Why does everybody procrastinate?
Do you remember what John Malkovich used to repeat as Vicomte de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons?
"It's beyond my control."
Procrastination can also be mostly beyond our control. It all comes down to how the human brain works and the domination of the limbic system above the prefrontal cortex (source), which first tells you to avoid unpleasant situations (like challenging tasks at work) and second motivates you to make things happen.
Furthermore, procrastination can result from many of the fears we face, and it has nothing to do with laziness.
- You can postpone addressing the problem because you fear you won’t succeed anyway. That happens when you are dealing with imposter syndrome or are being assigned tasks that are completely new for you or you consider beyond your actual level of expertise.
- You can also associate your present task with unpleasant events from the past. It can be some recent failure in a similar case or a conflict with a particular teammate - it makes your limbic system scream flee.
How do we deal with procrastination - pitfalls of busywork
When the limbic system wins the battle in the brain, and you fall prey to procrastination in the workplace, you can’t just give up working altogether. You need to do something until five pm. That’s when busywork comes in handy. By busywork, we mean everything people do to keep themselves looking busy, which is unproductive and doesn’t help you achieve your work-related goals. For example, cleaning your desk, organizing your files - paper or digital - shredding papers, checking mail, Slack and Jira. The biggest problem with busy work is its purely wasteful character. No one feels good about themselves when spending too much of their precious time busy working - especially when procrastinating important responsibilities.
How can you deal with procrastination?
As we have mentioned before, we can't escape procrastination entirely. Here are our tips:
- Although you should act towards working deeply and maximize focus time (more about that here), picking what’s most important, sometimes focusing on real work that’s not a top priority, is a welcomed warm-up. By real work, we understand somehow productive activities, and you have to execute them anyway. A nice compromise between the limbic and prefrontal cortex might be doing research for your task, especially if it’s new to you. Preparing a solid plan for tasks you have to do eventually can also be useful and productive.
- Don’t rely on your ability to perform under pressure. Although you may believe you thrive when placed against the wall, your output is likely to be worse. It’s easier to make mistakes, from harmless typos to bugs in code or contracts that may have really bad consequences.
- Try imagining yourself after executing a task you are currently procrastinating on. You would probably feel relieved, elated, and quite good about yourself.
Here at exec.ninja, we also notice some signs of procrastination. What is especially painful is that some of our ninjas register to the page without finishing the process of choosing and prioritizing their own rules. This way, they lose the opportunity to use what’s best in exec.ninja—smart features to get the most out of your time.