#13: How to work as efficiently as you procrastinate
Q: Why is it that you manage to find all the focus, enthusiasm, and dedication you need when it comes to explaining why some dude on Reddit is NTA, but you can't bring yourself even to make a start on what you're actually supposed to be doing?
A: It's because the way you think about what you're supposed to be doing is not the same as the way you think about what you're doing instead.
In this episode, we'll take a look at why your attitude to work is making it difficult for you to work and why your attitude to procrastination makes procrastination so easy - and at how approaching work in the way you approach procrastination can help you worry less and get more done.
Episode transcript:
How do you find the secrets of working efficiently and without stress or anxiety on a pretty boring task? Simple. Ask a procrastinator.
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 week by week, I'll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Let me ask you something. At the start of a day, how do you think about the work that you need to do that day? If you're anything like me, and anything like the clients I see who are struggling to get everything done, you'll think of it all at once. So you'll think things like, I've got to finish writing this essay by Friday, or I've got 120 exams to mark, or I need to write that feedback for my colleague, or I need to finish that review - it's already late. How the hell am I going to get it all done?! So what do you do when you're thinking along these lines? Well, anything to escape the stress of having to hold that weight, right? Anything to drop that burden. So you do something else, something non work related. And that's where procrastination comes in. Procrastination doesn't care about your deadlines. It doesn't care what you're supposed to be doing instead. I remember seeing a tweet a few years ago that said something like, 'I have an assignment due tomorrow, so naturally I've spent today making this cardboard box theatre for my cat'. And that really captures it, doesn't it? That sense of being so stressed by an impending deadline that you'll just do something completely meaningless instead as a distraction, even though doing that other thing takes you no closer to finishing the work that you need to get done. Now, when we go down this route of turning away from what we're supposed to be doing and turning towards procrastination, not only do we not get everything done, but often we don't manage to do any of it. Which means that, the next day, things are even more stressful. That deadline is even closer, that work is even more overdue, and in addition to all the stuff that you know you need to get done, you probably have a large dollop of self loathing to deal with too. You're beating yourself up for wasting time, as well as worrying about how you're going to get everything done. So let me ask you another question. At the moment when you switch from working to procrastinating, how do you think about what you're about to do? I'm going to guess that either you don't think about it at all - you know, one moment you're fretting over deadlines, and the next you find yourself organising that pile of books on your desk. Or if the procrastination activity is planned, then what you start out with is just an intention to do something other than what you're meant to be doing, just for a moment. So you might think something like, I'll just check Twitter for 30 seconds. Or let me just quickly look up the name of the actor from that movie I saw last night. And then before you know it, a couple of hours have passed and you're still pottering around on social media or IMDb. The thing is, we never start out with grand ambitions to procrastinate for hours. I'm going to guess that the guy who made that cardboard theatre for his cat started out thinking that maybe he'd just spent 15 seconds cutting a window for his cat in that cardboard box she likes to sit in. But what if we did? What if we started out our procrastinating with thoughts like, 'I'm going to spend the next four hours looking at Instagram'? Or what if the things that we do when we procrastinate were obligations on our to-do lists, along with our writing commitments and everything else. In that case, I think things would be very different. One of the things that makes getting started on our work so hard and procrastinating so easy is the way that we think about each of them before we begin. With work, we think about it all at once. We think of the sum total of all the stuff we need to get done. And this leads to at least two unhelpful attitudes to our work. The first is, 'Where do I even start?' We come up against this wall of work in front of us and we're preoccupied with what we need to accomplish, with the end results, which really isn't helpful to us at the moment when we just need to make a start. At that moment, what we need to focus on is not the end result but the first step and that first step might be opening a Word document or locating a particular email or logging into a website. The second unhelpful attitude is that, compared with the vast thing that we need to accomplish, the first step towards achieving it seems like a drop in the ocean. It seems so small and insignificant an undertaking that it's almost incredible that it could make a difference at all. So the first step towards finishing that essay by next Friday might be opening the Word document. But opening that document can seem like such a tiny, inconsequential act, we end up thinking, 'How can I possibly get everything done just by taking such tiny steps?' And that means that the very act of making a start on the work, the very act of doing exactly what we need to be doing to get going, can emphasise for us the vast amount that we need to do and it ends up just adding to our stress. So it's best to avoid it altogether, right? Now, with procrastination, on the other hand, we take a different approach. We view it differently. We think in terms of one step at a time, we tell ourselves that we're just going to spend five minutes on Instagram, and five minutes is nothing. That makes it easy to start. And also, because we're emphasising to ourselves how little time we're going to spend doing this thing other than work, it's easy for us to continue. We are constantly telling ourselves that we're going to stop in just a minute, even though sometimes we end up continuing for hours. There's a couple of things that emerge from these reflections, I think. One is simply the contrast between how we talk to ourselves when we're procrastinating compared to how we talk to ourselves when we're trying to make a start on the work that we should be doing. So with procrastination, unlike with our work, there's no pressure to do more of whatever the procrastination activity is. And there's no question that the amount we're doing isn't enough, or that we're not doing it fast enough. Another thing that emerges is that we don't procrastinate because it's enjoyable, but because it's a way to escape the sometimes vast pressure we feel to perform when we try to get ourselves to do our work. Procrastination, believe it or not, is not fun. And this will become obvious if you just reflect on the sorts of things that you do when you procrastinate. When we're procrastinating, we're not relaxing, and we're not enjoying ourselves. In fact, it's a terrible way of trying to relax and enjoy ourselves. We don't do the things that we do when we procrastinate on days when we don't intend to work. You know, we don't take a day off and plan to spend the entire day looking at friends of friends on Instagram. You've probably had the experience of feeling frustrated with yourself after spending a few hours procrastinating, because you could have used that time so much better if you'd intentionally allowed yourself those hours off from work and instead found something genuinely relaxing to do. But although procrastination is not relaxing, or enjoyable, it is an escape from the stresses and the sense of 'I'm not enough' that we come to associate with our work. Experiencing all that stress is like holding your head underwater. There's only so long you can bear it before you have to come up for air, or if not air, a mindless potter around a Wikipedia article about the ozone layer. So how is it that we have no problem doing not fun things when we're procrastinating but it's much more difficult to get ourselves to do the not fun things that we actually should be doing? The answer I think is: none of this is about having fun. The reason you can't get stuck into your work is not because the work itself is unenjoyable (although often of course it is), but because of how you feel about it, and how you feel about it is stressed and overwhelmed. By contrast, the reason you get stuck into procrastination is not because the procrastination is enjoyable but because of how you feel about it, and how you feel about it is not stressed and overwhelmed. It's an escape from feeling stressed and overwhelmed. In fact, you procrastinating just is you avoiding the stress and overwhelm that you've experienced when you think about work. That's all it does for you. And all this falls into place, I think, when you consider how many times you've had the experience of finally holding your nose and getting stuck into whatever bit of work it is that you need to get stuck into, and then when you finish, thinking, 'Well that wasn't so bad, and it would have been a lot easier if I'd just got on with it in the first place.' And also, how many times have you had the experience of procrastinating by doing something that you know you really have no interest in doing? Such as - here I'm drawing on my own history of procrastination - researching in detail how dry cleaning works, despite not having ever had anything but the mildest possible curiosity about it in the first place. I suspect that the answer to those questions is: Quite a lot, actually. And that's because how willing you are to do the thing, whether the thing is work or procrastination, has nothing to do with how much you enjoy the thing itself. Instead, it has everything to do with how you feel about the thing. And how you feel about the thing arises from how you view the thing and how you talk to yourself about it. So if you want to be able to get on with the work that you need to do with less stress and less of a sense of overwhelm, you need to learn how to view it, and how to talk to yourself about it in a more constructive and helpful way. How do you do that? Well, here's the good news. You already know how to do that. Because you do it every time you turn away from your work and towards procrastination. When you turn towards procrastination, you're making a start on doing some activity that you don't really enjoy. The reason you're able to turn towards it is that you know how to turn towards it and there are no expectations. There's no minimum amount of that activity that you're telling yourself that you need to do. To work as efficiently, as effectively, and as painlessly as you're able to procrastinate, you need to approach your work in something like the way that you approach procrastination. And that means not thinking in terms of the entirety of the task that you need to accomplish. But in terms of the very first very tiny, very quick, very undemanding first step. So instead of, 'I need to write 4000 words by Friday', you need to tell yourself, 'I need to write a sentence'. Or instead of, 'I need to send that overdue feedback to my colleague', you need to tell yourself, 'I need to read that email from my colleague where she explains what she needs from me'. Or instead of 'I need to mark 120 exams', you need to tell yourself, 'I just need to mark one exam'. Now if you manage to identify the first step that you need to take, and you find yourself resistant to taking even that first step, make it even smaller, make it embarrassingly small, shamefully small. Quill Kukla, who is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, once suggested that if you have a writing task that you're really, really dreading, dedicate an entire day just to opening the Word document that you need to use for it. That's all you need to achieve that day. Once you've done it, take the rest of the day off. Now, that might seem shockingly underambitious when you have so much on your plate, but it makes a lot of sense if you've been procrastinating for days about the task and still haven't managed even to open the document yet. And if you're in doubt about how effective identifying the first tiny step can be, just look at how it works with procrastination. Look at how I'll just spend 10 seconds checking Twitter can lead to hours of pottering about online. And in the same way just taking the very tiniest first step in starting work can lead on to other things. But - and this is really key - as long as you resist requiring those other things of yourself. The trick is to take the pressure off, to reward yourself and congratulate yourself for taking that first step, not beat yourself up for not doing more. And by doing this, we're able to slow down in order to speed up, as my coach Rumbi once said to me. We slow down for long enough to eliminate the association between work and anxiety and stress, and only when we've broken that association does it make sense to increase our demands on ourselves. You might be wondering whether my taking my own advice here means that I never procrastinate. Well, unfortunately not. So just today, in the course of creating this episode, I've researched among other things what sort of car I'd buy if I were planning to replace my car, which I'm not. But thinking along these lines has helped me catch myself in the act of procrastinating and gently bring myself back to the task in hand and it's helped me to do that without giving myself have too much of a hard time. This part of it reminds me a little bit of mindfulness. So when you start practising mindfulness, you find that guidance on how to meditate usually emphasises that you will get distracted and your mind will wander, and it tells you that when that happens, don't give yourself a hard time, just accept it as an inevitable part of the process and gently bring your attention back to the breath. And I think similarly, when we catch ourselves procrastinating, accept it as inevitable, and gently think about what you ought to be doing instead, where what you ought to be doing is not the end result but the tiniest first step. These reflections, too, have helped me break down and get started on tasks that I've been dreading and putting off. One of my go-to methods these days, when I'm really putting something off, is to make a cup of tea and spend five minutes with a pen and paper planning out the baby steps I need to take to get started - which, first of all, is actually quite enjoyable, you know, I'm giving myself permission to sit down and have a cup of tea. Now, the first of those baby steps invariably involves opening some document or other. You do that too: write it all down. And when you've done that, you have a set of instructions for yourself. So when you finish your cuppa, you can make a start just by following the instructions, which, because of the detail in the instructions, and because it's baby step by baby step, it's possible to follow them as mindlessly and unemotionally as following a set of IKEA instructions to assemble a table. The more room you make for articulating those baby steps, the less room you leave for anxiety and guilt and doubt about whether you're doing enough. Finally, a reminder, in case you need it, that procrastinating is exhausting. It's not relaxing. If you're a procrastinator, you'll know that it's possible to finish an unproductive, procrastination-filled day and feel just as exhausted and wiped out as you would have done had you spent the whole day on task. When that happens, make time to relax and unwind properly, regardless of how productive you'd been. Don't make resting conditional on how much you achieve. And if you need a recap of what's wrong with that idea, go back and listen to episode two of this podcast. Good luck with your baby steps. See you next time.
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'd like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful. You can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, or my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter at @AcademicImp or on Facebook at AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening and see you next time.
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