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What’s the Most Important Thing We Need to Know about Procrastination?

I won’t give in to feel good. Feeling good now comes at a cost.

MARTIN SAID THAT HE would work on the report this morning. That was yesterday, and it felt good to put that awful task off until tomorrow. Now he is facing the task and he feels awful. He is anxious and frustrated. He really dislikes this report. Feeling a whole range of negative emotions, he decides to work on some other, less important stuff instead. His mood lifts as he pushes the report aside for another day.

Issue

As the work of Roy Baumeister and Diane Tice (Florida State University) has clearly shown, procrastination is a form of self-regulation failure. We fail to regulate our behavior to achieve our own goals. We make an intention to act, but we do not use the self-control necessary to act when intended. This is the voluntary nature of the delay that I stressed in the first chapter that characterizes procrastination. We may voluntarily delay our action because we are unable or unwilling to self-regulate our behavior to act now.

There are many types of self-regulation problems, including problem gambling, overeating, reckless spending, and drinking too much. Procrastination is best understood as a problem like these—a problem with our self-regulation.

Why do we fail to self-regulate? Although there are many factors that contribute to this, the most important thing to understand is that we “give in to feel good.” That is, we want to feel good now and we will do whatever it takes for immediate mood repair, usually at the expense of long-term goals.

When we give in to feel good, we give in to impulsive urges. These urges can take many forms. We might gamble, shop, or eat more than we need, ingest mood-altering substances, or procrastinate—all in an effort to avoid negative emotions. Of course, my focus is on how we use procrastination—needless task delay—to give in to feel good.

When facing a task we intend to do but do not want to, we feel a number of possible negative emotions. We may feel frustrated, angry, bored, resentful, depressed, anxious, or guilty. These emotions may be some of the emotions that you listed in your table at the end of Chapter 1. Generally, we call this task aversiveness. Aversive tasks are things that we all want to put off. They make us feel bad. We do not like doing these tasks.

Who really wants to do an aversive task? No one. However, the task may be necessary for us to reach a desired goal. We may not want to do the task, but we need to do it.

The key issue is that for chronic procrastinators, short-term mood repair takes precedence. Chronic procrastinators want to eliminate the negative mood or emotions now, so they give in to feel good. They give in to the impulse to put off the task until another time. Now, not faced with the task, they feel better.

If you find that you are chronically procrastinating, it may well be that you are running away from negative feelings by putting off your tasks. Of course, this is temporarily rewarding. The moment we put off the task until tomorrow, we feel relief from the negative emotions. And, as you may have learned in a basic psychology course, behaviors that are rewarded get repeated. We are reinforcing our procrastination, and it becomes a problem.

STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE

The issue of short-term mood repair in favor of long-term goal pursuit is a crucial one when it comes to addressing our procrastination. It is important to recognize that giving in to feel good is at the heart of self-regulation failure, and it is important to develop strategies for change.

I want to begin with the most basic, and perhaps least palatable, strategy that I can think of in relation to giving in to feel good. That is, when faced with a task where our natural inclination is to say, “I’ll do this later” or “I’ll feel more like this tomorrow,” we need to stop and recognize that we are saying this in order to avoid the negative emotions we are feeling right now.

Knowledge is power in this regard. First and foremost, we need to recognize that this task makes us feel awful and what we are trying to do is to run away from these feelings. Of course, this takes a certain amount of emotional intelligence. This type of intelligence is not related to the size of our vocabulary or the ability to do arithmetic. Emotional intelligence is the ability to effectively identify and utilize emotions to guide behavior. Recent research has shown that lower emotional intelligence is related to more procrastination, but the good news is that we can increase our emotional intelligence. We can learn to more effectively perceive, understand, and regulate our emotions. This is very important in terms of more effective self-control.

In any case, based on what I know about procrastination, it seems clear that most people who procrastinate are emotionally aware enough to recognize that some tasks make them feel awful and that they are procrastinating to escape these emotions. What may require further focus and strengthening is the ability to regulate emotions, or at least some commitment not to take the path of least resistance—that is, not to give in to feel good.

What we really need to do is to come to terms with our negative feelings about a task. We need to find a way to cope with these negative feelings so that we can continue to pursue our intended goal. The question is, how?

While I was writing this book, Ivy, a podcast listener, wrote to me to say that she had developed some of her own mantras related to the iProcrastinate Podcasts. Here’s what she developed on this topic:

“Don’t give in to feel good, step on up to what should.”

I like this type of mantra or slogan, as you know. It can help us focus more on changing our procrastination habit. Ivy’s mantra could easily replace the one I offered at the beginning of this chapter.

This tough strategy is immediately effective as a first step. We have to “suck it up,” as they say. Yes, we are feeling awful about the task at hand. We would rather run away, give in to feel good. However, the first step at the moment of procrastination is to stay put. If you turn away in an effort to make yourself feel better, it’s over.

Certainly, staying put and dealing with these initial negative emotions is not the whole solution, but it is an absolutely necessary first step.

The key to success with this emotional experience is to be prepared. I will explain just why I am urging you to prepare in a certain way later. For now, I just want you to think about the following as your first step in an antiprocrastination strategy:

THINK: IF I feel negative emotions when I face the task at hand, THEN I will stay put and not stop, put off a task, or run away.

This “if . . . then” format of an intention has been labeled an implementation intention by Peter Gollwitzer (New York University). I will have more to say about implementation intentions in a later chapter. At the moment, the key thing is that you need to internalize this implementation intention in order to take a first step related to the negative emotions that are associated with procrastination.

Although I think most of us have to recognize that we might very well have to just experience the first moments of these negative emotions, we do not simply have to take a tough-guy approach and “suck it up” to succeed. There is another, gentler approach we can take.

Essentially, it comes down to choosing the emotions on which we will focus. For example, although the dominant emotion at the moment may be fear—we may have fear—the key thing is that we do not have to be our fear. We can acknowledge this fear but choose to continue to pursue our goals working from some other part of our self. Parker Palmer, one of my favorite educational writers, speaks of this as working from some other part of our “inner landscape.” Our inner landscape, the psychology of self, is more than the fear we may be experiencing. It also includes our curiosity, our desire to succeed, and another very strong emotion, our interest.

If we choose to acknowledge our fear but find “the courage to be” in spite of this fear, to work from another part of our inner landscape, we may more successfully stay put and stay on task. We will not give in to feel good. We will have made the first step toward beating procrastination.

Of course, we are quite expert at finding reasons not to persist like this. In the face of negative emotions, we might even try to justify why we want to run away. We will not acknowledge our fear or frustration. We might simply think, “I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.” We probably won’t. I think we all know this deep down. This is part of the strangely puzzling nature of procrastination. We have become our own worst enemy, and we even know how to lie to ourselves.

Emotionally, we are giving in to feel good while justifying this choice by thinking, “I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.” No, we won’t! In the next chapter, I explain why.