A reflection on Procrastination
By: Anitha Nadig
Tags: Career Coaching, Career Development, Habits, Behaviour, Procrastination

The topic ‘Procrastination’ is haunting me since last two weeks to write an article about it. But I kept procrastinating it!

Be it life, performance or leadership coaching, when we deep dive, topic of discussions leads towards certain habits, qualities of the personality or hovers around emotions & feelings. Incidentally, this month, while coaching couple of leaders from entirely different industries a common habit came up for discussion was ‘Procrastination’.

While facilitating the discussion for both my clients to help them uncover their reasons to procrastinate, I am also reflecting at myself, for my reasons and what I learn from it. In this journey, I happen to read a bit on Procrastination & summarizing my learnings from self, my clients and my readings here.

What is Procrastination? Procrastination is delaying or postponing something; it can be a decision to be made or task to complete.

All of us may have this habit in one or the other aspects of our life. For some people, procrastinating may help in some way and for others it may backfire. It may work in some situations and not in others.

With my clients bringing this topic for discussion, one common factor found was; both had a perfectionism as a driver. Both felt any task taken up to be done with perfection. While the reason to be perfect for one was towards self-satisfaction, for other it was ‘what would others think of me if there is a mistake?’. They also figured out that how a deadline or an external pressure helps them to complete the task.

One of them realised that, there is a tendency to keep working on same thing again and again with minor improvements which actually didn’t add much value to the overall task but consumed time. Examples shared were fine tuning a ppt, doing a thorough research before buying anything. It can be a product worth of $25 & profit made by research could be $3–4 while time spent can be 2–3 hours. Most of us may relate with one of these cases.

Other person explored that how not having enough time to think about the decision to be made, not being disciplined about it or lack of skills to do the task leading to procrastinate.

These discussions probed me to think about where all I procrastinate and what could be the reasons!

Interestingly, I found out that I have a tendency to procrastinate reading any document (eg: technical, legal or anything) where I am new to the subject. It takes relatively more energy and time for me to read a topic which is entirely new to me. I keep waiting for a time frame where I have a longer stretch of bandwidth and no disturbance (usually hard to get) until when I get fed up with myself for not completing the task & nearing the deadline and schedule it in my calendar to get done with it.

Another pattern I see in myself is that when I do not know what is appropriate decision for the given scenario, I take more time (probably to think consciously & subconsciously). When it comes to tasks, ‘how’ part is important to me. Before I start any task, I need to know most of the steps if not all of them before starting. Otherwise, I procrastinate.

We may arrive at a pattern out of these cases but I feel each individual’s journey & experiences are unique and hence the solution!

On exploring more on procrastination, an article in Psychology Today (https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/procrastination) also mentions about perfectionism linked to the habit of procrastination.

What has worked for me to beat the procrastination to an extent is creating a ‘To Do list’ and keeping it in a place where I get to see it every day. Other thing is, my energy levels are high in the morning. So, any tasks which needs high energy are planned in the morning half.

There are multiple ways proposed by different people to beat the procrastination. I believe in exploring self before getting into action mode. Few approaches are covered in this article in Forbes(https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2020/01/30/how-to-stop-procrastinating-and-start-accomplishing/?sh=6ab3f5af140d).

Have you experienced procrastination? How did you feel & deal with it? Please feel free to comment and share your experience.