Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Knaus, Ed.D. is a licensed psychologist and an expert in the area of procrastination, depression, and anxiety. He is a pioneer in cognitive revolution in psychotherapy. Author is doing seminar tour for PESI, a national organization that sponsors continuing education for professional groups, such as mental health and medical professionals. Aside from his private practice, numerous consultation assignments include: U.S. Army Post-Doctoral Psychologist Training Programs, Canadian Government, Addiction Research Bureau, Devereux Foundation. Regional television appearances include Boston, Minneapolis, Baltimore/Washington, New England Cable Network. National radio appearances include the Larry King Show, the Barry Farber Show, the Arlene Francis Show, and the Debbie Nigro Show. Life Series in Psychology, Channel 3, Cape Cod MA.

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End Procrastination Now!

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

Procrastination can be puzzling. This variable and complex process comes with lists of causes, symptoms, jokes, and horror stories. It can range from sporadic to persistent. It can be obvious or arrive in disguise. In this chapter, you'll begin to see procrastination from different angles and learn to adjust your level of aspiration concerning the time and resources you will need if you are to take corrective action against procrastination.

It's important to recognize that awareness is the very first step in identifying procrastination traps in order to make positive changes that can overcome the procrastination habit. However, as Alfred Korzybski, founder of General Semantics (an educational discipline on the accurate use of words), said, "The map is not the same as the territory. It's a symbol and guide. You learn the territory by engaging the process." So let's get started!

General Procrastination Styles

Procrastination is a needless delay of a timely and relevant activity. This definition applies across situations ranging from returning a phone call to creating a business plan to quitting smoking.

Occasional procrastination delays in areas of your life that are of relatively low importance are not the end of the world. If you normally shop for groceries once a week and you put off shopping for a day, this procrastination act is inconsequential. However, persistently putting off a number of minor and middle- valued activities is self-defeating if you routinely feel swamped by things you delayed yesterday.

Regardless of whether your procrastination is erratic or persistent, taking action to stop procrastination habits or patterns can lift artificial limits that you previously placed on your life. Any area of procrastination is grist for the mill for purposes of teaching yourself to rid yourself of the procrastination act on the way to disabling the pattern. This is a radically different way of thinking from that of time management hawks, whose views are calculated to get people to work harder and to put out more under umbrella terms of working smarter and easier.

Some causes of procrastination are social, some are linked to brain processes, and others are belief-driven or reliant on temperament and mood. Some forms of procrastination can also be connected to anxiety—feeling uncomfortable about being judged or evaluated. Combinations of motives for procrastination tend to vary in each individual situation. However, it is both the consistency of the procrastination process and the great diversity in situations that set procrastination apart from conditions. A cued panic reaction normally takes far less time and effort to change than a broad pattern of procrastination that may show up in different venues and in surprising and unexpected ways. Let's take a look at general forms of procrastination.

Deadline Procrastination

Deadlines have an endpoint and are partially connected to some sort of rule or regulation that you often can't control but that requires your compliance. When you think of procrastination, you may think of missing deadlines or rushing to meet them. That's a common view of procrastination. Not surprisingly, deadline procrastination is the act of waiting as long as possible before taking action to meet a deadline.

Work life is ruled by timelines, processes, and deadlines. Let's say you are working on your company's semiannual advertising brochure. To get it out at the appointed time, you'll need to take certain steps, such as preparing the content and design, getting it printed, and getting it distributed, in accordance with a schedule. If these activities were not regulated, the advertising brochure might be completed in a disorganized manner.

When a timeline and instructions are fuzzy, but the deadline is clear, you have a special challenge. You may see tasks with vague instructions as something to do later. When a task's purpose and instructions are clear and concrete (when, where, and how), you are more likely to do it. Thus, if you are not sure, ask. And if there is no clear structure, invent one!

You may have a deadline for a long and complex project, and the only reward in sight is the relief you expect to feel when it's done. In this case, you may face another set of challenges that has to do with the distance from your internal reward system. Pigeons will work for small immediate rewards but slack off for a larger reward that requires more work. Monkeys will get distracted and procrastinate when the reward is too far in the distance. We're not far from our mammalian roots when it comes to putting something off when the reward is distant and requires a lot of work. Humans will tend to go for quick rewards and discount bigger future rewards. We'll tend to delay starting projects that appear complex or ambiguous, or that promote uncertainty. Conflicts between our primitive impulses to avoid discomfort over complexity and our higher cognitive functions to solve problems can interfere with rational decision making and promote delays. Thus, a complex long-term project may be like the perfect storm unless you do something else first.

Deadline situations are often trade-off situations. If you want to get a paycheck, you follow the organization's processes and schedule and avoid procrastinating. The organization gets what it wants, which is a work product, and you get what you want, which is payment for your services. When you have a deadline in the future and the project is complex and requires consistent work, you may have no alternative other than to start early and invest significant time and effort in the process. If the process is internally rewarding, then that may suffice. Otherwise, you'd wisely set periodic rewards following intermediate deadlines that you set for yourself following the completion of predefined chunks of work.

If procrastination interferes with a productive long-term work process, a chart reminder may help you keep perspective on the purpose, deadline, timeline, and procrastination risk factor:

Remember, being aware and cognizant of your procrastination habit is the first step in our three-pronged cognitive, emotive, and behavioral approach to defeat procrastination. Reminders can be helpful. Human memory is fallible. Some delays are due to forget-fulness. You can meet some deadlines automatically with mechanical processes, like automatic payments to utility companies and mortgage holders, that eliminate work. This is also an efficient thing to do. You can use tickler files, calendar notations, iPhones, PDAs, and your cell phone to remind you of important dates.

Personal Procrastination

Deadline procrastination is just the tip of the procrastination iceberg. A bigger and more serious challenge may involve personal procrastination. Personal procrastination is habitually putting off personally relevant activities, such as facing a needless inhibiting fear. You stick with a stressful job that you want to ditch. You feel timid, and you promise yourself that you'll take an assertiveness class someday. Instead of engaging in self-improvement activities, you watch TV and read tabloid magazines.

Because self-development activities are just about you, and because they are open-ended with an...