body's ability to restore itself, compromising
your immune system; poor sleep patterns can occur and lead to depression.

If you become helpless when coping with stressors, you begin to feel as if you are living in an emotional war zone. Poor coping skills add to an elevated allostatic load. By using cognitive behavioral stress management methods, you can reduce cortisol from chronic fatigue, generalized anxiety, and other stress conditions.

One of the most common forms of stress is workplace stress, which may have as much to do with adversity as with change. Job satisfaction is declining, with 49 percent of people surveyed indicating that they are less satisfied with their jobs. However, while job satisfaction is desirable, work is for pay and rarely for play. But job stress may have more significant implications than job satisfaction.

You won't find much scientific literature on the connection between procrastination, job stress, job burnout, and low job satisfaction. Does that mean that stress and procrastination are unrelated in the workplace?

If you fear confrontation, you are likely to put off addressing a discussion where you expect disagreement. If you feel uncomfortable about a work function, you are likely to experience an urge to diverge. Does blame avoidance procrastination disappear when you have a choice between taking a risk and playing it safe? Are you likely to put off decisions?

Your positive work reflections can promote feelings of well-being that can spread to your leisure time. Your off-hours reflections on the positive aspects of your work can lead to proactive work effort. However, when work is stressful, dealing with stress effectively can give you something positive to think about regarding your coping competencies. I'll walk you through some paces on dealing with job stress procrastination. However, since stress
crisscrosses practically every avenue of life, what you learn here has broader implications for leading a life where you feel more in command of yourself and of the controllable events that take place around you,

Working in an environment where layoffs are taking place can feel stressful. However, not everyone is affected in the same way, and you may roll with the punches of life in some situations better than in others. That doesn't mean that stress conditions won't affect how you think, how you feel, and what you do. However, comparatively, you are less affected.

You may be challenged to develop inner freedom under persistently stressful conditions, such as working with difficult coworkers and supervisors, where you are difficult with yourself, and where you find work balance inequities. However, these conditions can be like a fan blowing cold air in your direction. You can turn the fan away from you, and it continues to blow. The wind may blow, and you need not amplify your stress or procrastinate because that happens.

You are surrounded by a cast of difficult characters, both at work and in other areas of your life—often, you'll find that your relationships with these people slow your ability to meet your goals or do your job. You have names for each. You call one
Joe the Deflector
. Whatever goes wrong gets deflected back to you. The
fabulous faker
looks busy, busy, busy, but you are the one who has to pick up the slack following this faffing procrastination.
Old tried and true
has a familiar mantra: it was good enough for grandfather and it's good enough for him.
One-upmanship
waits for opportunities to make you look bad.
The complainer
draws you in with horror stories about not getting a corner office and having an assigned parking space at a distance from the entryway.

You may get drawn into other people's procrastination intrigues, but you don't have to slip on this slope. Can you cause
others to stop diversionary activities so that you don't get diverted from your functions? You might be persuasive and make some gains in that way. However, the person that you have the best chance of controlling is yourself, and imperfectly so. But accepting and letting go of a need to control uncontrollable situations can lead to stress reduction, even under the most adverse work conditions.

Can you accomplish this emotional muscle building under the most extreme stress conditions? Imprisoned in several Nazi concentration camps, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl learned from the ancient Stoic philosophers that he had the freedom to choose his inner thoughts. From the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he learned that by having a
why
for living, you can bear almost any
how
. His
why
was surviving for his family. If you are engaged with difficult coworkers, family members, or friends, is it possible for you to find purpose and meaning that can help you strip away any added stress you may experience?

In most ongoing adverse situations, I find that people give themselves double trouble. The first is stress from the adversity, and the second is often worse: a fear of the feeling of stress that can amplify the tension. The concept of acceptance that we discussed earlier can have a calming effect: the situation is what it is, stress is what it is, now let me see what I can do to create a more favorable external and internal environment to lessen the stresses.

In many work environments, time is lost due to internal politics, intrigues, and acts of antagonistic cooperation. Lamenting these events and distracting yourself by focusing on them is analogous to getting hit by a bus driver and blaming the driver and cursing the situation. Here is an alternative view about this form of stress: Is it better to curse the driver or rehabilitate yourself so you are no longer afflicted? In the next chapter, I'll describe approaches for taking charge of yourself under adverse conditions where procrastination is especially risky.

END PROCRASTINATION NOW! TIP

Seven Steps to Freeing Yourself from Stress-Related Procrastination

The following seven-step process maps a way to control what you do and advance while others engage in procrastination activities:

1. Identify a clear purpose, a goal, and an organized approach to achieve that goal. You've set a leadership direction for yourself that can translate into conscientious, productive actions.

2. An effective person who can pull together a voluntary group for a common cause sets the tone by getting up front, taking responsibility, and displaying intelligence and capability.

3. Keep focused on your prime objective, act with a strategic mind, make an effort to look for and act on opportunities that will pass unobserved by most, and ask what's missing from the picture.

4. In fluidly changing circumstances, give structure and definition to emerging processes. Keep on top of new developments. Act to take advantage of changing information. Coordinate your resources.

5. The collective intelligence of a group is a rich information resource. Encourage communication. Listen. Judge which people you can count on. However, reserve the final decision for yourself when you have this discretion.

6. In activities where you are in charge, reserve the final decision as your prerogative. Rendering reasoned judgments to gain ground is important.

7. Push distractions aside as quickly as possible. There isn't time for them. Timing, pacing, and maintaining momentum are normally of greater importance.

Most people amplify their own stress problems. You can have a great employer, supportive coworkers, and challenging responsibilities that are comfortably within your capabilities. Still, you carry your work home and fret over what went wrong and what could go wrong tomorrow.

Negative thinking about your goals can affect the quality of your efforts. Connie, a procrastination workshop participant, complained that everyone at her office hated her. That was why she dragged her feet. I asked her how many people worked in her department. She said, 29. I asked for their first names. I then went down the list and asked her to tell me how she knew that each person hated her. This is what it boiled down to: she had sound evidence that a clique of three disliked her. She regularly socialized with six coworkers. The others showed some cordiality. The question is: if everyone hates you, how do you explain the exceptions? Once Connie got past her misperception, she began to act cooperatively, and she reported feeling better about her work. When she started thinking less about imaginary problems, Connie reported that she procrastinated less. There are numerous potential stressors around you. If establishing control decreases stress, can you establish inner control and direction to survive falling into procrastination traps?

Procrastination increases with worry, anxiety, and depression. These complex procrastination catalysts are common.