TIP 39
PROCRASTINATE WITH PURPOSE
“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” Under the influence of this pestilent morality, I am forever letting tomorrow’s work slop backwards into today’s and doing painfully and nervously today what I could do quickly and easily tomorrow.
Procrastination has an undeservedly bad reputation. Many people consider procrastination one of their weaknesses, and they beat themselves up and feel terrible about how much they procrastinate. Perhaps they have it all wrong. What if procrastination was not the bad guy, but the good guy? What if your procrastination simply showed you the way to living your dreams and reaching your true goals? We don’t usually hear it presented this way.
Let’s take a moment to distinguish the various types of procrastination—we have a lot lumped into one big fat category. There are excellent and valid reasons to procrastinate, and once you discover the real reason you are procrastinating, you’ll see what needs to be done and start taking action. Procrastination is a lot more complicated than it first appears. Let’s begin with the basic premise that procrastinating is a very good thing.
Why do you procrastinate? There are seven likely reasons, given below.
1. You procrastinate because you don’t like the task, job, or duty, so you put it off as long as possible.
I’m a firm believer that if you don’t like doing something, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. How the heck are you going to have a great life if you are doing all manner of tasks you don’t enjoy? Exactly.
Suppose you hate doing expense reports so you wait until you hit the limit on your company credit card before you start collecting the receipts and filling in the report so you can get reimbursed. Instead of wasting all that mental energy and getting into potentially awkward situations with clients, you just need to admit that you hate doing this task and delegate it to someone else. Train your assistant to do it, or if you don’t have an assistant, pay a bookkeeper to do it for you. It is worth it. There, that one’s handled. What other ugly tasks are you putting off? Most of the time, you shouldn’t be spending your precious time doing that task anyway so delegate it or automate it.
You can also try isolating the part of the project you don’t like and delegating or automating that. A client hated doing her weekly activity report. She realized what she hated about it was going back and thinking of all the things she did during the week. She couldn’t delegate that because she had to collect her own thoughts. So she decided to take a few minutes at the end of the day to record her accomplishments. Then she gave the audio recording to her assistant to transcribe and edited the memo in about five minutes. What a relief!
On the home front, a client realized that he procrastinated with the housecleaning because he didn’t like dusting. He decided to hire a housekeeper just to dust because he didn’t mind doing the other stuff. This was an affordable solution for him, and he was happy.
Suppose you hate leading meetings and as a sales manager you are expected to have one every week, but you keep postponing it. Perhaps your team is self-reliant and doesn’t really need a weekly meeting so it is just a waste of everyone’s time anyway. Or try delegating it to someone else. Who says the manager always has to be the one leading the meetings? One sales manager I coached ended up delegating the leading of the sales meetings to a different salesperson each week. It turned out to be a highly effective technique, and everyone began to take more responsibility for the success of the team. Very few managerial tasks can’t be delegated, so start training your team to do every aspect of your job. What if you don’t have a team and you have an icky task to do? Try swapping with a colleague. I’ll fill out the expense reports if you calculate the sales figures. Or recommend to your boss that the really nasty jobs no one likes should be rotated regularly. That way one person isn’t stuck doing the dirty work all the time, and the manager ends up with a team of people who are thoroughly cross-trained. A win-win for everyone.
Our client Louise realized that it wasn’t any specific task in her work that she disliked, it was the entire job. Now she understood why she was hitting the snooze alarm every single day again and again—she was procrastinating about going to work! She hired one of the coaches in my company to help her figure out what her real passions in life were and come up with a plan to make the transition smoothly. If you don’t like your entire job, then it is time to get a new one. Start with my book, Coach Yourself to a New Career for a specific action plan to identify the work you’d love to do.
2. You procrastinate because you don’t know how to handle something.
A sticky issue arises at work, and you aren’t sure how to handle it, so you don’t and just hope it goes away. You tell your boss or whoever may be involved that you need some time to think about it. Sometimes this head-in-the-sand approach actually works, and the issue resolves itself. But sometimes you have to get involved, but giving yourself a night to sleep on it may produce the solution you were looking for. Or perhaps you need some additional information before you can really make the best decision. Postponing the decision will give you the time to think about what is missing for you to make the decision. Many times the information will just present itself out of the blue, and then you’ll be able to proceed. Or maybe you are procrastinating out of ignorance. You may need more training in order to handle something, in which case make the request of your manager. Or perhaps you just need to do a little more research and check how someone else handled it or get some advice from your boss on how to deal with it.
One client who ran a printing business was procrastinating about learning how to work his computer. He didn’t even know how to plug it in, but he knew that the computer would improve his effectiveness in the business. He was procrastinating out of ignorance. I recommended that he hire a specialist to come over and help him set up his computer and show him how to plug it in and use it. He also signed up for a basic computer class at a local business school.
Another client was procrastinating with the bookkeeping for her business. She had an entire year’s worth of figures to enter and dreaded the task. She had purchased an accounting software program a year ago but hadn’t even removed the plastic wrapper. She had no clue how to set up the program. I referred her to a bookkeeper who specialized in that program and who came right to her home office, set up her program, entered all her data, and taught her how to use the program. That solved that.
3. You procrastinate because you can’t find the time.
Perhaps it isn’t that you hate the task, and it isn’t that you don’t know how to handle it, but you just can’t seem to find the time. The project looks overwhelming, and you don’t know where or how to get started.
One client, a professional trainer and speaker, had wanted to write a book for years but just couldn’t seem to find the time. He knew a book would help him take his speaking business to the next level and would generate more income. He had always wanted to write a book, so it wasn’t that he didn’t want to do it. He even knew what he wanted to write and had collected a number of ideas. His problem was getting started and getting the momentum. The overwhelming size of the task left him at a complete standstill. The truth of the matter was that he hadn’t carved out the space and time in his life to write a book.
First, I got him clearing off his desk, where he was buried in mounds of paper. Then, we started carving out blocks of time reserved for writing. He decided that the best time for him was for the first three hours before lunch. We set a goal of just writing for those hours and not worrying about the end result. His schedule was erratic, but when he wasn’t booked to lead a training seminar, he used those hours to write. Six months later he had already completed half his book.
4. You procrastinate because you don’t really want to do what you said you want to do.
This is called “having the wrong goal in the first place,” or if not the wrong goal, the wrong strategy. Take losing weight—why would anyone want to restrict calories and suffer and do all the horrible things they must do to lose weight? Just mentioning the goal, “lose weight and get in shape,” depresses most people. They are procrastinating because they don’t really want to do it. They just think they should. This goes back to dumping the old goals and getting rid of the “shoulds” (Tip 4).
5. You procrastinate because you are stuck and need a boost to get yourself going and create a little momentum.
Once you get started, you find the energy to do the whole job. One client did this with a remodeling project at home. He wanted to replace the light fixture in his dining room and knew that if he did that, he’d have to repair and repaint the ceiling as well. This is a case of the task seeming monumental. He decided he would just go to the store and buy the supplies. He did that, and then he decided, well, I’ll just remove the old light fixture. He did that and thought, well, I’ll just start with the taping. He did that and thought, well, I might as well do the replastering so it will have time to dry. He did that and thought, I might as well just try a coat of paint and see if I like the color. Before you know it, he had talked himself into completing the entire project one little step at a time. Give yourself permission to do just one tiny piece of the project and quit. More often than not, you’ll do a whole bunch more because of the natural momentum you have already created.
On the work front, if you have a big project you’ve been postponing, promise yourself that you’ll work on it for just 15 minutes and then stop. You might find that after 15 minutes, you don’t want to stop because you’ve created momentum. Or if it is a truly unpleasant task, then you should get it out of the way first thing when you are fresh in the morning and stop after 15 minutes. If you do the unpleasant tasks first, the rest of the day will be easier.
6. You procrastinate because you need time to mull things over.
This is what I call “creative procrastination.” If you are an artist, writer, or painter, or perhaps are just trying to think through some thorny work problem, you may find yourself procrastinating. This is not only appropriate, but necessary. You may find yourself doing the ironing or mowing the lawn, or some other menial task you normally abhor because it suddenly looks more appealing than your current project. This is just fine. You need the time to get your thoughts together before you embark. At some point, you will be ready and will start to paint or write, and everything will pour forth effortlessly.
A computer consultant friend was helping me straighten out a problem I was having with my database, and he couldn’t figure it out. After scratching our heads in frustration for a while, I got fed up and said, “Let’s go to the movies and forget about it.” Sure enough, in the middle of the movie, he prods me with his elbow and has a big grin on his face—the solution had come to him. After the movie, he came back to my office and fixed the whole thing in five minutes. So, while going to the movies might look like procrastination or slacking off, your brain is still ticking away at the problem. Of course, you can’t sneak out to go to the movies at work, but you could take a walk around the block for some fresh air.
7. You procrastinate because you are afraid.
If you don’t start, you can’t fail. True, but then you’ll have to live with the rankling thought that you could have been a contender. Far better to do it, fail and then put the thing to rest once and for all than it is to live your life wondering if you could have been a success if only things had turned out differently. Assess the risks carefully, and then manage the risks so that you have plenty of room to experiment and plenty of room to fail at least a few times. There is also the fear of success. Some people worry that they will succeed and that then their friends won’t love them, or some such thing. Take a good hard look at your beliefs in this case. True friends will be genuinely happy for you.
You now have seven reasons why procrastinating is a very good thing if you do it with purpose. Make a list of all the things you are procrastinating about and figure out why—then you will have the solution.