You have work to do.
You’re out there somewhere, holding this paper and leafing through the pages. Perhaps you’re taking a break from the tedious work you’ve been slaving over. Perhaps you have a couple of minutes between classes or the next activity scheduled into your day.
Whatever it is, you have work to do.
But imagine for a second how easy it would be to just forget it all, put it off a little bit longer. You don’t really want to do it now, do you? So why not enjoy the present and leave all of that for later. Just like that, you’ve left the realm of the productive and joined the limbo of the stagnant slacker universe. Just like that, you’ve become a procrastinator.
What is procrastination?
All of us are familiar with the basic notion of procrastination: putting things off until we can put it off no longer. All of us do it, and most of us do it often.
But if it’s something that happens so regularly and to so many of us, why does it continue to plague our lives? Questions like these are what Timothy Pychyl, associate professor of psychology at Carleton and director of the Procrastination Research Group, has been answering for years.
He said that in order to get rid of such tendencies, it’s important to know what defines the habit of procrastination in the first place. Pychyl describes it as the “voluntary needless delay of an intended task, despite knowing you’re going to be worse off for the delay.”
“We give in to feel good,” Pychyl said.
“We want to feel good now. So we look at a task and we think ‘it’s too hard,’ and by putting it off, we feel good now. We get immediate reward.”
Have you ever thought to yourself, ‘let future me deal with it?’ According to Pychyl, it is definitely something that many people do frequently and it only leads them in circles.
“We separate present self from future self, as if future self is a separate person. When we finally get to future self it becomes present self and present self likes to do what? Feel good now. So we put it off to future self and that’s where we really get into trouble.”
The science behind it
Though Pychyl agrees there is a psychological aspect behind why we procrastinate, he says that neuroscience is not there yet in terms ofexplaining it completely.
We do not have as much information about our brain as we’d like, Pychyl said. We do know, however, that the part of our brain meant to set priorities and help us plan is called the prefrontal cortex.
“The prefrontal cortex has to override all [previous] feelings and if it can’t then we procrastinate. So, for example, despite feeling like ‘I don’t want to do this,’ my prefrontal cortex is supposed to say ‘well, it doesn’t matter how you feel, now get going,” Pychyl said.
“And if you don’t, that’s really the neurosignature of procrastination, your prefrontal cortex isn’t winning this battle and so we want to strengthen the prefrontal cortex.”
Strengthening the prefrontal cortex develops willpower, which is something that students lack.
Savannah Brant, a first-year criminology student can attest to this.
“I think people procrastinate because they don’t want the reality of their program to hit them. It’s a way of putting off stress,” Brant said.
“It’s a mindset, it’s something they know they should control but they haven’t found a way to control it.”
Are you a procrastinator?
So how do you know if you’re amongst these people with a weak pre-frontal cortex?
Pychyl describes three traits that essentially lead a person to become a procrastinator: impulsiveness, low consciousnesses, and the tendency to internalize the values of others.
“Just imagine the perfect storm; someone who is impulsive, not very well organized, and also has this internal dialogue where they’re trying to live up to other people’s standards, it’s pretty much the perfect recipe for procrastination,” Pychyl said.
But do these traits regress over time? Most, if not all, university students procrastinate in one aspect of their lives or the other, but can the same be said for those older and more established? For the few studies that have been done, Pychyl observed that generally people procrastinate less as they age because their trait of consciousness increases as they mature.
This is important because procrastination can have many side effects on one’s life, including negatively impacting their performance, affecting their health or well-being, and hurting their social relationships as they spend most of their time rushing to get things done.
How to control the impulse
Pychyl offers three tips to those who are looking to stop procrastinating:
1) Stop the self-deception: “Recognize that you’re giving in to feel good and don’t make it any more illusionary than that. Don’t make excuses,” Pychyl said.
2) Move from broad goal intentions to specific implementation intentions. “Implementation intentions is saying ‘in situation X, I’m going to do behaviour Y.’ And make them as concrete as possible,” Pychyl said.
3) Pre-empt that which tempts. “Make that pre-commitment to get rid of the temptation and if you hold yourself to those you’ll stop the self-deception,” Pychyl said.
Samuel Chen, a third-year communications student, offered another practical way of reducing procrastination.
“A person needs to breathe in and understand the circumstance of the project at hand and how important it is. Know the due date and how much impact it has on one’s life,” he said.
Though the tasks may seem daunting, Pychyl said that the ultimate goal is a better life.
“It’s not all about being hyper productive, it’s about living a meaningful life,” Pychyl explained. “You can achieve the things you want to achieve. Who could ask for more?”
