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Why We Won’t Feel Like It Tomorrow

I won’t feel more like doing it tomorrow.

TO INTRODUCE THIS CHAPTER, I want to share a story I received from a reader of my Psychology Today blog. It clearly illustrates the problem of tomorrow. This reader said that the issue of feeling more like it tomorrow was reminiscent of a sign in a butcher’s shop window in his grandparents’ village in Poland.

Translated into English, the sign read: “Today you pay and tomorrow you get it for free.”

When the customers would come tomorrow for their free goods, the butcher would say, “Read the sign: Today you pay, tomorrow it’s free.” As this reader noted, it is pretty much that way with procrastination. The tomorrow in which “I’ll really feel like it” is always a day away. It never becomes today.

Issue

The story above captures the basic issue with procrastination: I’ll do it tomorrow. In fact, the Latin roots of the word procrastination mean “to put forward to tomorrow.” Yet, as the butcher explained with his sign, that tomorrow never really comes.

As with the butcher’s sign that implied that customers would get free goods tomorrow, our thinking plays a trick, too. We think, “I’ll feel more like it tomorrow.” What we need to understand, so as not to be tricked like the butcher’s customers, is why this is not true. We will not feel more like it tomorrow.

Research, particularly studies by Dan Gilbert (Harvard University) and Tim Wilson (University of Virginia), indicates that we are not very good forecasters. No, I don’t mean weather forecasters. Meteorologists seem to be better at forecasting the weather (at least in the short term) than we are at forecasting our own mood in the future. Forecasting our future mood is known as affective forecasting.

The main idea behind affective forecasting is that we have a bias when we predict future mood (affective) states in relation to positive or negative events. For example, a couple of years after winning a lottery, the winners were about as happy as they were before their win, despite the general affective forecast that they would be much happier if only they could win the lottery. This is also true of people who have suffered debilitating accidents. A few years after the accident, despite long-term effects such as paralysis, accident victims were about as happy as they were before this life-changing event—again, despite the general affective forecast that they would be much unhappier.

Two concepts are used to explain these peculiar findings: focalism and presentism. Focalism is the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings in the future. Presentism, as you might guess, addresses the fact that we put too much emphasis on the present in our prediction of the future. Taken together, this means that we focus on our current situation and how we feel now without enough consideration about the future situation, what might happen and how we might feel then (or have in similar situations in the past).

Here are some common experiences of this: If we go grocery shopping just after a meal, we will generally underestimate how much we will eat in the week ahead and buy less. Addicts who have just ingested their drug of choice will underestimate how much they will crave the drug later. Irrationally, we think how we are feeling now is how we will feel later. The most astonishing thing about this is that it is true for simple things like current and future hunger states.

HOW IS THIS RELATED TO PROCRASTINATION?

We need to consider what this human bias in affective forecasting means to our understanding of procrastination. By this point, the argument may be apparent. In making an intention for future action, we focus on our current affective state with the mistaken assumption that our affective state at the point we expect to act on our intention will be the same as it is now.

The real catch here is that when we intend a future action, our affective state is often particularly positive. Why? There are two reasons.

First, because we are putting off action until the future, we get the reward that we discussed with giving in to feel good. We feel good now that the intention is for future action. At the very least, we feel relief that we are not on the hook to act now.

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Second, we are imagining ourselves engaged in some future action that we perceive will make us happy. This is pleasant in and of itself. Health behaviors are good examples here. If we intend to go for a run tomorrow, we feel good about ourselves for making such a proactive health-related intention. Good for us! Our current affective state is positive, and we incorrectly forecast that our affective state tomorrow at the intended time of the run will be the same.

There is nothing like a righteous intention now for action later to make us feel good. “I’ll run tomorrow.” “I’ll do that assignment tomorrow.” “I’ll write that report later.” Happiness now, pay later (or not, as the case may be). Unless we can get better at “mental time traveling,” where we can set intentions with clearer knowledge about how we will feel about taking action in the future, we will continue to be predictably irrational with our procrastination.

STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE

We need a two-pronged approach to increase the likelihood that we will act on our intentions. One strategy is “time travel.” The other is to expect to be wrong and deal with it.

STRATEGY #1—Time Travel

As numerous psychologists who study affective forecasting have advocated, we need to use mental images of the future more often and more accurately. We need to represent the future as though it were happening in the present. For example, a person who is procrastinating on saving for retirement might imagine as vividly as possible living on his or her potential retirement savings. To make a future image like this more concrete and accurate, it may be important to set out some numbers for a budget and take into account the reality of the need for, and increasing expense of, health care in old age. This “time travel” can help make our predictions of the future more accurate and motivate us to take more appropriate action now.

Unfortunately, I am not that confident that this approach will work for many people. First, it is possible that we will put off this planning task itself, a form of second-order procrastination. Second, even if we do this task, the initial emotional response (e.g., fear) will most likely wear off quickly, and, more important, the fact that retirement is so far away may still result in our discounting its importance and delaying our savings further.

STRATEGY #2—Expect to Be Wrong and Deal with It

This second strategy is more effective, but you may think that is a hard-nosed approach. In this case, rather than trying to change what seems to be a deeply ingrained bias in human thinking by improving our affective forecasts, I think we should simply learn to expect to be wrong and go from there. We do this every day with respect to weather forecasts, and most recently we have been learning to do this with ridiculously inaccurate economic forecasts. Given our ability to cope with inaccurate meteorological and economic forecasts, I have confidence we can cope effectively with our poor affective forecasting. This strategy, by necessity, takes two forms or approaches.

APPROACH #1

When we are tempted to procrastinate on a current intention or task, thinking that we’ll feel more like it tomorrow, we need to stop and think, “No, that’s a problem with my forecasting. There is a good chance I won’t feel more like it tomorrow.” AND it is important to add the following:

“My current motivational state does not need to match my intention in order to act.”

This is a common misconception about goal pursuit: We believe that we have to actually feel like it. We don’t. And, with many of the tasks in our lives, we won’t feel like it . . . ever! The thing is, our motivational state does not need to match the intention. We can do something even if we do not feel like it. Parents spend a lot of time explaining this to their children.

Here is another example: Much as we might prefer a sunny day to go out for a run or a bike ride, we can put on rain gear and get outside. In fact, successful athletes do this every day. They are not “fair-weather trainers.” The weather does not have to match the activity. We can cope with what we get and still act as intended.

Similarly, acknowledging that our motivational state is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure action, we can simply remind ourselves of our personal goals (a form of self-affirmation) and “just get started.” Progress will fuel well-being and enhance goal attainment (more on this in Chapter 6).

APPROACH #2

When we set an intention to act tomorrow, and tomorrow comes, expect that you probably will not feel overly enthused to get started. Given that our intention was made yesterday (or much earlier) with the optimistic mood that comes with having a plan, we will probably feel less happy than we expected with the reality of the task now at hand (again, this is all part of our biased affective forecasting).

Now the thing to do is to remember that this is a transient mood and think through all of the issues raised with Approach #1, particularly how your motivational state does not need to match the task for you to get started right now.

This is “tough love” with oneself, I suppose. Certainly, many of us have heard this advice as we were growing up. It was couched in terms of “maturity” and the “responsibilities of adulthood.” These were often expressions of tough love, too. This was advice from adults in our lives who were trying to nurture fortitude and realism with respect to willpower.

In sum, the strategy I am advocating for dealing with our bias toward thinking we’ll feel more like it tomorrow is knowing that this is a common problem with being human. We are not very good at predicting how we will feel in the future. We are overly optimistic, and our optimism comes crashing down when tomorrow comes. When our mood sours, we end up where I started in the last chapter, giving in to feel good. We procrastinate.

The problem is pretty obvious, as is the solution: Let go of the misconception that our motivational state must match the task at hand. In fact, social psychologists have demonstrated that attitudes follow behaviors more than (or at least as much as) behaviors follow attitudes. When you start to act on your intention as intended, you will see your attitude and motivation change.

This gets me a little bit ahead of our story, however. For now, let’s keep the focus on the mantra for this chapter: “I won’t feel more like doing it tomorrow.”