Procrastination And Emotion, Or Why Time Management Tips Don’t Work
Procrastination is not a time management issue. It’s an emotion regulation issue. And by learning more about emotion management, you get to the root causes of your procrastination, which helps you create habits and systems that stick.
Do you feel you’ve tried all the productivity hacks and yet you’re still putting off important tasks or missing deadlines? Learning more about time management has helped you build better systems, but some chores still slip through the cracks.
But what if we’re was trying to fix procrastination with the wrong tools?
Productivity is not a time management issue. It’s an emotion regulation issue. And by learning more about emotion management, you get to the root causes of your procrastination, which helps you create habits and systems that stick.
In this post, you’ll learn more about the relationship between procrastination and emotion, and how to untangle the two to get back control of your attention and get things done again.
Redefine procrastination
Often, we associate procrastination with laziness. We feel bad when we think about something we’ve been putting off. We tell ourselves we’re lazy for not washing the dishes or spending a bit too long on social media instead of powering through to complete a report.
For Tim Pychyl, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University, procrastination is “a purely visceral, emotional reaction to something we don’t want to do.”
Researchers distinguish between behavioural procrastination, or “the delay of the completion of major and minor tasks”; and decisional procrastination, or delaying making decisions in a timely manner. Another consensus is the “role of negative beliefs about the self in the maintenance of procrastination”.
Think of how you feel about the activities you procrastinate on more often. Maybe, when you think about asking your boss for a raise, fear and anxiety come to mind. Or maybe the mere thought of cleaning up your closet makes you die out of boredom.
According to Pychyl, there are eight procrastination triggers:
- Boredom.
- Frustration.
- Difficulty.
- Stress.
- Ambiguity.
- Unstructured tasks.
- Unrewarding tasks.
- Meaninglessness.
Even the expectation of a task being too boring, too difficult, or too stressful can stop you from getting started. Or the memory of the negative feelings associated with it can keep you stuck in unfinished projects.
In short, procrastination is not a personal failure or a sign of a poor work ethic. In most cases, it’s the result of unhealthy coping skills to common but unpleasant emotions.
But what can you do about it? Let’s start by busting another myth: that time management techniques help get rid of procrastination.
The relationship between your experience of time and procrastination
In a fascinating article for Harvard Business Review, Abbie J. Shipp explains how we think of a time in two contradictory ways — objective and subjective time.
Objective time refers to how you perceive time-based on the external tools used to measure it, like clocks, schedulers, or planners. And subjective time refers to your personal experience of it.
Let’s say you create two blocks on your schedule of two hours each — one block to have lunch with a friend, and another one to finish a report. But when you’re performing each activity, time will feel different. Even though objectively they took the same two hours, maybe lunch with your friend flew by, while working on a report felt like an eternity.
The clash between the objective and subjective perceptions of time causes guilt and frustration. It leads many to think of themselves as lazy, undisciplined, or scattered.
So, when you treat all procrastination like a time management issue, you’re trying to deal with a subjective experience with objective measures. It’s no surprise tools and techniques like time-blocking, pomodoros, or distraction blocking don’t always work.
But how do you manage the negative emotions stemming from the clash between objective and subjective time?
Explore your emotions
While there’s no single method to learn to manage your negative emotions, here’s what has worked for me:
Keep a journal or log
For a week or two, note how you feel when performing different tasks. As an Airtable fan, I created a simple database to log time, date, and mood for each task. If databases or spreadsheets are not your thing, keep a journal instead.
What matters is to keep records of the emotions tied to each task. Over time, this data will let you see patterns. What do you enjoy the most? Which tasks do you avoid consistently, and why? What are the positive and negative feelings that arise with each task?
Find strategies to combat what’s causing the negative feelings
Now that you know which tasks you keep putting off and the emotions at the core of the procrastination, it’s time to look for solutions.
If you find the job too ambiguous or confusing, can you get additional instructions?
If it’s too boring, is there a way to make it more fun?
If it’s too difficult, would it help to break it down into smaller parts?
Pay attention to your self-talk
How you talk about yourself impacts how you feel about work.
For example, I’ve always thought of myself as a slow writer. In a time when frequent, consistent output is the key component in a writer’s success, this perception of myself has been an important source of anguish.
To challenge this notion, I’ve stopped calling myself a slow writer. There isn’t something in me that makes me a slow writer by nature. I can improve my writing and editing process to publish articles more frequently without sacrificing quality.
You, too, can challenge preconceived notions about yourself by paying attention to your inner self-talk. Instead of assuming those thoughts are correct, see them as areas of exploration and growth.
What if you can’t make tasks more enjoyable?
But what if, after following these steps, you’re still putting off those tasks you dread to do?
Don’t despair, there’s still hope. Here are a few more ideas to power through those tasks you really, really don’t want to do.
- Reward yourself. Using rewards for completing tasks on time can be a fun way to motivate yourself. You can even turn it into a competition with friends or colleagues, or gamify your experience using apps like Habitica.
- Create habits around the task, not about the task itself. Author Nir Eyal suggests padding an unpleasant job with other, more enjoyable habits. For instance, make it a habit of brewing your favourite tea and playing music you love before sitting down to do a task you don’t enjoy. Or change the scenery by doing a dreaded job in a pleasant location, like your favourite coffee shop.
- 5-minute rule. If getting started gets too difficult, commit to working on that task for only five minutes. More often than not, after getting through those first few minutes, the negative feelings about it disappear and you’ll find it easier to get in a state of flow.
The Takeaway
Time management tricks can only get you so far. When negative emotions are at the core of your procrastination, the only way to stop them from impeding your productivity is by addressing them. Sometimes, the way you feel about certain tasks and how you think of yourself gets in the way.
To help, it’s important to know what your internal triggers are, what you think about the tasks, and what you think of yourself. Keeping a journal or log helps with this. Then, challenge the negative emotions, improve negative situations, and move away from negative self-talk. In the end, paying attention to the more subjective experience of time is the only way to remove the last obstacles to productivity.
