You know the feeling. That essay is due in at the end of the month. You’ve got to get the weekly trading figures to Jenna for her presentation by Friday. You’re kitchen sink is overflowing with dirty cups and crockery and if you don’t get washing, you’ll be left eating your cereal with chopsticks.
Yet you can’t seem to get round to getting around to it!
These tasks lurk just beneath your consciousness, prowling through your mind and niggling at your sense of ease – yet still you don’t manage to tackling them!
It’s infuriating! Why don’t I just crack on? Why is it so difficult to approach them?
It’s usually then that you start to beat yourself up. Then the snide, unspoken quips shoot through your mind.
“You’re lazy! You’re pathetic! You ridiculous excuse for a human being! You can’t even do the washing up!”
Well, if you feel like that at any time during a hectic week, you are certainly not alone. An studies show an estimated 20% of us adults are chronic procrastinators. Even worse, 50% of students would label themselves as chronic procrastinators and this number reaches a staggering 90% of students admit to suffering from the procrastination bug at sometime during their studies.
So, no! You are absolutely not alone!
But why do we let things slide when, deep down, we know it would be much better to smash that task and triumphantly cross it off our to-do list?
Causes of procrastination
Depression and low self esteem
We all suffer from mood swings and come home from work feeling spent and exhausted. But when this feeling becomes a permanent fixture in your mental welfare, then it may be time to go and see a GP or get some professional help.
Depression literally depresses our functionality and stops us working from the efficient, effective place that we would usually approach tasks. So, it is no worder that we struggle to find the enthusiasm to tackle often the easiest tasks when we are feeling so low. This in turn, can make us feel worse, or set our nagging and destructive thought processes off, which make us feel even worse. It is a vicious cycle.
Low self esteem often negatively impacts our ability to see ourselves as achievers, allowing us to fall at the first hurdle and think, “Well, what’s the point? The sink will only be filled up again tomorrow!”
Other problems include catastrophising – generalised thinking that makes us feel as if anything we do will be met with rage, condemnation and judgement by all who witness our efforts, or that the project is bound to end in failure and there is no point even attempting to tackle it.
Anxiety about the task
Other times, we think the task ahead of us will be so difficult, laborious, or boring that we manage to put ourselves off even starting it. Very often we will find less productive jobs to do instead, anxious that our time will be so terrible that we convince ourselves that putting this off and watching T.V. will be far more rewarding, forgetting that we are settling for short-term gain over long-term results.
Anxiety can also build up the task into gigantic proportions so that we convince ourselves that it is almost an impossible, Herculean task, when really you are just stripping the walls of the spare bedroom.
Once a thought like this gains a hold in your mind, it becomes an immovable object: one you towers over you like a menacing nightmare, deadening your feelings and growing ever-more monstrous over time.
Perfectionism
Perfectionists are common. They love to get things right and often love to be seen to get things right. If you can’t stand that spelling mistake on page 4 of the report, the spell checker will pick it up. But perfectionists often go one or three steps further! Rather than worrying about the odd spelling mistake or grammar inconsistency, they question how well-written the report is, whether the recommendations on page 55 been written in a persuasive enough fashion and whether the formality of the conclusion will be too overpowering for your audience. These are much more nebulous feelings as there is no one correct answer. That Microsoft paperclip (sorry to anyone younger than 30-years-old – search it up if you don’t know what I’m talking about) can easily fix that grammatical error, but it certainly can’t assess the value that your report will bring your clients, nor can it make a sound judgement on the overall effectiveness of the presentation.
These subjective questions run through a perfectionist’s mind – rendering them powerless and quite often, result in excessive tinkering with a product that is fit-for-purpose and should be left alone. In the extreme, the project never gets off the ground as the perfectionist would rather not try than to be seen to be a failure.
This nameless, all-powerful judge of a perfectionist’s work is sometimes a real group of people (ie. bosses/ clients etc.) and sometimes it is just a generalised anxiety that everyone will see their work and instantly fall about in fits of laughter at their banal and juvenile attempts.
Stress
Stress comes in 2 main forms – eustress (or good stress) and distress (bad stress)
Eustress is encountered when we are confident in our abilities, tasked with an appropriate level of challenge and we feel supported.
Distress is when we are far too far outside our own comfort zones. We are uncertain we can ‘get the job done’ and feel that the task being asked of us is an almost impossible one.
Whether you suffer from distress or eustress is very much a personal thing. If you asked me to renovate an old house, I would crumble like a bar of Kendal Mint Cake in a tumble drier. Someone else may relish the chance to get stuck in to mortar-ing and electric-ing and whatever other skills that seem to come naturally to these handy-dandy people. Personally, you are more likely to be awarded the Noble Peace Prize than find me within spitting distance of a unused rawl plug!
And this is partly why stress is so divisive. You give the same research project to two different staff members and one thrives whilst the other withers away under the pressure.
So, if someone is experiencing a good deal of distress, then it is much more likely that they will not be functioning in tip-top condition. It is then that tasks seem more unmanageable, more unknowable or maybe even completely impossible.
A distracting environment
Given a choice between watching the next episode of Casualty or cleaning the gutters from your rooftop, which on is preferable? Not a difficult one.
But it is amazing how the way we set up our environment can lure us away from doing ‘the work that must be done!’
“I would paint the garden fence, but Kaylee has just phoned to say the girls are meeting up at the Cooper’s Arms and it I missed the last night out.”
“I would declutter the shed, but there’s the pooch to take out for a walk. I’ll do it later.”
“I would write the next chapter of my book but I’ve heard that Megan Fox is currently shopping for avocados at the local supermarket and I need her autograph to complete my top 50 highly-esteemed actors list.”
We give ourselves alternatives to distract us and if our environment is not well organised, it is often the nudge we need to back out of a task that you really should get cracking on with.
As a student, who here has experienced the unusual, unholy, desperate and all-consuming desire to clean the whole house, rather than revise for that economics exam or write another 200 blasted words on your blasted dissertation?
Poor habits
People with discipline usually have good habits and systems in place to help them when the lure of a short-term pleasure tries to persuade them away from a longer-term goal.
Coming in after work and slumping down in front of the telly for ‘just a couple of minutes’ is the catalyst for an evening watching reruns of Columbo and wondering whether he ever washes that raincoat of his!
Habits and systems are what makes millionaires, CEOs and high-performing individuals tick. They know their weaknesses and have put in place checks to stop them from wasting their time, money or resources on tasks that don’t bring value to their lives or businesses.
Having these checks and balances allows you to overcome distractions with as little effort as possible.
ADHD and ASD
People who are on the ASD spectrum often find it difficult to focus on one thing for extended amounts of time, especially if that subject does not catch their interest.
Parents with children who have such a diagnosis often find that their children are not particularly interested in some lessons at school and come out with lower than expected grades, despite being highly intelligent.
Small distractions such as a light bouncing off another pupil’s watch, the sound of another class doing PE in the hall next door, or just the overwhelming feeling of new situations in the classroom can break a pupil’s focus and make it difficult to take in new information.
Coupled with the pressure of achieving that is put on so many schools, pupils can often find the ability to focus on a task for extended periods of time, makes it nigh-on impossible to make headway when revising or learning new material.
Fear
Fear is one of the most powerful emotions and we, as members of the animal kingdom, are hard-wired to respond to fear as a survival mechanism.
So, the moment we get that sinking feeling of fear, it makes it 100 times more difficult to act effectively.
The fear may be that we will fail in a task, or that it won’t be perfect, or that our efforts will be unkindly judged, or even rejected. Many of the aspects we have looked at in this article can be traced back to fear.
And because this emotion is so deeply ingrained in our psyches, we sometimes find ourselves powerless to resist the urge to cope through avoidance and postponing action.
It is pretty easy to see why a fear of failure can leave someone stuck, but often the fear of success can be just as prominent. Why? Well, it may be that we fear change and by becoming a best-selling author, we attribute the characteristics of others who have achieved fame and glamour and fear we might act like them.
‘Famous people have affairs.’
‘Most celebs end up on drugs or fighting other addictions.’
‘People who are rich are usually selfish and nasty to their workforce and I don’t want to turn out like my boss!’
If you want to delve deeper into the link between fear and procrastination, check out our article here: the root cause of procrastination: fear
Conclusion
More often, procrastination is linked to a concoction of many different fears. Jumbled up together and presented as an cocktail of amalgamous thoughts and feelings that can slow or completely halt your actions.
It’s hardly surprising that so many of us suffer from procrastination on a regular basis.
So, it turns out, you’re not lazy, stupid or pathetic! You’re just human!