Musings on Procrastination

The Overthinking It podcast expressed some thoughts on procrastination that I hadn't heard before. They describe procrastination as a successful tool for dealing with anxiety, and relate a story about parenting that feels very familiar.

Image courtesy of Overthinking It

Procrastination as Anxiety Management

This was the section of the podcast that first made me think that it was relevant to a blog post. Early in the episode, Peter Fenzel relates what it feels like (to him) to procrastinate:

[10:00] There is some element of [the task] I think of as easy that isn't easy. And then I'm avoiding the full confrontation with the notion that the thing I'm talking about isn't easy. That's one of my big modes of procrastination; there's a sense of self-loathing that I associate with it from not being able to do the easy thing - which when I stop and think about it isn't easy. That is, it's surprisingly complex...

My archetypical procrastination experience is seeking relief from the rushing horror of all of the scope and complexity of the things I've committed to.

Co-host Matthew Wrather empatically agrees, and adds:

[10:57] It's a strategy for managing anxiety. And this is the crucial thing, because it causes so much pain but it's a successful strategy for managing anxiety. And that's why you do it over and over and over. Like, on a cost-adjusted basis, doing the cost/benefit analysis of procrastinating versus engaging, the "whatever you feel", like self-criticism or worry or whatever is better, is preferable at the moment, to the big unknown of taking on a project where you would have to open yourself up to the abyss a little bit and sort-of see. Now, of course the fun thing that you realize over and over and over and over is that it's harder than you wish but it's never as hard as you fear once you actually do it. But it's not that; that doesn't matter because you're dealing with fears, you're dealing with imaginings at the moment you're trying to negotiate with it.

I had never thought to link procrastination to anxiety, but the elements of procrastinating when confronted with a task that feels like it should be easy - even if that's not a reasonable feeling! - sound very familiar, as does the self-loathing that can come with it. This can come from both the "why can't I do this easy task?", and "why can't I do this easy task right now instead of whatever I'm doing to avoid it?" The strategy may balance the anxieties and emotions in the moment, but it is definitely not a long-term successful strategy.

Getting Over Procrastination

I've deployed many tactics and strategies over time to avoid procrastination, with a good success rate. The most important elements are task-awareness and self-awareness. For task awareness, I need to recognize what needs to be done first with the task, and accept what elements of it may bleed into the next day/week/month. As Fenzel puts it:

[17:37] It requires the self-forgiveness to recognize that it's not going to get done immediately: that you're going to only to sit down and do part of it, you're not going to be able to sit down and do the whole thing and don't get so "up" about what you think of what you're capable of that you're just going to be able to bang it out. If I think about it that way I will crush myself with the anxiety of it because I know that this is a large project.

Relating to the "self-loathing" element above, I think that "self-forgiveness" is vital to the breaking of procrastination and getting the task moving. Forgiving yourself for wasting the previous time is a necessary precondition to getting moving and avoiding waste of the next chunk of time.

The element of self-awareness is a reminder that we all have cycles of mental and physical productivity during the day. At the extreme, if I'm working a normal day shift, I will never be as productive at 3 AM as I was during daylight hours: my body will know that it's time to sleep, not to work. Lesser peaks and valleys occur during the day; my mornings tend to be my most productive and creative times. Fenzel points out that "There's only certain kinds of work you can do when you're really exhausted," which reminded me of Howard Tayler's philosophy on work schedules which he shorthands as chop wood, carry water. Paraphrasing chalain, he defines the two people who live in his body during the day:

Chalain once told me that in the mornings there’s a smart guy who sits at his desk, looks at the pile of work, and attacks it. In the afternoons there’s a dumb guy who can’t do much beyond chopping wood and carrying water. So he arrived at a strategy in which Smart Guy does very little coding in the morning — he solves problems and leaves instructions on how to execute on those solutions in simple, easily reducible steps. Chop wood, carry water. The result is that by noon he has nothing to show for his work except pages of notes. By 5:00pm (or 10:00 pm, depending on how long Dumb Guy is required to stay at the office) he has piles upon piles of working code, most of which Dumb Guy can hardly believe he wrote.

Recognizing that sometimes I'll be a superstar thinker and sometimes I just need to grind at a low level (using notes and tasks I set myself when I was higher-energy) is vital to getting out of procrastination. The worst time to need to apply willpower and creativity to a problem is when you're already tired!

A Family Story

Peter Fenzel tied the discussion of procrastination to the additional troubles of staying on-task while parenting, which felt so familiar to me that I had to capture it too. The story is about going to an outdoor restaurant with his wife, son, and two-year-old daughter. He was watching his daughter at the table while his wife and son ordered food at the counter, but then his daughter asked to go stand by mommy.

[50:15] I did go on a vacation with my family recently, and this is all related to the idea of procrastination because I think when you're really committed to something, to getting something done, a big project, having it as your "default RAM", as the thing you're thinking about when you're not thinking about other things, can be really powerful. And having - for me - children has ruined that, because they are the RAM...

[51:30] 90 seconds later, I am shouting [my daughter's] name at the top of my lungs because she has not only gone across the entire restaurant but she has wandered out into traffic...

Because I had not finished the handoff, by being like, "You have her," so she had walked over there and from my perspective she was standing there, but she was in a blind spot [for my wife]."

To accomplish a task, we need a defined time and space for the task, and parenting often breaks that up. In this case, Fenzel thought he had a moment to work on his phone, but because he hadn't "completed the handoff", his wife was not ensuring his daughter's safety and so he didn't have the defined time at that moment. Whether we're parenting or have other urgent tasks that might come up, it's extremely helpful to hand off the "keep the world spinning" tasks for just a little while.