#116: Procrastination is a bad idea
If only you spent more time working and less time procrastinating, your life would be so much better. Right? Friend, I know how you feel, but it's not that simple. Some forms of procrastination actually help us get our work done, while some forms of work are just a waste of your time. In fact, I've come to realise that the very idea of procrastination is pretty unhelpful, and it can stand in the way of understanding why we struggle to make progress, and how to fix it. In this episode, I'm going to share with you a more empowering way to think about how to get things done.
Brand new download! Click here for the 'Comfort vs relevance: resist the work/procrastination binary!' worksheet, or find it on the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website.
References
Grant, Adam. 2016: 'Why I taught myself to procrastinate', New York Times.
Jensen, Joli. 2017: Write No Matter What (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello again, everyone, and welcome back! I hope you didn’t miss me too much during my little summer break. Well, I say ‘break’, and there was a bit of down-time in there, but what I’ve mainly been doing since I last spoke to you is frantically working on a grant application, which didn’t really go to plan, but which got done in the end. All that work meant that my scheduled holiday wasn’t all that much of a holiday. There was a lot of getting up at the crack of dawn to do some work before everyone else woke up, then a day of doing stuff and needing to forgo my usual, sacred, daily nap, which is an important part of being able to function, especially given my habit of getting up early. But I got to see family, I did 2 parkruns I hadn’t done before, and the notoriously temperamental Welsh weather was kind to us, so all is well.
While all that was going on, my ideas for this episode were fermenting away in the background. I’m excited to share them with you, because they have made a big difference to me, and to the way I approach and feel about my writing, and other projects close to my heart. I’m going to talk to you about everyone’s favourite productivity baddie: procrastination. I want to lead you through a new way of thinking about procrastination that I’ve found incredibly helpful, both personally and in coaching sessions - so helpful that initially I thought that surely someone else must have written about this already, but as far as I can tell, that’s not the case, so here I am. I don’t have any scientific or other empirical bombshells to drop here - it’s a conceptual insight I want to share, which I guess stands to reason given that I’m a philosopher, not a scientist.
Now. If I were to ask to you describe what procrastination is, in a sentence, without thinking about it too hard, what would you come up with? Go on - have a go. Hit pause for a moment. I’ll wait. All done? While you were doing that, I googled the word ‘procrastination’. As tends to happen these days, Google’s ‘AI overview’ was top of the results. The first sentence of that reads, ‘Procrastination is the act of unnecessarily delaying or postponing tasks, often despite knowing there could be negative consequences’. That sounds about right to me, and I’m guessing that your own conception of procrastination touches on roughly the same themes - delaying, postponing, the knowledge that it’s all a bad idea and that really you should be getting on with whatever it is you’re meant to be doing. Implicit in this conceptualisation is a contrast between work and procrastination. We should be working, but we’re procrastinating instead. We’re doing one or the other. We might switch back and forth between them. The more efficient among us - the better people, as many of us think about them - are the ones who spend most of their time working and only a little bit of time, if any, procrastinating. And when we’re procrastinating, we’re not working. Working is paused. We’re making no progress at all. Which is why procrastination is such a giant waste of time, and why we feel so bad about it.
And yet. Sometimes, it seems there’s a grey area between work and procrastination. Sometimes procrastination seems like maybe it’s not all bad. There’s that 2016 essay in the New York Times by the psychologist Adam Grant entitled ‘Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate’, in which he argued that procrastination, done well, can be good for creativity, and shared some tips for how to procrastinate right. And I’ve previously talked about how to do not-writing in a way that helps move your writing along in episode #20: Don’t just write it - ferment it! And, just as it seems that sometimes procrastination can be sort of okay, conversely, some people have noted that there are ways of doing work that are actually ways of delaying work. Professor Joli Jensen talks about some of them in her wonderful book, Write No Matter What, and in my interview with her in episode #93 of this podcast. She talks about various ‘myths’, as she calls them, relating to writing: including the myth that you need to clear and tidy your desk before you start writing, and the myth that you need to look up one more source before you make a start. Are things like this ‘work’? Well, kind of. But, do they help us get our writing done? Not really. They’re just more delaying tactics. More ways of avoiding the discomfort of actually getting on with things.
You’d be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed at this point. As if it’s not already difficult enough to resist procrastination, now we have to navigate this grey area between work and procrastination and learn to tell the difference between good and bad procrastination and between good and bad work. That can be really difficult to do, especially because those of us who struggle with self-doubt, anxiety, impostor syndrome, shame, guilt, and all those other things that drive you to procrastinate in the first place - those of us who struggle with things like that aren’t exactly in a good place to take a cool-headed approach to thinking about work versus procrastination. When the idea of sitting down and adding to your writing draft fills you with terror, it’s pretty easy to convince yourself that looking up that one extra source really is necessary, or that of course you should spend some time playing computer games before you try to write anything - after all, Adam Grant, citing a study designed by Jihae Shin, says it’s a good idea. Is it even possible to work effectively towards our goals when we’re having to navigate all these ideas and keep our own raging anxiety in check?
Well, friends, there’s a way out of this mess, and it involves moving away from the concept of procrastination. It involves dropping that idea that you’re either working or you’re procrastinating (or, maybe, doing some weird procrastination-masquerading-as-work or work-masquerading-as-procrastination thing). If you struggle with procrastination, stop thinking about it. What I mean by that is: stop conceptualising what you’re doing as either procrastination or work. Stop asking yourself the questions, ‘Am I working?’ and ‘Am I procrastinating?’, and instead start asking yourself two different questions instead. The questions: ‘How relevant is what I’m doing?’ and ‘How comfortable is what I’m doing?’
Here’s what I’ve come to realise about what’s going on when we sit down and try to write, or try to do something else that we really want to have done but also, in some sense, really want not to do. When we’re faced with having to do the thing, there’s two main things that we want. The first is that we want to get it done. Obviously. That’s why we’re there, and that means that what we end up doing needs to be relevant to accomplishing our goal, in the sense that it needs to move us closer to the goal. The second is that we want to feel comfortable. Who cares about comfort when there’s important stuff to do? you might ask. Well, anyone who is familiar with the experience of having to battle with themselves to get the thing done, rather than to go off and look at social media or do some chores or argue with strangers on the internet. If you think of yourself as someone who struggles with procrastination, then I invite you to think of yourself, instead, as someone who struggles to balance a desire to get something important done with a desire to feel comfortable. ‘Feeling comfortable’, in this case, doesn’t usually involve chasing blissful states. It usually just means: avoiding uncomfortable feelings like anxiety, fear, self-doubt, shame, and guilt.
Why do I think it’s helpful to think in terms of comfort versus relevance instead of procrastination versus work? Well, partly because it avoids the need to make sense of those weird, almost paradoxical states that involve procrastination-masquerading-as-work or work-masquerading-as-procrastination. Comfort versus relevance better describes what’s going on. Comfort and relevance are both things that sit on a spectrum. When you set your mind to getting something done, whatever you do next is going to sit somewhere on a spectrum between very comfortable and very uncomfortable, and it’s also going to sit somewhere on a spectrum between highly relevant and completely irrelevant. You can imagine these spectrums - spectra? Does that sound too pretentious? - as the X and Y axes of a graph. In fact, you don’t have to imagine it, because I’ve done it for you: feel free to go and download the brand-new Comfort vs Relevance exercise from the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website - there’s also a link in the notes for this episode. In that download, I’ve mapped out where some of my own work-related and, erm … work-adjacent activities sit with respect to comfort and relevance. Actually sitting down and trying to write words that might appear in the final draft of the thing I want to get done, something that other people might end up reading and judging me on the basis of, is highly relevant, but often also often highly uncomfortable. Tidying my desk is pretty comfortable but also pretty irrelevant, although it’s less irrelevant than sitting on the sofa watching TV. Taking a nap is very comfortable, and I’ve come to realise over the last couple of years that it’s actually pretty relevant too, because I’m more likely to squeeze a bit more usefulness out of myself in the afternoon on days that I’ve taken a nap compared to days when I don’t. In that Comfort vs Relevance document, I’ve also provided a blank chart for you to map out your own work-related activities, if you really want it, although you can sketch out your own in 2 seconds.
Another important reason that I think that replacing a work/procrastination binary with thinking in terms of various degrees of comfort and relevance, is that it makes it easier to separate out the various things we’re trying to do when we work. Think back to a time when work was going really well for you. I’m sure you’ve got a few of those golden moments - I certainly have, some of them going back to the nineties. Those (probably lamentably short) periods when you were just nailing it, storming through the tasks, hitting deadlines left right and centre. You might use memories like that as sticks to beat yourself with - I’ve been guilty of that. I’ve said to myself things like, ‘I churned out one 4,000-word essay a week for 4 weeks over the Christmas break while I was doing my Masters (I really did) so I know I can do it, and the fact that I’ve never been as productive ever since proves I’m just lazy and that I’ve given up’. The thing is, though, those sorts of memories of times when work was going really well are often memories of times when we were getting things done and feeling good about it; in other words, times when what we were doing was scoring highly with regard to both relevance and comfort. And while that’s lovely to experience, it’s a much higher bar than anyone who cares about getting things done actually needs to meet. In coaching sessions, when I work with clients on getting important things done, what they want is just that: they want to get important things done. That’s the goal. The goal is not: get the important things done while also feeling good. They care about relevance, not comfort. Well, I mean, we all care about comfort, in the sense that we’d rather feel comfortable than not, but when I get people to articulate explicitly what hitting their work-related goals will look like, their ideas about success are all about what they get done, not how they feel about it. In fact, they often explicitly talk about how they’d like to work on being able to power through the work even when they’re not feeling good about it. I honestly can’t think of a time I’ve asked someone to articulate in detail what attaining their work-related goals would involve, and they’ve included ‘feel good while working’ as part of their success criteria. We all prefer to feel good about our work, but we recognise it’s a nice add-on, not a necessary part of success.
However. Often, our behaviour when we actually try to get on with the work reveals something else. We get discouraged by feelings of discomfort. We catch ourselves feeling reluctant, or anxious, or unfocused, or confused, and we allow ourselves to get distracted by all that. We end up misguidedly viewing feelings like that as signs of failure. We say to ourselves things like, ‘Why can’t I be super focused and motivated like I was that time for a week in 1997?’ and ‘Why can’t I be calmly locked-in like that colleague I was surreptitiously and enviously watching at their desk the other day?’ And we get disheartened and off we go to make a snack or plan a fantasy holiday or decide where we’d go locally for salsa classes in a non-existent possible world where we decide to take up salsa dancing. But we really don’t need to do any of that. Getting a task done requires doing relevant things. It doesn’t require doing comfortable things. Which means that, if you sit down to get some work done and you feel bad about it, there’s no reason at all to view that as a sign that something has gone wrong. It sucks that you feel bad about it, but you’re here for relevance, not comfort. Just grit your way through the task. You can do comfort later.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘What do you mean, “just grit your way through the task”? My complete inability to do that is the whole problem! It’s exactly what drives me to do all the classic procrastination things in the first place!’ But you’re wrong about that. People who think of themselves as procrastinators - and I’m guessing that’s everyone who’s listening to this episode, which itself might be a way of avoiding doing something else - people who think of themselves as procrastinators like to tell themselves that they just can’t do difficult or boring things, but it’s more complicated than that. They’re not simply struggling with unappealing tasks. In fact, they have no problem doing unappealing tasks every single day - housework, buying groceries, filling in forms, queueing at counters, opening and reading boring official letters, paying bills, working out what train to catch to arrive somewhere in time for an appointment. They don’t do these things for fun, they do them because they need to be done. But when it comes to getting things done that they care deeply about, things whose success is linked to their identity and their sense of self-worth, like their writing or other professional or scholarly tasks, they freeze. And it’s not simply the unpleasantness of the task that’s the problem. In fact, sometimes the things that they need to get done aren’t even unpleasant - some people say things like, ‘I actually like writing, so why can’t I get it done?’ The problem is the meaning they attach to the task. Thoughts like, ‘My difficulty focusing proves I’m not cut out for this’ and ‘My uncertainty about how to approach this task shows I’m not smart enough’ and ‘I’m struggling with this because I’m lazy’ and - of course - ‘This needs to be perfect otherwise I’m a failure’. What people are trying to avoid is not simply doing unappealing things. They’re trying to avoid confronting the idea that maybe they’re a bad person.
My comfort vs relevance framework helps you break down what’s wrong here. Those ‘I’m a bad person’ type thoughts are just a form of discomfort. Let’s say you have a writing assignment to finish by the end of the week, and you sit down at your desk to - you hope - get on with it. What is it that you’re trying to do? Are you trying to get something done, or are you setting out to give yourself a sort of emotional massage? The answer, of course, is that you need to get the thing done. How you feel about it is irrelevant. Whoever it was that sent you that email saying ‘Please send me the final draft by Friday’ just wants the bloody draft. They don’t want the draft plus your latest list of positive affirmations. Feeling good is just not a criterion of success here. Let your inner critic chatter away. She’s annoying, and you don’t like what she has to say, but she’s irrelevant here. Managing your inner critic is not what you’re here to do. Completing the draft while feeling uncomfortable about it is just as much a success as completing the draft while feeling great. In fact, if you set your sights on completing the task and feeling good while you’re doing it, you’re actually making things harder for yourself than they need to be. Because doing that requires maximising relevance and maximising comfort. Exhausting, often impossible, and unnecessary. Allow yourself to focus on relevance, and accept a bit of discomfort. Make the task finite: you’ll prioritise relevance for 30 minutes, then you’ll do something comfortable. You know the advice about breaking down a task into smaller chunks in order to make it easier to do? That applies to comfort and relevance too. You don’t need to work on both of them at the same time.
Now, behind all this stuff about comfort and relevance, there’s - you guessed it - a running-related insight. My thoughts on all this were prompted by an episode of the Runner’s World podcast. Every Tuesday, I do an interval workout, and interval workouts are the most unpleasant kind of workout, in my humble opinion. An important part of my horrid Tuesday interval workout routine is finding a podcast episode to listen to, about how doing intervals is a great idea. I don’t need anyone to explain to me why doing intervals is good for me - I know all that already, and it’s why I have this nasty weekly ritual in the first place - but I like to listen to people talk about it while I’m doing intervals because it’s encouraging and motivating. There’ll be someone talking in my ear about how you really need to do intervals, and I’ll be thinking, ‘Look at me, actually doing the intervals right now - I’m an absolute icon of healthy behaviour!’. Anyway. A few weeks ago I was contemplating doing a Norwegian 4x4 workout, which is among the most horrible sorts of interval workout because the intervals are so long. It involves doing 4 sets of 4 minutes running at maximum effort. As I was preparing to go out, I managed to talk myself round to thinking that actually it would be perfectly fine to do 30-second intervals instead. Then, on the episode of Runner’s World that I was listening to, one of the hosts shared a slogan he’d come across: something along the lines of, ‘the purpose of training is to improve fitness, not to prove fitness’. The point was that the sort of workout that is going to improve your fitness is not necessarily going to be the sort of workout that makes you feel good about your current level of fitness. It made me realise that the reason I was reluctant to do that Norwegian 4x4 workout was because I knew that by the end of it I’d be dragging myself along, on my last legs, which would make me feel like I wasn’t very fit. But, of course, ending a workout feeling pleased with my current level of fitness was completely irrelevant to my reasons for doing the workout in the first place. I wasn’t going to all that trouble just to massage my ego. So, I went and did the workout I didn’t want to do. And while I was doing it, I was thinking about the lessons for other sorts of uncomfortable task, which over the next few days started to crystallise into thoughts about relevance vs comfort.
So. When you next set out to get something done, take a pause and resist the temptation to tidy your desk or plan out which Netflix series to watch next. Grab a sheet of paper, plot out your comfort vs relevance axes, and take a moment to work out where the various things you’re considering doing next sit in that space. If your priority is getting the thing done, then ideally you want to make sure you’re motivated by relevance rather than by comfort. ‘Ideally’, of course, is another way of saying ‘in the perfect world’, which is definitely not the standard we’re trying to meet here. So, you should feel free to throw in a mix of relevance and comfort. Perhaps you could choose a task that prioritises relevance one day and do something a bit more comfortable the next. Perhaps you could sandwich a highly relevant but uncomfortable task in between two comfortable ones. Perhaps you could try your best to minimise the time you spend on the most uncomfortable tasks, while accepting that that might come at the expense of relevance, and that it might therefore take you longer to reach the goal you’re trying to reach. The important thing here, I think, is to be aware of what’s motivating you, and to avoid burdening yourself with trying to maximise relevance and comfort at the same time, within a single task. That’s a standard nobody needs to meet. Good luck, friends. Speak soon.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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