A common story…
Lena is a sociology student and has been given 2 months ago an assignment to produce a paper. Deadline is tomorrow, she has spent the past seven days sitting in front of her computer with a pile of books on her desk. Yet, the page is blank. Her internet browser is opened with many tabs facebook, twitter, pinterest. She is now texting a friend and refreshing her emails. Four hours passed, it is 12.30 and she is starting to panic now. She is calling a university mate who is at the final editing stage. She gets more panicky. As she is staring at her blank page, she grabs chocolate bars, then smokes two cigarettes and ends up starting to type with a pain in the stomach. Lena will spend the next 24 hours reading and typing through tears and sweat to deliver the assignment on time. She admits that its quality is very poor which confirms her opinion that she is not good enough anyways. Lena clearly put off working on her assignment until she had no other option than doing it.
Procrastination is the repeated deliberate decision to accomplish a task “later”. This comes often with doing something else funnier than the initial task. It affects everybody and comes into various forms in everyday life – paying bills, filling the tax declaration, cleaning the house etc…
What happens when we procrastinate?
Lena experiences an internal conflict and a dilemma: she can either do something daunting – her assignment – or doing something immediately rewarding and simple – anything else. A part of her wants to start working on the assignment while another part wants immediate gratification. Lena chooses pleasure and simplicity, like most of people.
Why are do people procrastinate?
There are all sorts of reasons why people procrastinate. Here are the most common:
Inefficient time-management
We plan to accomplish many things in a single day and realise that we underestimated the amount of time necessary to accomplish our tasks.
Overwhelmed by the task
Sometimes we have no idea where to start the action so we imagine that it is going to be very complicated and long. For instance moving house can be overwhelming. As we accumulated objects, documents and furniture, we cannot always see clearly where to start.
Lack of motivation and boredom
Sometimes, we do not see the added value in doing the task. Why should I spend a whole morning at the city hall to get my resident card ?
Lack of confidence
We put the task off because we question our capacity to accomplish it. We may be afraid of the consequences, we may fear to receive criticism from our colleagues or to be laughed at.
Lack of confidence paralyses us in our ability to take action, so we avoid it by distracting ourselves with games on the phone or by meeting with friends. The avoidance has to end at some stage and we enter, like Sara, in a state of panic that leads us to take action in a poor emotional state leading us to be very unsatisfied with ourselves. This is a real vicious circle where the lack of confidence is being reinforced.
Perfectionnism
The Perfectionnist never finishes the task because he/she needs to be perfect. Because of that, he/she is under a very high pressure that causes stress. He may wait the last moment to start working and justifies the imperfection of his work by the lack of time – due to his constant delaying. The stress factor is combined with the very high expectation level of the outcome.
What is the cost of procrastination ?
Sometimes the cost of procrastination is very high. People do not manage to change job because they delay the application process, people may lose a lot of money with lateness fees by not paying their bills on time. Yet, it is possible to control procrastination and find a way to get things done.
Share with us why you tend to procrastinate and what it has cost you.
Very interesting article Yayi!
Like many people, I also procrastinate, using all sorts of excuses. Now I have devided to correct it, so I wash dishes imediately, jump out of bed in the morning and so on.
I still need to pay my bills in time though 🙂
Thank you Iulia for your comment!
Can you share with us how you managed to change this behaviour?
The bills thing is very interesting 🙂 Do you systematically pay your bills late or are there situations where you pay them immediately?