Dealing with procrastination

I had been putting off writing my weekly post since I couldn’t finalize what to write about. So I am writing this meta post to capture my feelings on dealing with procrastination and to also get my writing done for the week 🙂

Why do we procrastinate?

I recently came across this explanation for procrastination:

“… what causes procrastination is not the desire to avoid work. It’s the desire to avoid feelings. More specifically, negative emotions.”

Adam Grant on WorkLife podcast

This makes a lot of sense to me. Looking back, I delayed starting on several tasks not because the effort required was huge but due to my feelings around it.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the explanation and understand what causes negative emotions. Here are some reasons that I have personally experienced:

• Lack of interest (Example: finishing a school assignment for a course you don’t really care about)
• Unfamiliarity/discomfort with skill required to do the work (Example: needing to learn a new technology to finish a task that requires it)
• Fear of negative consequences from your actions (Example: sending an email to get approval from an exec and you are not sure how it will go)
• Lack of clarity on how to approach the task (Example: scoping a project where requirements are not clear)

As you can see, there are different reasons for why we may procrastinate. So to overcome procrastination, we need to diagnose the cause for procrastination and then find the appropriate strategy to tackle it.

How can we overcome procrastination?

There are different approaches for dealing with procrastination and I want to share ones that have worked for me. It’s not easy to map these 1:1 to the reasons mentioned in the previous section since there could be many that apply to a given situation.

1. Find forcing functions

I have always wanted to write regularly. I would start by writing an article or two in a couple of days and then completely stop for months. This is probably a very relatable experience for most of you in some dimension (fitness goals, reading books, learning a new language etc.). What’s working for me this time around is making a commitment to friends about writing one post a week. This is even more powerful when such a commitment is mutual since you have someone to understand what you are going through. It is no surprise why people seek a community of others trying to do similar things in any hobby or profession.

An important caveat about forcing functions is that it should be something that forces you to do something. So it is important that you seek out forcing functions that actually make you procrastinate less. Personally, I don’t find apps/tools effective as a forcing function since I can always ignore them. Fortunately, people I care about are harder to ignore and hence can play that role well 🙂

2. Find experienced mentors

Often times, what appears to be a daunting challenge can often be broken down into a series of simple tasks that need to be accomplished. In other words, we know the destination but we don’t have a map to tell us how to get there. This is where having an experienced mentor really helps. I have had many mentors in the past who shared their mental tools/frameworks for dealing with different problems. Equipped with these new tools in my toolkit, I no longer felt as lost when navigating tricky situations. I also felt better knowing that if I ran into further issues, I could go to them and get help. This really helped build my confidence and reduce the dread associated with performing a specific task (running meetings in my case). (Relevant read: I wrote about what I learned from my mentors on how to be a good mentor)

3. Find ways to level up

If the procrastination results from lack of skill, leveling up is the solution. This is something that I can relate to right now with my weekly writing goal. When I sit down to write, sometimes the words flow and it feels great. But more often than not, I am confused about what to write, how to structure things etc. To overcome this issue, I have been reading up a lot on how different people approach their writing. I have taken some of those ideas and incorporated that into my own process. I can already see some small improvements in my overall approach but there’s still a long way to go. Overall, taking this step to get better at this skill has given me more confidence in approaching the task that used to give me anxiety.

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To conclude, dealing with procrastination effectively can help us achieve our goals without a big tax on our mental health. Even though we spent a lot of time discussing procrastination as a problem, there are some benefits to it. Procrastination can sometimes help you accomplish more and can play a part in making you more self-aware. So procrastinate productively or get better at dealing with procrastination. Good luck 🙂