Procrastination: Why Is It So Hard to Start?
Why did I choose this topic? Firstly, the name is challenging, and I’ve always struggled to pronounce the second “r.” Secondly, by writing an article about it, I finally decided to learn how to write and pronounce “procrastination” correctly.
I had been thinking about the article for a year already. Why am I publishing it right now? It turns out that my procrastination was influenced by fear, ignorance, concern about others’ opinions, and “lack of time.” These are just a few of the reasons or excuses that I would like to address.
What will you learn from this article?
- Why it’s challenging for us to start and complete our projects.
- What procrastination is in business and whether it can have a positive side.
- The origins of procrastination.
- How to combat procrastination in yourself and within a team.
In addition to the literature, mainly in the fields of psychology and personal development that I’ve read to create the article, I would like to share my experiences from ten years of working in marketing and five years in team management.
Positive and Negative Consequences of Procrastination
Procrastination has a bad reputation, but it is associated with both negative and positive outcomes. There are moments when it’s better to have the strategic thinking of a chess player rather than the quick moves of a tennis player.
Avoiding Hasty Decisions
One of the reasons for procrastination may be the avoidance of hasty decisions, waiting for a better idea, or offer, or “sleeping on the decision.” Quick decisions that initially seem great can end up colliding painfully with reality. For example, making a decision based on a book or a LinkedIn post that suggests launching a campaign in a market completely unfamiliar to us. Without the standard campaign preparation process, during which we can assess possibilities, costs, potential risks, and ways to mitigate them, we can waste time and money.
Managing Emotions
Emotions are another aspect to consider. Especially when it comes to optimization and making changes, trying to persuade others of your ideas can lead to stressful situations and sometimes misunderstandings. Before speaking too emotionally, you can postpone the conversation to another time, cool down, become a lotus flower, and only then, with a clear head, revisit the topic.
This also applies to job hunting, where a fantastic offer suddenly appears, but after a thorough review, it turns out not to be as advantageous as it seemed or simply doesn’t align with your current professional position.
Allowing Intuition to Shine
Procrastination can provide space for your intuition to work. Sometimes, when starting a project or working with a new client, a quiet voice in your head suggests holding back from taking action. This is not about magical thinking, hunches, or crystal ball readings, but rather a thoughtful approach, cooling off after the initial excitement and considering the situation rationally.
Financial Costs
However, procrastination mainly has negative consequences, although there are many shades of gray. By postponing tasks, you waste your time and money, reduce efficiency, and lose motivation because there are no results. It’s a vicious cycle. In such a situation, it’s difficult to relax because even though you might not be doing anything, you’re constantly aware that you should be doing something. This unfinished business weighs on you and doesn’t allow for peaceful sleep.
As the deadline approaches, you attempt to make up for lost time and work on autopilot, without reflection, instead of pausing, contemplating, and perhaps learning something new.
Another issue arises when procrastination affects teamwork and demotivates those who have better planned their tasks.
Why Do We Procrastinate?
Fear of Failure
Firstly, we procrastinate because we are afraid of not being able to complete a task, so we delay the potential failure and its consequences over time. This fear is often associated with uncertainty about the requirements: “I’m afraid I won’t meet your expectations because I don’t understand them.”
Ignorance
Secondly, we often simply don’t know what to do, how to approach it, and where to find a starting point. Finding this out seems intellectually too costly for us at the moment, so we don’t want to take it on.
For instance, when it comes to writing bachelor’s or master’s theses or articles I’ve worked on, I’ve observed a tendency where people faced with a challenging and uncomfortable task simply start executing it without considering a plan, the future reader, or the desired outcome. What hypothesis to pose, what to confirm, what to refute, and what literature to use? It’s similar to painting a picture; it’s worthwhile to first sketch what you intend to fill with colors. With a sketch and a vision of the result, you feel secure and know where you are headed.
Regular discussions about subsequent iterations and versions of the project provide a sense of progress and safety that you are moving in the right direction.
But what if you don’t know how to start? You can conduct research, use a ChatGPT, or ask people who have already done such work.
Fear of Evaluation
Another very common cause of procrastination is the fear of evaluation and the opinions of others. In my work with individuals at various organizational levels, there has often been an issue with public speaking, writing articles, or social media posts. People I worked with claimed they had too little knowledge (despite being experts), had nothing interesting to say, and couldn’t write or speak fluently. However, these were often just excuses, and the real reason was the fear of evaluation.
If I were overly concerned about someone writing that I talk nonsense in the podcast and write nonsense in the blog, that no one will be interested in the topic, or that I don’t speak perfectly and there are signs of thinking too often, I would have to stop recording podcasts or writing articles.
Excellence and proficiency in a particular field are achieved through repetition of a particular activity, so I record podcasts with the assumption that the first dozen episodes will be “good enough” rather than “perfect.” That’s why I write articles, knowing that there’s room for improvement in each of them.
I record and write with the hope that if I can reach at least two people who say, “Okay, I was able to figure out the procrastination issue thanks to you and somewhat mitigate the problem in my team,” it will already be a success for me.
The bar is worth setting at a point where it’s good enough to show the work to the world, around 70%, as the remaining 30% of refinement will come with time.
However, what happens if someone disagrees with us in the comments? Even better! In social media, posts that spark discussion and different opinions are the most effective and reach a larger audience. Moreover, expressing one’s opinion courteously is an invitation to consider another viewpoint. This helps us grow and change our minds.
To speak publicly, we need a healthy dose of self-assurance and openness to the idea that we might be wrong or make a mistake — something that happens to everyone. It’s also important to remember that we are our own harshest critics.
Laziness and Excuses vs. Procrastination
Another aspect from which procrastination arises is common laziness and the search for excuses. Who hasn’t been in a situation where they had something to do, write, or prepare for work, but ultimately ended up cleaning windows or tidying up the basement? The question to ask is, to what extent are we able to catch ourselves and say, “Okay, I’m looking for excuses, so maybe I’ll deal with what I was supposed to do, and then I’ll clean the windows and tidy up, rather than the other way around.” Laziness and excuses are often associated with “lack of time.”
For me, however, “lack of time” is often just an excuse, and on the other hand, the task I’m avoiding has too low a priority for me. We don’t explain to ourselves that we don’t have time to brush our teeth in the evening. We don’t explain to ourselves that we don’t have time to have lunch. If that happens, it’s pathological behavior and requires consideration of what our priorities are. However, eating and sleep are our basic needs.
If we place hygiene, eating, and sleep high on our list of priorities, then if podcasting or writing articles, or even leaving aside marketing or business but if personal development is important to us, we need to plan when and where we’ll tackle it.
I had such a moment last year when I was teaching at the university, traveling back and forth from one city to another, and had additional projects. It was easy for me at that time not to read anything but work-related books, which, of course, drained me because I was not only working from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. to meet my full-time job and university preparation, and make up for time, but also only reading developmental books related to work, which was again an intellectual effort. At some point, I got disgusted with reading altogether. I also removed playing the piano from my priorities, even though it was very soothing for me. But I explained to myself that I didn’t have time for it, I had to work.
Such a work mode, focusing everything around work, led to a point where I was burned out, exhausted, and couldn’t work effectively. I couldn’t deliver the quality of work I could, when, for instance, I devoted 10 minutes a day to playing the piano or half an hour to reading something other than work.
To combat procrastination, it’s worth harnessing… the calendar
My meditations and reflections have led me to the conclusion that if something is important to me, just like sports, is a priority for me to feel mentally and physically well, there are no excuses. This activity simply goes on the calendar, and even if I’m tired, even if I have other tasks, I just know that without it, there’s a slippery slope ahead. Returning to athletes, if I don’t recover, I won’t be at my best on that metaphorical field. If something is important to us and we want to do it regularly, it must go on the priority list, period. Something should come out of it.
How to Fight Procrastination?
Acceptance of Failures and Combatting Perfectionism
How to combat procrastination beyond prioritizing tasks in the calendar? Several ways personally help me or people in my surroundings. Many of them are a matter of approach. One of them is the acceptance of failures. This means that if something doesn’t work out, it’s okay because not everything has to be perfect.
It’s also about fighting perfectionism, which used to plague me. I’ve accepted that in creative work, there will always be something I want to improve tomorrow. It’s tough, but one must learn that if I’m satisfied at 80% or 90%, the remaining 10% takes a lot of time that I could use more efficiently.
If we accept that we can make mistakes and that we won’t always perform at the same level, it allows us to act consistently. No athlete plays every match the same and at the same level. Everyone has off days. Sometimes we sit down at the piano, and all the notes play themselves, and sometimes it’s hard to play basic chords. However, from my experience, successful people are the ones who are not afraid of these rough patches but persistently move forward despite adversity.
A Work Environment Allowing for Mistakes
In addition to sports and music metaphors, it’s worth mentioning the analogy to the work environment. If we accept that sometimes a campaign may fail and that everything is a learning experience, this approach opens us up to testing and trying avant-garde solutions, some of which may not work out while others may be successful. This is closely related to a sense of security and whether we work in a culture that allows for mistakes. We can test what is acceptable, and in this regard, I believe it’s also valuable to have a boss, manager, leader, or client who can say, “Okay, my mistake. I also made an error here.” This provides us with a sense of security, knowing that nobody is infallible, and it sets a good example from the top down.
Motivation for Work
It’s important to align tasks with people’s competencies and motivations. If we assign tasks requiring creativity to someone who excels in copy-pasting into spreadsheets, and we expect them to do this with great enthusiasm, at an excellent level, and quickly, we’re likely making a mistake, and it’s not the person’s fault. These tasks are not tailored to their preferences, and the person will procrastinate because they’ll be doing tasks they dislike. However, if we place them in tasks that require creativity, where they have to come up with something from scratch, and where they need to interact with people, a person of this type will flourish and deliver results beyond expectations. This once again puts a significant responsibility on the leader to identify and understand the reasons behind procrastination.
Project Management
Effective project management can help combat procrastination. When we work transparently, the entire team knows who is responsible for which tasks and the deadlines we commit to. For instance, if I declared that I would deliver something on Monday, but I had a bad day on Friday, suffered from a migraine, and slept half the day, at that moment, I have much more motivation to sit down on the weekend or at 5 AM on Monday to deliver it. Of course, these are extreme examples I’m discussing, but they are real. For me, what was more important was delivering something rather than finding excuses.
Good management, a sense of responsibility, and commitment to deadlines keep us on track. I’ve been in teams where everyone worked at their own pace, which was individually determined. It wasn’t synchronized, and procrastination was easier there.
Internal and External Motivation
I think internal motivation is equally important. It’s a drive, a desire to acquire knowledge, which everyone undoubtedly has in various areas. In our work, we should seek positions and tasks that align with what we want to do, and what we enjoy doing in the areas where we want to develop. If it doesn’t align again and there’s a discrepancy, it becomes harder to maintain motivation for action.
Equally important is awareness of how our work impacts the organization’s goals. This ties into the appreciation, and awareness of the cause-and-effect chain, that my tasks affect X, which in turn affects Y, and Y affects Z. Ultimately, in marketing and sales, for example, we have this many customers who come to us for a certain amount, and they leave this much money daily, which allows the company to grow, and it also allows every employee in the company to grow.
Showing this impact on the organization to others is crucial. In the context of marketing and collaborating with copywriters and specialist programmers, I noticed that if I showed them that this blog is part of a particular campaign, and if this campaign is rich in content, we can more easily convert these people and persuade them to contact us. It comes back to that person as a project they can execute, and in that work, there is a place for them and tasks they can perform. Demonstrating such impact is part of the motivation.
Tools for Combating Procrastination
Scrum/Agile
In project management and combating procrastination, various tools like Scrum can be helpful. They are particularly useful in software development environments but can also assist in organizing work in business departments. Setting goals, deadlines, and processes to ensure the delivery of a product proceeds without interruptions is crucial. Organizing work is key.
Pomodoro Technique
One of the simpler tools is the Pomodoro Technique, which involves setting a timer for about 20 minutes for a specific task, without distractions and in a state of deep work. I set the time for 40 or 45 minutes because 20 minutes is too short for me to complete a task. I focus solely on the task and complete it within the planned time without getting distracted. I believe distractions are a significant factor that hinders us from starting and finishing tasks. Methods similar to “getting things done” are also very useful.
Calendar
Apart from Pomodoro, the most effective method for me, which I have introduced in the past few years to combat procrastination, is time blocking. This involves scheduling all tasks for a particular day or week. If a task is not on the calendar, it usually won’t get done. Thanks to this, scheduling time for meetings, preparing materials, sports, reading, playing the piano, and meditating in the calendar is very useful for me.
I’ve learned to manage my calendar flexibly because sometimes I don’t have time to write an article, engage on LinkedIn, or record a podcast. In such cases, I reschedule these tasks. I find this calendar management approach very useful.
Rewarding Yourself
It’s a good idea to reward yourself for completing tasks. However, if we reward ourselves too often and celebrate everything, the dopamine level keeps rising, and it becomes difficult to feel the difference. Therefore, micro-rewarding, like making yourself a nice cup of tea, can be positive.
Just Do It
Sometimes it’s worth doing something without overthinking it. Just like brushing your teeth, you may not feel like it, but you know you have to do it. It’s the same with tasks to which you’ve committed.
Summary
Procrastination can have both negative and positive effects. It often stems from ignorance, uncertainty, and the fear of judgment. You can combat procrastination in various ways, such as organizing your work, fostering an environment that accepts failures, or accepting that you won’t know everything perfectly.
Tasks aligned with your competencies and motivation, along with tools like the Pomodoro technique or scheduling everything in your calendar, can be helpful. There are numerous methods to explore, so it’s worth trying different techniques. Sometimes, it’s simply beneficial to sit down and force yourself to take action.
What are your experiences?
I invite you to join the discussion. I’m curious about your insights and the techniques you use to effectively combat procrastination.
