From Procrastinator to Producer (FF-016)

If you think about our behaviors when we are stressed and overwhelmed, we often are in fight or flight mode.  This is the automatic physiological response triggered by the amygdala when the brain perceives a threat or high stress.  And the freeze mode – not taking any action or taking actions that are not relevant to the important task at hand – is what we are doing when we are neither fighting nor flighting, but instead we are freezing.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have always called this procrastinating. 

“I am procrastinating on starting that presentation outline.”

“I am procrastinating on going to the grocery store or the gym.”

“I am procrastinating on doing that research.”

Joseph R. Ferrari, Ph.D. is a prominent psychologist and professor based at DePaul University in Chicago, known for his deep expertise in chronic procrastination and related decision making behaviors.  Dr. Ferrari explains that procrastination is not the same behavior as delaying.  He says, “if I am stuck on the tarmac and my plane isn’t getting off, and I am four hours late for some appointment, (then) I didn’t procrastinate.  That’s delay.” ¹

That makes sense, right?  

Put yourself in that moment at work when you have two or more hours of open time on your calendar, a long list of things you need to do, and you’re feeling stuck.  You’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed about it all.  In that moment, at least from my experience, there is almost always a very clear task that needs to be done.  And…it is often the task that I do not want to do.  

Without setting up the right cue, which we will discuss, I find myself delaying that critical task and doing everything else on my list.  I am lying to myself and saying I am being productive – because I am getting things done – but I am avoiding the one big task that is the thing I should be doing.  

What Dr. Ferrari points out is that I am not a chronic procrastinator, I am procrastinating or delaying on this one task.  But, in general, I am not someone who is chronically procrastinating on many things in my life.  

You might be thinking, what is the difference between procrastinating and a chronic procrastinator?

Dr. Ferrari says that everybody procrastinates, but not everyone is a procrastinator.  Twenty percent of adult men and women are chronic procrastinators.  That may not seem like a lot, but Dr. Ferrari points out that percentage is higher than depression, substance abuse, panic attacks, and alcoholism.  And unlike any of those diagnoses, we often associate procrastination with humor.  In a short search, I found these funny and relatable memes:

If you periodically procrastinate on one task, or even repeatedly on the same task that you dislike doing, then you procrastinate or delay.  

If you procrastinate on many tasks and in different spaces and at different times, then you are a chronic procrastinator.  For example, you are likely in the twenty percent of chronic procrastinators if you are someone who:

• Does not RSVP to events on time.

• Frequently run your gas tank to empty before you fill it up.

• Does not show up to events on time or at all because you failed to buy the tickets before they sold out.

• Receives a third and final bill or invoice before you finally pay it.

What do you think?  Do you sometimes procrastinate or delay?  Or, are you a chronic procrastinator? 

If you are a chronic procrastinator, I want to translate more of what Dr. Ferrari says.  Before we dive in, the high-level takeaway is 1) you learned to behave this way, so you can unlearn it, 2) you live in a society that supports being a procrastinator, and 3) you are not serving yourself or others around you in a healthy way.  

As we have established, procrastination is a learned tendency, and cultural and societal expectations support it.  Consider, for a minute, some of these examples that Dr. Ferrari discusses wherein our society supports procrastinating on getting things done.

Credit Card Payments.  You will receive a penalty charge or interest if you pay late, but there is no reward for paying early each month.

Paying the IRS.  If you owe, there is little benefit to paying earlier than April 15^th.  If you keep your money, you earn interest on it.  The IRS does not discount for early payments.

Christmas Shopping.  Often, discounts on items occur on Christmas Eve, which supports last-minute shopping.  Additionally, return policies can affect your desire to buy early.

Hotel Stays.  Companies like Hotel Tonight offer big discounts on hotel stays if you wait until the last minute to book them.

Entering your Billable Time.  Many of my clients have to get their billable time entered on some regular cadence – and certainly by the end of the month.  Often, the excitement of waiting until the last minute is the reward that the adrenaline junkies crave.  You know it isn’t best practice, yet each month you do it again and again and again. 

Let’s discuss why this behavior is not serving you nor is it serving others.

Procrastination is the irrational and intentional delay of a target task and prevents you from reaching your goals.  The research shows that it is also a maladaptive lifestyle.  Chronic procrastinators are often operating in A World About Me instead of what it should be – A World About We. 

Research says that chronic procrastinators are very good excuse makers.  They always have a reason that they couldn’t get something done on time, or it took longer than expected, which is why it was late.  Their reasons are logical, they often make sense, and they are often repeated over and over again.  Because, as Dr. Ferrari points out, for the chronic procrastinator, they think that the world is all about me. 

There are typically two things going on behind the chronic procrastination: 

The blaming of time and the justification that you work better under pressure.

Chronic procrastinators are not lazy.  In fact, they are often working their butts off on something.  But, there is something that they should be working on – that thing that they are procrastinating on – and they often subconsciously (or maybe consciously at time) think: 

“If I don’t do that task or delay doing it, and I do something else productive and take my time doing that other thing, then I can say that I simply didn’t have enough time.”

You’ve done that before, right?  I know I have done that at times.  And it usually doesn’t feel good.  

Or we use the delay to explain why the work product is not as great as what we know we are capable of.  

“This is not my best work product.  This is as good as it could be with the time that I had available to work on it.  If only I had more time, I could have done better.”   

We know that lack of effort is not a positive image, but it is a better image than producing a piece of garbage.

Note: This blog is an excerpt from the manuscript of The Perfectly Productive Day.

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¹ Mel Robbins Podcast, Episode 127 (00:03:20)