We All Procrastinate for Different Reasons, but the Cure Is the Same | Beat Procrastination Lab, Day 3
The method is "bird by bird." Read on and you'll see what that means. Don't put it off! Finish reading now!
The method is "bird by bird." Read on and you'll see what that means. Don't put it off! Finish reading now!
We have always wanted to find a universal cure for procrastination. Unfortunately, that turns out to be hard.
On day three of the Beat Procrastination Lab, most of the fellow sufferers who shared their symptoms before the experiment began still haven't started treatment. But sharing seems to have given everyone the pleasure of finding kindred spirits: so I'm not the only one who drags my feet!
Here are a few:
JO, student: In my third year of college, lots of people told me to start planning for life after graduation. Now I'm about to graduate and I still have no clear plan.
Auntie Xiong, reporter: I mostly procrastinate on writing. I get up at 7 a.m. and start making coffee, wiping the desk, tidying my bookshelf. The first line I actually write always comes after 11:30 p.m. I go to sleep at 2 a.m. feeling guilty, get up at 5 to keep going, and scramble to file before noon.
Xu Chang, intern: I don't study for exams, and I put it off until I skip them altogether. The GRE, the TOEFL, a double degree: all the same story.
Meilihao, operations: I joined Warfalcon's 100-day early-rising program and lasted one day.
A student teaching herself UI design: A very close friend suddenly stopped talking to me. I meant to sit down with her for a proper talk, but I kept putting it off, and in the end we drifted apart.
Chen Xin, planner: When I'm procrastinating, I'm happy doing anything as long as I can look at my phone. I finish scrolling Moments, check the official accounts, keep opening WeChat to see if anyone wants to chat. I'd even rather memorize vocabulary than get out of bed.
Dan Junjun, student: It depends on the task. I've never put off eating.
Lin Yuehua: I buy vegetables and never cook them. They often rot in the fridge.
QuillBlue: With a task still unfinished, I'm reading three reports on procrastination first.
Feng Jiuting, student: The books I bought on Singles' Day last year are still in their shrink-wrap.
Mi Zong, PR: I kept putting off a reimbursement claim of more than 100,000 yuan, and now I've left the company.
Leng Tongxue, reporter: I need a cavity filled, and I've put it off for two years.
Mogu, project manager: A friend and I planned to open a Taobao shop selling rabbits. Now we're no longer speaking.
XM, teacher: My water bill can't be paid through Alipay, so I've gone a year and a half without paying it.
A late sleeper who is straining relations with the neighbors: I go to bed at 2 or 3 every night. One day an old man in the building across from mine told me my light stays on until 1 or 2 and keeps him awake.
Sometimes we put things off because we're lazy. Other times the process of dealing with a task is unfriendly: if you don't know where to find a repairman, for example, you just make do. Look closely, and even people with similar symptoms may have different reasons behind them.
As with physical illness, a drug that works for A won't necessarily work for B. Getting up early to work doesn't suit people who must sit at a desk during office hours; the Pomodoro method doesn't suit work that keeps you coordinating with others; and ranking your to-do list can become meaningless when you don't control your own schedule.
Having come this far in the lab, I've found that whether we choose early rising, Pomodoros, GTD or something else, there is only one way to actually reach the goal: start doing it now, right now, this minute.
The methods our three volunteers follow are simply different ways of pushing themselves into immediate action.
What to do about emotional procrastination? | Tang Yunlu, technology reporter
Strictly speaking, in the 24 hours since I filed yesterday's report, there were a few hours when I lost the fight against procrastination.
I still got up early, but I missed my goal of going to bed early. By 10:30 I had actually finished everything for the day and told myself to get ready for bed, so that getting up at 3:45 wouldn't hurt so much.
But by the time I had answered the day's backlog of WeChat messages and scrolled through the Moments I hadn't checked all day, it was 11:30. I hadn't given up social networks. I had only taken the scattered minutes I used to lose to distractions at work and saved them up into one block before bed.
Because I didn't sleep early, I overslept by 20 minutes. And at 7:30 I couldn't resist going back for another nap.
Beijing's air is now so bad that I can't make out the buildings across the street, so I went home after running for the length of two songs. The last time I opened Keep was during our 18-day stay-at-home experiment, when I tried working out indoors. It has been two months since I last finished a workout.
When you want to build a new habit, or revive one you failed to build before, the best method is still to have friends keep each other in check. Only when I saw that a colleague I had friended in the Keep community had finished her workout every single day did I do one more set, full of shame.
- Napping | Sleep Cycle Power Nap (iPhone)
The energy exercise gives you is an illusion when you're short of sleep. Halfway through a book, I was so tired my head dropped onto my Kindle.
So I tried Power Nap, another app from the makers of Sleep Cycle. It is built to help people short on time recover quickly. You choose a nap of 20, 45 or 120 minutes, and the alarm wakes you at the best moment.
- Emotional procrastination | You can only write bird by bird, even wing by wing
Today my biggest obstacle to beating procrastination wasn't sleep. It was my mood.
If your work isn't good enough, or you haven't done it well enough, the satisfaction of finishing on time doesn't last, especially when the criticism keeps coming. Procrastinators tend to be perfectionists, and perfectionists are far more sensitive than most people to anyone questioning their work.
Perhaps you know moments like these: your adviser or boss is unhappy with what you handed in, you fight with your partner or a close friend, a collaborator won't cooperate. These things feel like forces beyond your control, and the low mood they bring often stops you from working well.
Put plainly: you're in a bad mood and you don't feel like working.
Thanks to the anti-procrastination methods of the past two days, this time I didn't scroll social networks and I wasn't distracted. I just sat in front of a blank document and couldn't write a word. But my schedule today was packed, and if I kept staring into space I would get nothing done. That wasn't an option.
In her book Bird by Bird, the American writer Anne Lamott tells a story she always offers as encouragement to the students in her writing classes:
"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. He was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"
In moments when you have to manage your emotions, writing bird by bird is the only way through. To borrow the ad slogan: Just do it. Whatever happens, even if what you produce right now is a mess, you can fix it once you find your rhythm.
I began by sorting my notes, and after four or five paragraphs I could hardly bear to reread, my rhythm seemed to come back. Those bad paragraphs, of course, were soon rewritten.
Done is better than perfect. If you find yourself in the same bind, remember that sentence.
John Perry, a Stanford professor of psychology, makes a similar point in his book The Art of Procrastination: if you keep putting off work because you want to write the perfect paper, you can start by "writing the worst paper in the world."
Once you start writing, the paper is sure to be far better than "the worst in the world." The same goes for everything else.
Because I had interviews and meetings scheduled, I completed only 11 Pomodoros today. Whether I slipped back into procrastination today depends on whether I keep working after filing this report and write up today's interview notes.
I hope tomorrow's report brings you good news.
What to do about team procrastination? | Tara, project manager
A friend often asks me a question I find hard to answer: what exactly does a project manager do?
After joining QDaily's procrastination experiment, I used aTimeLogger to record what category everything I did in a day fell into and how long it took.
I labeled the categories work, transport, meals, rest, internet and errands. Later I broke work down further by type: administrative, communication and creative work, and added four more categories: personal organizing, meetings, writing articles and planning events.
Over the past three days, meetings took up more of my time than anything else, nearly a third of each day. A new project has just started, and this out-of-the-ordinary work swallows my time like a bottomless pit. Polishing the creative and agreeing on requirements make the meetings drag on and on.
Next comes communication: pushing the team's projects forward, confirming content and new requirements with clients, going over project details with colleagues, discussing available resources with media outlets, and handling some new partnership requests that have just come in.
This should be one of the most important parts of my daily job. I have to make sure I get accurate requirements and pass them on promptly and clearly to everyone on the team, so that every part of the machine runs properly and on time.
Third comes administrative work. As a project manager, I sometimes have to deal with contracts, finance, media and all kinds of payments, including some of the company's internal administration. None of it is big, and no single item takes long, but it is extremely fiddly, and it adds up.
What's more, getting these things done depends largely on third parties. At least half the items on my overdue to-do list are late because of other people.
Last comes creative work. By this I mean creative, strategic and analytical work outside communication and business processes, even resource analysis and research (and of course writing proposals and PowerPoint decks). This work, the most enjoyable of the lot, actually takes up only a tiny slice.
After all that, I have almost no time left. In other words, my work has spilled out of working hours into my personal time, and it is still spreading. This life as an "overtime drudge" has become the daily routine of a project manager at an ad agency.
As for the personal work where I could really use the Pomodoro timer, I've been fighting hard to make time for it. That is exactly what I have been working on for the past year.
The event planning I forced myself to push ahead with for this procrastination treatment gets only one Pomodoro a day, and the first post of the week for my WeChat account is still sitting quietly in my head.
The only difference from last week is that, because of the experiment, I have cut back on Taobao, scrolling WeChat and other entertainment as much as I can. Since installing the app, I keep reining in my entertainment and shrinking its territory, trying to see as objectively as possible what is eating up so much of my time and energy at work and in life.
As a project manager at an ad agency, my job is to take a project from the client's brief through creative output, shaping the proposal and execution, to lining up resources for execution, making sure everyone on the project is in the right place and working effectively, and then to take the project from 0 to 1 to a full 100.
Sudden new requests at work, a delay by any member of the team, slow and hesitant feedback: every problem I have to solve makes my procrastination worse. And my procrastination isn't mine alone. Maybe I need to take a serious look at team procrastination?
More than how to overcome my own procrastination, what I want to figure out is what to do when a whole team's progress stalls.
What to do about procrastination caused by a lack of novelty? | Datoujun, designer
Just as Tara reported in our group chat that she had overslept again, I got a slightly smug message from Datoujun: "I'm a man who has now swum three days in a row!" he said. "I think curing my procrastination started with swimming."
He may have put off getting the gym membership for two months, but the sense of achievement from "sticking with something I'd never done before" is already working. Because he spent the whole afternoon in meetings, his report was very short, and I was tempted to ask his boss to please give him half an hour to write it.
Here is his report:
Today is day three of the experiment. My work plan was: 1. read the brief for the new project; 2. find reference material for the pitch design; 3. make a demo of the pitch design; 3. check on the progress of the illustrations; 4. find reference material for the logo design; 5. tidy up the files on my computer; 6. creative meeting; 7. morning swim.
So far, apart from the swim, I have finished only item 2. Everything else got pushed back by the creative meeting, and item 5, tidying my computer files, was already left over from yesterday.
Because of where the project stands, today's creative meeting took 4 hours. Meetings eat a large share of my working time, and I'm stuck in the swamp of trying to make creative meetings more efficient. I haven't procrastinated on getting up or on working late, but whether I finish a day's plan doesn't seem to be up to me.
By day three, I've noticed that my life and work run in a very repetitive loop: meetings, design work, home. Some of the fatigue that feeds procrastination comes from this too.
I've decided to add a new "task" tomorrow as a challenge, and to try breaking my routine as a way to work better. Tomorrow I'll get up early and spend an hour at Ditan Park photographing the ginkgo trees. Autumn in Beijing is too short, and if I don't put it on the schedule I may miss it.
Besides keeping life from repeating itself, setting myself a task that seems hard to pull off on an ordinary workday should also add to my sense of achievement.
For me, taking photos is also a good way to focus, because you have to open your eyes wide to everything beautiful around you, and your brain stays sharply alert, hunting for light and shadow, composition, and the subtle relationships between objects, and between objects and people.
I'm looking forward to seeing whether I can pull off tomorrow's task. (The editor can't resist asking: do you know how many readers are waiting to watch you fail?)
Today's Tips
- We've found that people who manage to keep exercising rarely have much of a procrastination problem. If the famous cures do nothing for you, try starting by adding a little more exercise each day, and use the satisfaction it brings to fight the fatigue of tedious work. As for those of you who bought a gym membership six months ago and have never once gone: you really have no option left but to get moving!
- Yesterday we said that failing to finish a plan may come from chasing the perfect plan without asking whether it can be carried out. "Finish reading Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now this week," for example, may not be workable. But break it down into chapters 1-3 from 7 to 8 a.m. on Monday, chapters 4-5 on the subway at lunchtime on Tuesday, and the rest after Wednesday's morning meeting, and you can easily finish ahead of schedule. (P.S. Double the sense of achievement!)
Experiment reports
Getting up at four like Tim Cook to take on procrastination | Beat Procrastination Lab, Day 1
Anti-procrastination experimenter B drew Pomodoro tomatoes but lost to a last-minute meeting | Day 1
For more anti-procrastination methods and experience reports, follow this lab's updates every evening.
Cover image from flickr: Kaveh F. Azad
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.