In the 1970s, only about five percent of Americans admitted to regularly procrastinating. Today, it’s a whopping 26 percent.
Few of us are strangers to the lingering to-do list item – typically a difficult or complex activity – that we just can’t seem to get motivated for today. Yet when tomorrow comes around, we often come to the same conclusion again, and again. The question, then, is: How can we recalibrate – or just plain trick – our psyches and our selves into mustering up the right mixture of self-discipline and external motivators to take action sooner rather than later?
Here are a few suggestions for overcoming procrastination:
1. View deadlines as a way to create a window of opportunity.
The default take on deadlines is typically to consider them to be cumbersome and stressful. Yet, from another perspective, a deadline can be viewed as a huge benefit to any project. Without the urgency of a hard deadline pushing a project to completion, it’s easy for you, your team, or your client to lose focus. We’ve all worked on agonizing projects where the timeline just bleeds on and on, merely because the flexibility is there.
As illustrator Christoph Niemann pointed out in a 99U interview, deadlines can actually help us by creating a fixed window of opportunity that requires us to be focused, pragmatic, and decisive:
In advertising, and also editorial, when people have two days, the briefing is much better, and the discussion is much better. It’s not that people just sign off on anything because they’re in a hurry. They’re just really looking at what they have, and trying to make the best product, and get it done.
The problem is when people have too much time on their hands, because eventually everybody’s going to question, “Why did you make it red, not green?” and “Could we try it upside-down, or left to right?” and then at some point it becomes arbitrary.
If the anxiety is about the deadline, then the energy really focuses on the result. If there is not anxiety about a deadline, all of the anxiety goes right to the creative part.
2. Create accountability (and fear!).
In the documentary Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, we see the late night talk show host struggling with idleness and unemployment after he’s booted from NBC. To get his groove back, O’Brien decides to put together a tour across America. When tickets go on sale, the team is stressed: No one knows what will happen. When it sells out in a matter of hours, they’re thrilled. But after the flush of success wears off, O’Brien has his “Oh, no!” realization: Now he has to actually figure out what he’s going to do.
“Nothing motivates you to figure out what your show is like selling a bunch of tickets,” O’Brien explains.
While most of us may not have the adoring audience that Conan O’Brien does, we can all muster up someone to hold us accountable: Whether it’s declaring your intentions publicly to your team of colleagues, taking on a paid assignment you have to deliver, or just telling a family member or friend who’s willing to nag you.
No one wants to disappoint an expectant audience. By creating one, you motivate yourself.
3. Break the project down into smaller concrete tasks.
It turns out that the manner in which a task is presented to someone – or the way in which you present it to your brain – has a significant impact on how motivated you will be to take action. A study led by researcher Sean McCrea at the University of Konstanz in Germany recently found that people are much more likely to tackle a concrete task than an abstract task. Here’s a recap from The Economist:
Dr McCrea and his colleagues conducted three separate studies. First they recruited 34 students who were offered €2.50 ($3.30) for completing a questionnaire within the subsequent three weeks. Half of the students were then sent an email asking them to write a couple of sentences on how they might go about various activities, such as opening a bank account or keeping a diary. The others were asked to write about why someone might want to open a bank account or keep a diary.For their second study, Dr McCrea and his colleagues recruited 50 students, who were offered the same sums and timespans as the first lot. Half of these students were asked to provide examples of members of a group, for example, naming any type of bird. The task was inverted for the other students, who were asked to name a category to which birds belong.…
Those who were presented with concrete tasks and information responded more promptly than did those who were asked to think in an abstract way. Moreover, almost all the students who had been prompted to think in concrete terms completed their tasks by the deadline while up to 56 percent of students asked to think in abstract terms failed to respond at all.
It seems to me like the difference between being handed a map versus following the step-by-step instructions of a GPS device. Not everyone can read a map, but everyone can follow the directions. By breaking your project down into smaller, well-described tasks, the way forward becomes clear and it’s easy to take action.
4. Work on the project a little bit each day.
Fred Wilson wrote a nice post about why working on a problem over time is superior to churning something out just before a deadline. Here’s the advice his father shared with Fred when he got caught procrastinating:
He explained that I should start working on a project as soon as it was assigned. An hour or so would do fine, he told me. He told me to come back to the project every day for at least a little bit and make progress on it slowly over time. I asked him why that was better than cramming at the very end (as I was doing during the conversation).
He explained that once your brain starts working on a problem, it doesn’t stop. If you get your mind wrapped around a problem with a fair bit of time left to solve it, the brain will solve the problem subconsciously over time and one day you’ll sit down to do some more work on it and the answer will be right in front of you.
Most of our greatest insights – those fabled “A-ha!” moments – arrive when we least expect them. To use computer terms, they come when our brains are processing problems “in the background” of our consciousness – while we’re running, or showering, or sleeping. If we start projects at the 11th hour and cram, cram, cram till deadline, there’s no allowance for the vital “downtime” that fuels our best creative insights.
This was originally published on 99u.com.
Illustration credit: Oscar Ramos Orozco
Jocelyn K. Glei is the director and editor-in-chief of 99U.