Procrastinators Anonymous

Not a Laughing Matter!

The jokes about procrastination infuriate me. This is not a funny problem - not if you are suffering from true, chronic procrastination. Lawyers have been disbarred due to procrastination. Small business owners have lost their businesses due to procrastination. People's lives fall apart and are destroyed due to procrastination. This is not a funny problem.

The blindness of the psychological community in not recognizing procrastination as an addictive disorder also infuriates me. Every book or article I've ever read about procrastination talks about getting to the "underlying reason" why you procrastinate so you can solve the problem. Knowing why you're procrastinating on a particular task can be helpful, but it's not the whole solution - not by a long shot. That's like saying an alcoholic can stop drinking if he can only discover what's really bothering him. An alcoholic drinks because he has an addictive personality and alcohol is his drug of choice. A procrastinator procrastinates because he (or she) has an addictive personality and procrastination is his or her "drug" of choice.

I just made a change to the site theme that corrects the "jumping" bug in the chatbox. But the site will look very strange now unless you clear your browser's cache - delete temporary files in IE, clear private data in Firefox. Then do a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5).

Compulsive procrastinators may not have all the signs listed here, but if you identify with many of these characteristics, you are probably a compulsive procrastinator.

1. Disappointment is a way of life. We constantly disappoint other people and ourselves by not keeping our promises.

2. We have enormous difficulty getting started on new projects, or transitioning from one project to another.

From the P.A. Meeting Materials...

1. Break It Down: Break down projects into specific action steps; include preparation tasks in the breakdown.

2. Visualization: Plan what to do, then imagine yourself doing it. The more specific and vivid your visualization, the better. See yourself doing the task, and doing it well.

4. Ask Yourself Why: While you are visualizing doing the task, see if you can detect what it is about the task that feels odious to you, what uncomfortable feeling you are avoiding. Knowing what's behind the avoidance can help you get past it - for example, address real problems or ignore irrational fears.

Demand Resistance - Is It Hurting Your Business?

by Mitch Meyerson

Over the last twenty years, I have seen many forms of self-sabotage. The following psychological concept is one of the more common, yet least identified patterns that holds people back from success.

Simply put, demand-resistance is a chronic negative response to obligations or expectations. It is almost always unconscious.

Here are some common examples:

• You make daily lists of things to do, which you seldom complete.

There are two important levels to the planning process:

1. Planning what to do.
2. Imagining yourself doing it.

Planning What to Do

If you don't plan what you are going to do with each day - if you don't consider your priorities and set a direction for yourself - then you will end up doing whatever floats in front of you, and you will never get done what matters most to you. You can't get where you want to go if you don't take the time to think about where you want to go and how to get there!! So set aside time to plan each day. You can do it each morning or in the evening prior, but do it!

A common source of procrastination is the idea that we have to wait until we have a big block of time before starting on a task - any task. One of my great frustrations in life is not being able to get done everything I need to get done even when I am trying. I think this is because I don't make good use of the many small pockets of time that are available throughout a day.

People who don't procrastinate and are efficient about getting stuff done tend to use these small pockets of time. Making use of this time is one of the purposes of the Getting Things Done (GTD) strategy (author David Allen) of organizing a to-do list by where you are rather than by project. When you're home and you have 15 minutes, you look at your "at home" list. When you're waiting in a doctor's office, you look at your "anywhere" list, and do something on that.

This list of tips for getting started was posted by Procrastinator's Anonymous member, Milo (original post here). I'm re-posting it, with minor editing, as an article so it won't get lost:

1. Visualisation. Visualise the task being completed and how good it feels to have it off your list and out of your head.

2. Break it down into small steps. (But don't overanalyse; that's another form of procrastination.)

3. Exercise brute-force willpower. Grit your teeth and say, "I'm just going to do it, dammit!"

4. Use a timer to commit to doing it for a short period of time. For example, set the timer for 15 minutes and tell yourself, "I only need to spend 15 minutes on it, that's all - 15 minutes won't kill me." You'll find that 15 minutes gets you past the hardest bit (starting), and then you'll have less trouble continuing.

There's a saying that, "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well." This is emphatically not true! One of my favorite sayings is this:

"Some things require completion, not perfection."

Perfectionism can stymie us in many ways. Often it prevents people from doing a thing at all. They feel so much anxiety about whether they'll be able to do it perfectly, or feel so overwhelmed with the enormity of trying to do it perfectly, that they're unable to even get started.

Perfectionism can have another, more insidious effect as well. It can lead us to spend more time on a task than it warrants. In my previous article, I talked about how some things on our to-do list are simply not things we should spend time doing. Other times, a thing is worth doing, but not worth spending a lot of time on.

One common reason that people never get done what they want to get done most is that they are trying to fit too much into a 24-hour period. The solution isn't better time management. If you're like me, no amount of time management will allow you to do it all. The solution is to realize which items on your to-do list that you don't actually have to do.

A quote from Chinese writer and educator Lin Yutang expresses this well:

"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone... The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials."