5 Excuses and Self-deception: How Our Thinking Contributes to Our Procrastination

I need to be aware of my rationalizations.

ALLAN LAMENTED HIS PROCRASTINATION to anyone who would listen, but nothing seemed to change. His friends recognized him as the master of excuses, although Allan didn’t acknowledge his own hidden talents here. He was truly the “Teflon guy” when it came to being accountable, even to himself. Nothing stuck to him. There was always an excuse for waiting another day, and there was always an excuse for being off task.

It’s not due for weeks.

I can do that work in a few hours.

I work better under pressure.

Of course, another day always became another, and soon weeks or months passed without progress. Why couldn’t Allan see how he was just rationalizing this needless delay?

Issue

In addition to understanding our basic impulse to give in to feel good (see Chapter 3) and not really feel more like doing it tomorrow (see Chapter 4), we need to consider some of the biases in our thinking. There are a number of very important issues to consider, including the human tendency to:

discount future rewards in relation to short-term rewards,
underestimate the time things will take and overestimate how much we can do,
prefer tomorrow over today,
self-handicap to protect self-esteem,
think irrationally about the task at hand and our ability to accomplish the task, and
manufacture our own happiness by changing our thinking to be consistent with our behavior.

Books have been written about each of these topics, but true to the digest nature of this book (and the promise to provide you with what you need now), I have summarized each of these problems in the sections below. Of course, this is followed by strategies for change.

Discounting Future Rewards over Short-Term Rewards

Future rewards, particularly those in the more distant future, seem smaller in size. It is as if we are looking at a picture of a distant mountain and assuming that it is actually small. We do not seem to have perspective for size when time is involved. This is the notion of discounting future rewards, also known as temporal discounting.

The problem is that future rewards seem less attractive to us than immediately available ones. I guess this should not surprise us too much. From an evolutionary perspective, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Our brains seem programmed to prefer immediate rewards. This stone-age brain is not so adaptive in our modern world, where we need to meet distant deadlines by doing things today.

The Planning Fallacy

It is also human nature to be overly optimistic. We assume we can get more done in less time than is reasonable, and we assume tasks will take less time than they usually do. This is at the heart of the issue—we are not really thinking about how long things usually take based on past experience. We focus on the singular event we are facing without taking into account distributive information about experience or similar events. What results from this optimistic bias is poor planning.

Self-handicapping to Protect Self

To self-handicap is to provide an excuse for oneself. For example, if you were to wear weighted shoes and have a running race with a friend, your ability or competence as a runner would never come into question. If you lose the race, it is the fault of the handicap, the heavy shoes. If you win the race, however, that is extraordinarily meritorious. It is win-win for the individual’s sense of self. Certainly, self-esteem is never threatened.

A similar situation can arise with procrastination. To the extent that we delay work on a task to the last moment, we can be creating another form of self-handicapping. As with the running race, a task done at the last minute can be excused if not done well because it was done in such a short amount of time. And, of course, if the task is done very well, it looks exceptionally good for the individual.

This implies that the needless delay of a task that we defined as procrastination may in fact fill a need. It can protect self-esteem, and experimental research evidence by Joseph Ferrari (DePaul University) indicates that chronic procrastinators in particular prefer not to have feedback about self if they have the choice. Of course, delay of this sort has begged the question of whether this is truly procrastination at all, because it can be seen as a strategic use of delay, but it is worth including here just to acknowledge that we can end up delaying our tasks for reasons that may not at first seem apparent.

Preferring Tomorrow over Today

Here is an example of a relation that we all understand: If B is greater than A, and C is greater than B, then we can assume that C is also greater than A. This is known as a transitive relation.

What about this example? Imagine a task is due on Friday. It is now Monday morning. It is preferable to work on this task Tuesday as opposed to Monday. In other words, the preference for Tuesday is greater than the preference for Monday. Tuesday arrives. Ah, it’s preferable to work on this on Wednesday as opposed to Tuesday. Wednesday arrives. Again, it’s preferable to work on this Thursday instead of Wednesday. So far, so good; these are transitive relations. Then Thursday arrives. Oops, we think, it is now preferable that we had begun on Monday. This is known as an intransitive preference. Chrisoula Andreou, a philosopher at the University of Utah, has argued that when it comes to procrastination, this is a common problem with our thinking.

Certainly, many health behaviors and retirement savings plans suffer from this problem with our reasoning. It comes to a point where tomorrow is not only less preferred, but that an earlier date is actually the preferred date (and it is now too late to act).

Many of us know this relation from experience. Studies from our research group also bear this out. We get a reversal of our preferences that makes for an intransitive preference structure. The problem is that the intransitive nature of this preference structure works against us in the long run. Tomorrow is not as preferable as we once thought.

Our Irrational Thoughts

We often believe things to be true that are not. We do not challenge these beliefs with any reality testing, so they persist. For example, we might believe that we cannot make any mistakes or that we have to be able to answer any and every question after a presentation. We might believe we need to be perfect. We might think that our whole self-worth is dependent upon our career success. All of these are examples of irrational thoughts, and they are common and problematic. They can lead us to experience very negative emotions, and they provide an excuse for not trying. For example, if we are fearful that we cannot do a task perfectly and that our self-worth depends on this perfect performance, then we may avoid the task to protect our self-esteem. We procrastinate.

Manufacturing Our Own Happiness and Resolving Internal Conflict

When our actions and beliefs or even two beliefs are in conflict, they are dissonant. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. Dissonance is uncomfortable. We want to alleviate this negative state. When we intend to act, when we have a goal toward which we have made an intention to act, and we do not act (voluntarily and quite irrationally choosing to delay action despite knowing this may affect us negatively), we experience dissonance. This dissonance is one of the costs of procrastination.

Here are a few typical reactions that researchers have catalogued as responses to dissonance (and ways that we reduce this dissonance):

Distraction—we divert our attention away from dissonant cognitions and avoid the negative affective state caused by dissonance.
Forgetting—can be in two forms, passive and active. Passive is often the case with unimportant thoughts, while we may have to actively suppress important cognitions that are causing dissonance.
Trivialization—involves changing beliefs to reduce the importance of the dissonance- creating thoughts or beliefs.
Self-affirmation—creates a focus on our core values and other qualities that reasserts our sense of self and integrity despite the dissonance.
Denial of responsibility—allows us to distance ourselves as a causal agent in the dissonance.
Adding consonant cognitions—often by seeking out new information that supports our position (e.g., “this isn’t procrastination”; “I need more information before I can do anything on this project”).
Making downward counterfactuals—“it could have been worse”—so we don’t learn anything, we just feel better in the short term.
Changing behavior—to better align with our beliefs and values. This means that we would act instead of procrastinating, although changing one’s behavior requires effort and is often not the most convenient way to reduce dissonance.

We are quite expert at employing these strategies to keep buoyant day-to-day. We manufacture our own happiness. It is part of our coping mechanisms.

That said, not all coping mechanisms are adaptive. Quite consistently, research has demonstrated that techniques like distraction, forgetting, trivialization, and denial of responsibility are emotion-focused strategies that are not nearly as effective in the long term as planful problem-solving strategies. Yes, we have to take care of our emotions, but this cannot be where the coping stops. If it is, that is just another instance of giving in to feel good, and we will pay in the long run if this is our dominant short-term strategy.

THE MYTH OF THE AROUSAL PROCRASTINATOR

We often hear this: “I work better under pressure.” This thinking reflects a sensation seeker of sorts, someone who thrives on pressure. The thing is, our research has shown that this is a myth, at least for the majority of people. Sensation seeking is not related to procrastination, and time pressure typically results in more errors. Although many people use the excuse that they work better under pressure to explain their needless task delay, it clearly falls into the category above as an example of a rationalization for the dissonance we feel when we fail to act when intended.

Perhaps a more accurate way to rephrase this oft-heard expression is that “we only work under pressure.” Why? Most probably because of the mistaken belief, presented in Chapter 4, that our motivational state must match the task at hand. When we do not feel motivated to work on a task, we put it off until finally the external time pressure to do the task motivates action (typically so late that a poorer overall performance is the result).

STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE

I have briefly summarized a number of important biases in our thinking that can get us in trouble. On the one hand, we tend to be overly optimistic about the future and minimize the importance of more distant goals. On the other hand, when it finally comes down to doing something, we prefer tomorrow over today and make excuses about not working to make ourselves feel better. Given these psychological processes, change here is not a simple thing, but it is possible.

Knowledge is power. Recognizing that it is human nature to have these biases, and more important, identifying specifically what we tend to do can be the beginning of change. For example, if we typically say something like “Ah, it’s not that important” (trivialization of the goal) or “There’s lots of time yet, so I’d prefer to do it tomorrow” (planning fallacy and intransitive preferences), we can learn to make these “flags,” or signals for change.

By flag or signal, I mean that as soon as we say something like “There’s lots of time, I can do this later,” it acts as a trigger or stimulus for a new response. Remember the earlier example of this as an implementation intention? IF we say “Ah, it’s not that important,” THEN we stop and remind ourselves that this is a form of self-deception, a bias in our thinking, and we just get started on the task instead.

This form of implementation intention puts a cue in the situation (even in our thinking) to help us break a habit. The thought becomes the stimulus for a different response. We break our habitual way of responding. We begin to break that pernicious procrastination habit.

The takeaway for this chapter in terms of what you might do now is to use the space below (or a separate sheet of paper or your computer) to list the things that you commonly say or do to justify your procrastination. You may need to compile this list over the next few days or weeks. The key thing is to learn to recognize how you are reasoning and rationalizing the voluntary, unnecessary delays in your life. Each of these statements can become your own flags to signal a new response.

My typical excuses for rationalizing a needless delay are:

If these are your typical rationalizations or excuses for needless task delay, what will your new response be?

In the next chapter, you will see that I think the important step is “just get started.” So my standard implementation intention is “IF I say something to myself like ‘Oh, I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow,’ I will catch myself in this self-deception and add “THEN I will just get started on the task” instead.

It works. You’d be surprised. In the next chapter, I explain why.