End Procrastination Now! (3 page)

7. Waking up from her nap, Jane realized that it was time for the nightly news. She told herself that after the news, she'd stay up late and get the report done.

8. The news ended, and Jane returned to the computer. However, her fingers had a life of their own. She clicked the solitaire icon and felt jived about the game.

9. Before she realized it, it was midnight. She thought, “It is too late to start now. I'll start early in the morning.” She felt good about her new resolve

10. Her alarm rang at 7:00 a.m. Now panicked to get ready for work, Jane had no time to start the report.

11. Arriving at work, she decided to get the busywork out of the way. By the time she finished her phone calls and e-mails, it was time for lunch.

12. Jane skipped lunch, rushed to meet the 4:00 deadline, and ran out of time.

13. Frazzled, she asked her boss for an extension because of “complications” and got an extra day.

14. She blocked out everything else and finished.

15. Annoyed, Jane blamed herself, thinking that she could have done better had she started earlier, and swore, “I'll start earlier next time.”

16. With the next report, she repeated a similar pattern.

Jane's style of procrastinating suggests that procrastination can be both automatic and extensive. (We'll revisit Jane's procrastination problem habit in later chapters, where I'll show you how Jane used a basic cognitive, emotive, and behavioral approach to prevent procrastination.)

Procrastination is an equal opportunity habit that interferes with the productivity of people from every economic level, profession, age, or other demographic category. Practically everyone has at least one (and probably more) serious procrastination challenge to meet, especially workplace procrastination. A 2007 salary.com survey suggests that U.S. workers, on average, waste 20 percent of the workday. Procrastination researchers Joseph Ferrari and his colleagues surveyed white- and blue-collar workers living in such diverse countries as the United States, England, Australia, Turkey, Peru, Spain, and Venezuela. They found that about 25 percent persistently hinder themselves through workplace procrastination. Does this mean that the others are relatively procrastination-free? Hardly! Few, if any, workers are procrastination-free.

Different people procrastinate for different reasons and in different ways. Some postpone decisions where there is no guarantee for success; others find creative ways to delay and put off unpleasant tasks. Persistent forms of procrastination are serious problems for hundreds of millions of people, especially for those who tie their self-worth to their performance and whose procrastination may also contribute to stress-related health problems.

I don't know anyone who chooses to develop a procrastination habit. This would be like choosing depression over emotional health. Choice comes into play when you recognize that you can either take corrective action or do nothing and hope for the best. Choose to change, and it is your responsibility to take corrective action. However, change is also a process, not an event, and I'll tell you more about that in
Chapter 1
.

If procrastination is an automatic habit, are you stuck? Fortunately, you have alternative choices that you can employ against procrastination. Changing erroneous thinking (the cognitive way), developing tolerance for discomfort (the emotive way), and graduated exposure (the behavioral way) can disable procrastination and prevent recurrences.

In “The Road Not Taken,” the American poet Robert Frost showed the inevitability of choice. He wrote the poem to describe the dilemma of a friend who, after choosing one path, would fret because he had not traveled the other. Frost's poem knocks at the door of human inquisitiveness, and its last verse is among the most frequently quoted: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” Here we see an interesting example of how we can view the automatic habit of procrastination as being tempered by the idea of choice.

The father of American psychology, William James, got an important insight into the importance of choice. You see, James suffered from recurring depression. After trying the behavioral methods of his day, James found no relief. He needed a new option. He found it in the free-will philosophy of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Charles Renouvier: this is the idea that you can choose one way when you could have chosen another. James decided that he could try other ways. For example, he believed that by changing his thinking, he could change his life.

Another view of freedom of choice is that of doing as you please. But might this be the path to self-indulgence? Consider an alternative view. Some of our most impressive accomplishments involve hardships. Have you ever done something of significance that did not have a cost?

What can be said about following the path on which procrastination casts its shadow? The experiences will be different from those found on a path of productive accomplishments. The procrastination path is often worn, and the one of purposeful, productive, and creative efforts and products covers exciting new ground. On this path, commitment and persistence count more than undisciplined ability. However, those with high ability who impose restrictions on themselves to support persistence with productive actions can justifiably be counted among the top performers.

Before we move ahead to discuss the cognitive, emotive, and behavioral approach to kicking the procrastination habit, there are a few additional foundation concepts to cover. As a practical matter, people may loosely say, “I'm a procrastinator.” Upon reflection, few of them could legitimately say that they were only one way or another; thus, negative generalizations about yourself are false depictions. If you are only a procrastinator, how do you change who you are?

Procrastination is not a black-and-white issue where you either are a procrastinator or you are not. You can procrastinate in some areas of your life and still have many admirable qualities and accomplishments. Instead, procrastination represents a changeable process. Thus, it is infinitely more reasonable and realistic to think about changing your actions or habits than to pigeonhole yourself.

Remember that words have the power to color perspective. Think of the words
loser
and
winner
. Do they create different images? If you label yourself a loser, how will you feel and what will you do? Character generalizations like “loser” or “winner” suffer from the same flaw as the label “procrastinator.”

Labeling yourself a procrastinator is a choice, but one that you'll have trouble justifying. Procrastination is relative. No one I know procrastinates 100 percent of the time, and no one is 100 percent efficient or effective. You might more accurately describe yourself as a person who procrastinates in specific ways, but who is timely and effective in other ways.

You may not like your procrastinating behavior. You may change what you don't like. But procrastination does not define you as a whole.

If you call yourself a procrastinator, this may have no more general meaning than descriptively calling yourself an engineer or middle-aged. You know you're a pluralistic person with thousands of attributes who plays dozens of roles in life. But here's the problem: most people think categorically and not pluralistically. Thus, you risk identifying with the label in a way that suggests that you have no choice but to imitate the label.

Procrastination has many causes, such as tension avoidance. If you don't like a pressing project, you put it on the back burner.
Among other causes, anxiety can ignite procrastination. When you are anxious, you look to the future with apprehension. A threat is coming. You believe that you can't control the situation. You have an urge to diverge to a safer activity. “Fear of failure” is commonly used to describe this procrastination process. However, “failure anxiety” is a better phrase.

Perfectionism can provoke anxious thinking and spur procrastination. You may act as if you believe that you are either a success or a failure based on your ability to meet high performance expectations. If you don't think that you have the resources to meet your lofty standards, this belief can kick procrastination into gear. However, you can help yourself dump this self-sabotage by eliminating the idea of failure.

Beyond taxes and death, there are few guarantees in life. Failure, or falling short of your standards for success, is another guaranteed area. This will, from time to time, happen. It's how you deal with the inevitable setbacks and failures in life that makes the difference.

A no-failure philosophy can make a difference if it helps free you from inhibitions and fears about undertaking something new, difficult, or complicated that you might normally put off. Before looking at the idea behind a nonfailure philosophy, let's look at some ideas about failure:

• Failure is like a passing breeze among everything else that is part of nature. It is a normal part of living and learning. You don't make a sale every time you try. You may take a bar examination more than once. You have no luck as a professional Bigfoot investigator. During a recessionary period, your stock portfolio gets hit.

• Some failures have consequences. The person who wishes to get drunk without ill effects is living in a dream world. In the world of commerce, failing to produce is likely to result in someone else getting your job.

• Most failures are fictional, such as thinking that if you are not 100 percent perfect in whatever you undertake, you are a failure. That show-stopping idea can lead to many manufactured miseries. Who's perfect?

• Failure can be instructive when you use its consequences for self-correction. Sometimes the instruction is painful. Sometimes the consequences lead to new insights and discoveries.

The fear of failure trap has different window views. The irrational perfectionism view is through a watermarked prism window. The prism distorts what you experience. The watermarks represent a contingent worth point of view: you're noble if your life is filled with successes; your failures define you. This black-white perspective is a slippery slope toward procrastination.

Can you spring free from this success-failure trap? Fear of failure is a fictional trap that has everything to do with you, and little to do with what you do. If there is no failure, you have nothing to fear. Fortunately, you can eliminate failure. Well, at least in the area of your self-development.

View your self-development efforts as experiments and your plans as hypotheses. That changes the view. Now you are operating like a scientist. You test the plan and judge the result, not yourself. If you don't like the result, you adjust and retest the plan.

Introducing this new tolerance-building line of thought into a well-practiced contingency worth script is not an overnight deal. New philosophies take time to take hold.

The
do-it-now
philosophy is to do reasonable things in a reasonable way within a reasonable time to increase your chances for health, happiness, and desired accomplishments. Following the do-it-now way, you simultaneously attack procrastination and responsibly follow through on what is important to do. You contest your urges
to diverge by refusing to distract yourself as you work hard at what you may be tempted to put off. How you go about executing this
dual-change
challenge makes the difference. It's here that knowledge and know-how count. You develop this ability by combining the processes that you find work best for you and by repeating the application until you overlearn it.

You're starting from a positive point. You already have the means to take charge of what you think, feel, and do to meet the challenge. Your challenge is to unleash yourself to do what you can accomplish.

The do-it-now philosophy highlights a path to progressive mastery over procrastination. By following this philosophy, you act to break a procrastination habit. In executing this lifestyle shift, you recognize sidetracking self-statements, perceived emotional threats, and diversionary activities that all hinder productive results.

The do-it-now process won't take hold overnight. It takes time and practice to successfully contest old procrastination habits and build positive follow-through ones, but with this positive attitude, in conjunction with the cognitive, emotive, and behavioral approach that I'll show you, you'll be on the road to overcoming procrastination.

By changing negative thinking, defusing stress emotions, and engaging in proactive behaviors, you can change your life for the better. I'll tell you how.

The cognitive, behavioral, and emotive skills that you can learn are durable and are especially useful in making and sustaining lifestyle changes that most people put off, such as such as weight control, exercise, and stress reduction.

You can learn and apply the methods with confidence. Cognitive behavioral therapy is an evidence-based system that is supported
by more than 400 random control studies. The system is also supported by 16 meta-analyses A meta-analysis is a study of studies that uses a statistical synthesis of the research data. The cognitive behavioral approach is the dominant system because it's probably the most effective way to make and maintain important cognitive, emotive, and behavioral changes.

Evidence-based cognitive, emotive, and behavioral methods can be self-taught. The most highly rated self-help books are those that focus on a specific theme, apply empirically grounded cognitive behavioral methods, and are written by doctoral-level mental health professionals who are trained in the methods. This book meets those criteria.