The Art of Procrastination

by Rosie Newhouse-Hill

Procrastination: ‘The action of delaying or postponing something’ according to Google; this definition further reinforced by Wikipedia as a ‘habitual or intentional delay of starting or finishing a task despite knowing it has negative consequences’. Synonyms include – dithering, delaying, hesitation and stalling (Google). This is something I am very good at; in fact, it is something I excel at and I can’t be the only one. I stand corrected - I know I’m not the only one: according to MicroBizMag in the UK alone 1 in 5 people procrastinate daily. But why and how can we deal with it?

What is procrastination? A common and infuriating misconception is that procrastinators are lazy. I disagree. Do you ever find yourself organising your desk, sorting your wardrobe, or even offering to do the chores around the house when you have a deadline coming up for a task you don’t particularly want to do? Well these are the sorts of things people get up to when procrastinating and while these activities widely vary you can see they require focus and effort. This is not laziness.

This leads us to question: what is it that causes us to delay a task if we aren’t just being lazy? Firstly, lazy people don’t think like this. In the words of Dr Tim Pychyl, Professor of Psychology and member of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa, ‘procrastination is an emotional regulation problem, not a time management problem’. What does this mean? It means that this dithering is not a lack of care or effort, it is the avoidance of a task because of how it makes us feel. You are procrastinating the feeling associated with the task, not the task itself. In many ways this may look like being lazy, but it is in fact the overwhelming stimulation when even thinking about the task that makes us want to stop and hide. As Dr Fuschia Sirois, Psychology Professor at the University of Sheffield said, procrastination is ‘irrational’ and ‘it doesn’t make sense to do something you know is going to have negative consequences.’

I’ve done the research, so you don’t have to. Together let's dive into getting to the root of procrastination. It’s easy to say, “just get on with it” and sometimes this works, as we will cover later, but it also just ignores the whole reason why you are stalling the task in the first place. From what I’ve learned, procrastination is the cause of two main obstacles: the simpler one, what the task looks like; and the more complicated one, how the task makes us feel. The simpler one consists of upfront feelings such as finding the task unpleasant or boring, meanwhile there are deeper feelings connected to the thought of doing a task and you may not have considered them before. These are, for example, anxiety, stress or self-doubt, emotions that you may be faced with when having to start, finish or even think about getting on with a task. As HuffPost said, it is ‘fear’ that connects these, the ‘what if’.

Researchers connect procrastination to what is called the Amygdala Hijack (as referred to in the New York Times and Healthline). This is ‘the emotional response that is out of measure with the actual stimulus as it has triggered a more significant emotional threat’ (Google). In simpler terms, it is the feeling that is rationally disproportional to the weight of the task in question. The threat could be fear of failure or even success or something completely different.