The Art Of Putting It Off Until Later…!

To be or not to be: that is the question

 

The most quoted and fabled soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

 

 

Often we talk about Hamlet’s famous dilemma. His unrelenting brooding and travails. His tenacious struggle to unknot the most obstinate and demanding question. In midst of an emotionally challenging promise, he always tried to disentangle his dilemma. It was not that he was disloyal to his father, but that he had never resolved to discern the scruples matter out of his muddled mind.

His tragic flaw was his procrastination.

(“Oh yeah, I am at my work station… unceasing buzzing of telephones and murmuring of fellow colleagues…people are peeping on my screen while heading towards coffee dispenser…my inbox is like on fire…last minute unscheduled meeting requests…and I have a deadline to complete my weekly report… so much to cover…even the clock on the filing cabinet wall is virtually mocking at me…just another busy day at office! Oh God, my day is bursting… so much to do… I do not know how I will finish all the work…well it is fine to put weekly report off until later…may be tomorrow or definitely sometime before next week…”)

This is procrastination.

I am sure you would probably relate with the above expressions and most likely think of many more situations in which you have deferred a decision or suspended a task.

We all procrastinate.

Simply meaning: later. It is a psychological route of convincing yourself that you will address things “later” or “at the best opportune time”. For all of us, delaying is one of the best breather out of a demanding status quo. Delaying a task or putting off a work is fine, we all do it some or other time. Sometimes, due to some unplanned engagements or lack of readiness, we do sporadically postpone certain tasks. Nevertheless, in the given business realities, professionals literally struggle hard for availability of time. Sense of urgency is enormous. Today we all are expected to do more with less resources, which has become a major epicentre of distress at work. Other source of pull on the job includes apprehensions about performing well against swelling demands and shrinking unfilled time for each task. The burden of continuously be on the mark, unending spats with colleagues or differences with the senior management are now unchanging fixtures at work. Do you remember the beautiful song by Randy Newman “It’s a jungle out there,” the theme song of TV serial Monk (season 2).

Scenario is not going to change. The naked legitimacies of current business and commercial world are here to stay. We need to discover what is causing our postponements? Why we procrastinate? How can we deal with our lifestyle differently?

The procrastination is the act of putting off an impending essential work until a later time. In fact, that available ‘time space’ is then invested on some familiar marginally useful tasks in lieu of the essential ones. Procrastination is your saviour. We all rationalize. We cleverly craft a believable excuse for our non-action. We make it sound very lucid without reflecting the actual intent. In reality, the conceivable excuse we frame first ‘within’ for the self and then for the purpose of others. I do not think any one of us view procrastination as a serious problem. We just take it as a common tendency to be bit easy-going or being measured. Probably, procrastination is a natural impulsive reaction.

Procrastination becomes a problem only when it turns into a normal tendency (learned behaviour). Therefore, it is crucial for a professional to hold his temptation of stalling imminent deliverables for some other time. I am confident that each time when you postpone the task, deep inside it hurts. It is so perplexing behaviour. At the end you are not happy. It triggers an emotional reaction, because you do not enjoy consciously stalling a crucial work against your better judgement. It remains with you as a hangover. And so, learning to own up your uncomfortable feelings is certainly going to help you appreciate your procrastination. Do not let procrastination be your way of life.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. I was quite enamoured after reading article by Dr. Joseph Ferrari (AAP, April, 2010) on procrastination. Particularly his citation, “Everyone procrastinates, but not everyone is a procrastinator.” When procrastination becomes a habit than it is much more than just laziness or poor time management or some other realistic justification like, ‘you find work unexciting’. At least, for me it is difficult to believe that among committed professionals, procrastination is an artefact of idleness or reluctance to do an imperfect task. No way. It has to be something more. A chronic procrastination tendency has more to do with our maladaptive lifestyle (Ferrari). It evolve as a maladaptive contrivance. It is interesting to note that chronic procrastinators are unable to make logical decisions. They purposefully prefer to unload the burden of decision making to someone else. They develop a mental state of indecisiveness (waiting to make a decision) out of the fear of attached liabilities and reparations.

Let’s explore, what can we really do about it? For understanding it better, first we need to be honest to accept the fact that we are procrastinating. Keep asking, ‘why we want to postpone a demanding task’? It is critical for us to arrest the core reasons.

Here are some thoughts… 

Make Conscious Choice to Start

It is one of the most unnerving things. It is the want of starting that aborts most tasks and projects. Starting itself is enough to gain desired momentum to complete the task. Do you remember deciphering a proverb in your early school English grammar class, “Well begun is half done”? You cannot complete a work you do not start. Get a good start and the rest of it will fall in place. Most difficult part is to convince oneself to initiate. Once you are in it, you are likely to keep continuing. The actual discomfort is in making a decision to start the work. Forget for that moment about the finish task, just concentrate on initiating. Bring your focus from the future to now. Challenge your negative thoughts. Keep on reminding you that once you will start the work, eventually you will finish it. Thinking tangible also helps you get started. Give it a try. Start with the hardest task. Even a small success there will generate the feeling of progression. Just start anywhere in the line of your task. Keep in mind likely consequences of not attending to a particular task. While procrastination might not be something you can circumvent completely, even becoming mindful of the reasons can help you a lot. At least you will be able to put aside your illusions to make a beginning. Let me quote here Buddha, “there are two mistakes one can make along the road of truth…not going all the way, and not starting”. If you really want to start, you will. 

Control Your Day-Map

Procrastination is adversary of your time. .As a professional, you all know the obvious reasons why getting rid of clutter and effectively managing time is critical. I am not talking here about time management. I am emphasising upon committing a time-window to your task. You need to be specific. No point being optimistic about planning your time for a task, it is good to be realistic and tangible. You need to provide very specific time to start your work. Do not say, “I will take up this work during second half”. Be sure to say,  “I will do it after my 03:30 pm tea break.” I would personally recommend jotting down your day-map (first thing in the morning). Preferably, it should operationalise the objectives and intentions by providing an appropriate structural dimension to the day. There is a Chinese proverb, “palest ink is stronger than the sharpest memory”. The act of writing your day-map, creates a psychological promise to self. Being a professional, you have range of tasks that must be attended to, unless a specific time set aside for essential matters, invariably what is important gets second priority to the urgent routine matters. It is good to prepare your day-map, listing down series of activities in certain order of importance. Include your routine also, like, lunch, gym, shopping, to get a very realistic picture of available time. It puts you in a position of control. A day-map is a schedule record of considered promise made to self on the allocation of time to each critical tasks. But for a definite time/day/date apportioned to a particular work, particularly if it is unpleasant or demanding matter to tackle, the probability of it getting a precedence is limited. Fortunately, now a days with advancement of technology it is in your palm all the time. A well-known quote by John L Masson is worth referring here, “Don’t ask time where it’s gone; tell it where to go”.

Defang Your Distractions

As I have already elaborated before that procrastination is a deceptive mental process, also because the ‘distracting tasks’ are part of your day to day work cycle, but are not the most pressing tasks at hand. What is distraction? Paul Graham has defined distraction as, “desirable at the wrong time”. We are hard-wired to procrastinate. Therefore, when we want to be distracted, we will be. Procrastination nourishes on distractions. So shut off the all possible addictive trappings (routine tasks, internet, mobile, music system, TV, friends, leisure reading magazines or books, etc.) of distractions when you are addressing a demanding task. You need to literally starve it of distractions. First learn to respect your productive time and then (once you have effectuated predetermined tasks) only indulge in such distractions. In my opinion, procrastination has a lot to do with distraction than anything else. The promising way of maintaining good focus on task is by inhibiting the distractions from coming into focus. Sounds simple… difficult in practice, but it works

I don’t believe in making the choice of ‘not to do it now’. A decision is a choice of action in indecision. There will be an unceasing struggle between our emotional impulse and our reasoning. There should be equipoise between intellect and your mind. A choice between procrastination and action.When we are drawn by a dream, action happens naturally. It is only when we misplace the purpose of our being that we surrender to procrastination.

So next time you contemplate procrastinating, think twice!

Leave a comment below and let me know if you have any meaningful thoughts on how to time-out procrastinating!

That’s all for now folks!