Overcoming Procrastination: Causes & Cures

TRANSCRIPT: Overcoming Procrastination: Causes & Cures

Speaker: Laurie Hazard

Hi, my name is Laurie Hazard.

I work at Bryant University and one of my roles at Bryant University is to help college students hone their study skills and I also teach in the Applied Psychology Department, so I’ve been studying the personality traits and attitudes that make college students successful.

Today we’re going to be talking about the psychology of procrastination.

If you’ve already learned time management, what you probably have discovered is that, if you’re procrastinating that gets in the way of your ability to achieve your goals and manage your time properly. That is what we’re going to be talking about today.

The Definition of Psychology

Because we’re talking about the psychology of procrastination today, what I want to do first is to talk about the definition of psychology.

As we’re having this discussion, I want you to keep that definition in the backdrop of your mind.

Psychology is the study of behaviors and mental processes.

So you want to kind of conceptualize goal-setting or ability to reach your goals and time management as the behaviors and the psychology of procrastination as the attitudes and the mental processes that might get in the way of you managing your time well, achieving academically and reaching your goals.

What we are going to do is that we are going to talk about the psychodynamic of procrastination and that is kind of a fancy word, but what psychodynamic means is what is underlying your behaviors, your attitudes, your thoughts and your feelings that may be getting in the way of you putting your plans into action.

Theory Of Personality

Sigmund Freud has this theory of the personality and he says there are three parts of the personality: the id, the ego and the superego.

He says in a healthy personality, all three parts function together.

They work together and they stay in this balanced state, kind of like homeostasis in biology – they stay in this balanced state and if one of them gets out of balance, it causes conflict and it causes anxiety for the person.

Slide 11: Id

The first part of the personality is the id.

The id is considered the pleasure-seeking part of the personality.

The id is the let’s drink and be merry part of the personality.

The id is the girls just want to have fun.

The id is the part of the personality that can’t delay gratification.

It wants to have a fun, fun, fun, fun.

The id is the part of the personality that might have a person eat to excess or drink to excess.

Id; it’s no mistake – the word idiot is derived from id.

I’m sure you’ve seen people act like idiots when they’ve drank too much so the id is the pleasure- seeking part of the personality.

You might think of the id as like the devil on your shoulder.

Ego

The second part of the personality is the ego. The ego actually has a job relative to the id.

The ego is the reality part of the personality.

The ego is the one that is supposed to say to the id, “You know what, it’s okay for you to have two beers the night before a test, but it’s not okay for you to have ten beers the night before a test.”

The ego’s job is to what Freud says gratify the id safely.

You might think of the ego as the angel on your shoulder.

The ego is the one that comes in and says, “You have to study tonight.”

The id might come in and say, “No you don’t have to study. Go out and have a good time.”

The ego would say, “No, I have to study. I have an exam on Friday.”

The id would say, “Go out and have fun fun fun.”

The ego’s job is to make sure that id doesn’t take control.

Weak Ego

Really what is going on is that sometimes if students can’t combat procrastination, we might say that they have a weak ego; that is that they didn’t have the ego strength to stand up to the id.

When the id was bothering the ego to blow off studying and not go to the library or when the id was bothering the ego to blow off studying and go shoot basketball, or when the id was bothering the ego to quit doing the work and go down to the school’s pub and have a beer, usually what is happening is that the ego doesn’t have the strength to stand up to the id.

I want you to think about that when you’re right in the decision of should I stay or should I go, should I stay and study or should I go off with my friends, can my ego stand up to the strength of the id and the peer pressure and say no?

Superego

Let’s not forget that there is a context that the id and the ego are communicating with each other and that is the last part of the personality that Freud talked about, and that is the superego.

The id is the fun part of the personality, the pleasure- seeking part.

The ego is the reality part of the personality, that one that says let’s be real and this is the work that you have to do.

The superego is what Freud called “the perfection principle”.

The perfection principle is this idea of if we were in an ideal and perfect world, how would we behave as a student?

The Perfect Student

This perfection part of the personality, the perfection principle, the superego – this kind of encompasses society and what society ‘s rules are.

Let’s think about the University, higher education, and what their rules might be, what the social morays are, how to be a good person, how to be the perfect student.

What would the perfect student do?

The perfect student would be studying and going to the library.

The perfect student would want to make the Dean’s List.

The perfect student would want to tell their mother and father, grandmother, grandfather, and their professors how well they are doing.

I always say to students that the superego is kind of the guiding principles and your morals.

The ego and the id are kind of communicating within this context of the superego, of the question of what would the perfect person or the perfect student do in this situation.

They would probably go to the library and do their studying.

Rationalization: Out of Balance

Remember these three types of the personality function together and personality psychologists would say a healthy personality ego and a superego are in balance.

But there is always a time where things can get out of balance a little bit and there could be a conflict between the superego and the ego or the id and the ego.

And what happens when a conflict arises is, as humans rationalization comes in you might thing about this as far as dieting goes.

Let’s say that you decided you’re going to go on a diet and you’ve decided that you’re going to have a nice big salad and chicken with a light dressing on it for lunch.

Then all of the sudden somebody comes along and says, hey, it would be the ego right, hey you can’t have a cheeseburger, you’ve got to eat the salad.

You’re trying to lose weight.

But the id comes along and says, hey go ahead, let’s have a cheeseburger and then all of the sudden you decide so the id and the ego are in conflict, it’s out of balance, and you say, oh, it’s all right if I have a cheeseburger.

So this sort of anxiety about making the right decision comes up and then rationalization comes in to push it down and you say it’s ok to have a cheeseburger, I’ll have French fries too and I’ll start my diet tomorrow.

So rationalization is kind of a form of lying.

So we rationalize so that we can engage in behaviors or give ourselves permission to engage in behaviors that we know are the things that we are not supposed to be doing.

Anxiety: Procrastination Ruins Your Leisure Time

Ok, so the bottom line is folks, if you’re putting things off or you’re procrastinating, it causes anxiety.

It makes you feel not so great about things and that’s not the best place to be is feeling anxious.

What is also does, and I want you to think about this.

It really interferes with your leisure time.

Let’s say that you decided one weekend that you were going to put off all of your school work onto a Sunday and then, I don’t’ know, it was during football season or something like that, and you and all your buddies were going to go watch a football game Sunday afternoon.

But you’ve already put off all of your school work all week and you’ve left it for Sunday afternoon and you decide, well that’s all right, I’ll go and watch the football game and I’ll do my homework even later.

So you’re hanging out with all of your friends and you’re watching the football game, but all the while you’re anxious because you have this weight on your shoulders of all the work that you know you should be getting to.

So not only does procrastinating cause anxiety, it kind of ruins your leisure time.

So if you can find a way to get all of your work done, what sort of happens is you get everything done and then your leisure time can be guilt and anxiety free.

Now wouldn’t that be a great place to be at.

Questions

So, wouldn’t you like to be free from anxiety and have some guilt-free leisure time and minimize the amount of time that you’re lying in combat procrastination, reach your goals, and make the Dean’s list?

I have four questions that I’d like you to answer. They’re going to pop up on the screen. Take five minutes to fill out this questionnaire.

1. What tasks am I currently putting off?

2. What tasks have I put off doing in the past?

3. Is there a pattern? Are there certain types of tasks I avoid doing until the last minute?

4. How do I know when I’m procrastinating? Do I have favorite replacement activities?

Replacement Activities

Ok, so now I want you to look at the last question I asked you about your replacement activities because typically when people are procrastinating, they are not doing what they are supposed to do and for college students it’s typically the reading, studying, working on your papers, doing your projects.

You’re doing other things and those other things are called replacement activities.

There are all sorts of replacement activities that people engage in.

A lot of times when I ask college students what kinds of things do they do instead of doing the work that they are supposed to be doing I hear things like, MySpace and Facebook.

I hear stuff like hanging out with their friends playing video games.

I hear things like getting on a cell phone. I hear things like watching television.

I hear things like napping.

Ok. Those kinds of things are pretty obvious. Those aren’t hard to identify replacement activities.

So now you know when you’re engaging in those kinds of behaviors, you’re going to ask yourself the question, what task am I avoiding right now and what should I be doing besides spending time on Facebook or on the cell phone or hanging out with my friends playing video games or watching TV.

You want to really sit there and think, these are the things that I’m doing instead of what I’m supposed to be doing and be aware that that particular thing is your favorite replacement activity.

For me, it’s e-mail.

I know when I get stuck on e-mail for 15 or 20 minutes there is some kind of procrastination going on.

So for you it might be Facebook.

Productive Replacements

So those are obviously time wasting replacement activities.

It’s kind of obvious that when you’re watching a movie when you’re supposed to be doing your studying, you’re wasting your time.

So I would encourage you to think about those as your triggers.

When you’re doing those kinds of things it a trigger for procrastination but there is other kinds of replacement activities that are a little bit more dangerous.

Those are what is called productive replacement activities.

Some people engage in activities that are really productive so that they can kind of make themselves feel better about not really doing what they are supposed to be doing.

So what might a productive replacement activity be?

Well, it could be things like doing your laundry or cleaning your residence hall room, or running errands, like going to the bank and the post office and those kinds of things.

And productive procrastinators are the worst kind because they convince themselves its ok that they’re not doing their priority tasks because they’re actually getting something accomplished in another arena.

So I joke around and say with students, because a lot of times I’ll hear them say laundry is my replacement activity, I’ll say “how many pairs of underwear do you have?”.

And if the student says to me I have fourteen pairs of underwear, I’ll say good, that means you don’t have to do laundry for two weeks.

Get down to doing your work.

So I want you to really pay attention to those kinds of running errands and doing activities that are productive, but they’re not really a priority.

It’s not what’s due the next day.

Top Priority

Ok so we’ve got the time wasters, we’ve got productive replacement activities like running errands and maintaining lifestyle kinds of things like going to the bank.

But then you could even be a more productive procrastinator and I want you to think about the five classes that you have.

What students tend to do, is they’ll pay more attention to the courses that they like, and then those courses become replacement activities.

They don’t give equal time to all five of their courses.

So you might have a task of things or a list of things that you have to do, and that’s all schoolwork related, but what you end up doing is spending time on things that you like to do.

Like you might be somebody who is more interested in doing research and doing writing than studying; so you spend more of your time doing research and writing when really, you ought to be studying.

So that’s incredibly productive, because you need to be doing those things for your schoolwork, but you’re not putting priority on the tasks in terms of the timeline when things are due, and you’re not putting priority on the task in terms of giving equal treatment to each of your subjects and your classes.

It is productive, but make sure that for example, sometimes I’ll look and I’ll say I have to write a letter of recommendation for a student today and then I have five papers to correct.

Well, I hate writing letters of recommendation; it’s just hard for me to do.

So even though I don’t like correcting papers either, I’ll go along and do my correcting of my papers because I’ll have five or six tasks that are all work related, just like you’ll have five or six tasks that are all work related, all productive, need to do them all, but then I’m not prioritizing them.

So that’s really important to think about.

Delay Gratification

So what is this really all about?

This is about getting your work done so that you can have leisure time later and in psychology we call that the ability to delay gratification.

What that means is you put work first and fun after.

And I want to challenge you to think about a typical college student’s schedule because I observe this all the time in my place of employment here at Bryant University.

I see students getting up and dragging their butts to classes, but in between the classes, all those hours in-between classes, they have good time, they have fun, fun, fun.

I see them in the springtime outside playing Frisbee, I see them hanging out with their friends, I see them hanging out in the cafeteria, I see them hanging out in the social parts of the University and they have a good time all day long and they have fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun all day long until 10 or 11:00 at night and then they go oh gee now it’s time to do my schoolwork.

So they put all of their fun first, and then the work comes after.

That’s not delaying gratification, delaying gratification would be to work all day long and then have your fun after.

Think about the rest of the workforce on the rest of the planet.

Who has fun all day during the day and they go to work at 10:00 at night.

So college students tend to do it the opposite of everybody else.

So I want to challenge you to get your work done during the day, so you get everything accomplished, then save your leisure time at night so you can have guilt free leisure time.

This is all about being able to delay gratification, putting off fun first and then doing your work first.

Procrastination Survey

1. Do you wait until the last minute to do things?

2. Do you wait until a crisis arises or the semester has ended before taking action?

3. Do you avoid setting personal deadlines and sticking to them?

4. Do you often do things quickly, but incorrectly, and then have to redo them?

5. Do you spend a lot of time on routine and trivial things?

6. Do you avoid setting a daily schedule for how you want to use your time?

7. Are you bad at establishing priorities? Do you treat everything as if it were equally important?

8. Do you have a hard time saying no to requests or invitations?

9. Do you often spend time socializing instead of working?

10. Do you often get distracted and read things that aren't essential to finishing your work at hand?

11. Do you spend too much time on the phone or texting?

12. Are you guilty of not having clear goals or objectives for what you want to do?

13. Do you rarely ask other people for help?

14. Do you have trouble listening to or reading instructions on how to do things?

15. Do you often find it difficult to begin a paper or project?

16. Do you ever over schedule and take on too many commitments?

17. Do you start a task, put it aside, start another, put it aside, and continue doing this so that you rarely finish any one project?

18. Do you pack your schedule so full that you don’t have time if an emergency arises?

Fear of Failure

So if you answered yes to five or more of these I would really say that you are probably a diehard procrastinator and your procrastination behaviors do have the potential of getting in the way of your school work.

Let’s say that you answered yes to 13 and 14.

Thirteen is asking for help and 14 is failing to read instructions.

I’m thinking of a student that I had in my psychology class a couple years ago and I gave him a research paper and he read the directions of the research paper and there were parts of it that he didn’t understand.

He wasn’t sure what to do.

Something really simple he wasn’t sure how to use one of the databases in the library and he didn’t come to me and ask for help and I can remember thinking geez I’m a pretty approachable professor why didn’t he come and ask me for help?

All he had to do was ask me for help on how to use the database and he didn’t read the instructions of the paper carefully and he avoided trying to find out and when I talked to him about it, what was really going on with him was it was a little bit of a fear of failure and he was embarrassed because he said he looked around the room and it said it seemed like everyone else understood the instructions to the paper, everyone else seemed to know exactly what to do, everyone else seemed to know how to use the library. And I bet that wasn’t the case, but it was his fear of failure and feeling embarrassed to ask me and asking for help that was really feeding into his procrastination.

So I want you to be aware of that and I always say to students ask for help, ask for help, ask for help. The best thing to do to make you successful in college is having the humility to ask for help.

Create Accountability

So let’s say one of the tasks that you are procrastinating on is reading and you avoid reading and you have two chapters to read for your economics class.

Really what feeds into procrastination is if you answered yes to number 12, not having clear goals or objectives for how you’re going to approach tackling these two chapters.

So what I say to students if that’s one of the things that they wrote down on their questionnaire that they have two chapters to read, I ask them a questions like when do you plan on doing this.

And if it’s the night I’m giving my procrastinating workshop and they say 7:00 tonight, I’ll say ok, how long do you think it’s going to take you to read a chapter?

They’ll say well typically it takes me two hours to read a chapter.

I’ll say ok, where are you going to read the chapter? They’ll say I’m going to the library.

So I really try to pin them down, when are they going to do it, 7:00; how long is it going to take, two hours.

They’ll be done by 9:00.

When are they going to do it, um tonight at the library.

I want real clear goals and objectives from them.

What I’ll do to them sometimes is I’ll say ok, when you’re done with reading that chapter, I want you to write a summary and they look at me like oh gosh and I’ll say I want you to e-mail it to me.

What am I doing there? I’m creating accountability.

You really need to set clear goals and objectives and it’s important to be accountable and if you can’t be accountable for yourself, I’m willing to create accountability for you so that you can do it.

So make sure if you have difficulty being accountable to yourself, you have someone else that you can be accountable to, even if it’s a friend.

Or if you have a tutoring center on your campus. Set those clear goals and objectives and find a way to follow through.

Take Action

A lot of times if you’re a student who answered yes to number 2, this is a tough one.

What kind of crisis might you experience? It could be a failed test or a quiz.

That is a crisis, if you know that you’ve waited until the night before to study for something and it yields a D or an F that is a crisis.

What happens to students sometimes is that they function in that crisis mode through the whole semester and they’ll come to me at the end of a semester and say, “I think I need to drop a class because I’m going to fail it” and it’s already passed the drop/add period.

Many times students will wait until they’re on probation to start taking action.

I say take a temperature reading at the very beginning of the semester.

If you have any grades that are below a C, to me that is a crisis and you have to start taking action before the mid-term point.

Expect Difficulties

We have talked about some strategies for combating procrastination like being able to identify your replacement activities and I want to talk to you about a couple more.

Number one is expect difficulties. I always say this to my students.

What you have to do isn’t easy, but you can’t expect that taking five courses in a semester, getting involved in student activities, maybe some of you are working part time – you can’t expect that it’s easy and I say to students, don’t pay attention to the other students who say things like, “Oh, I didn’t even crack that book and I got an A.”

Typically those students are what I would call closet studiers and there’s probably a lot of bravado there.

None of this comes easy to anybody so don’t listen to people who say that it’s not difficult.

It is difficult so expect it’s going to be difficult, but also know that you have the ability to do it.

Cost Benefit Analysis

The other thing to do and, to a certain extent we’ve already talked about this a little bit, is do a cost benefit analysis.

Say to yourself what are the costs of procrastinating?

We’ve already talked about guilt and anxiety is one cost of procrastinating.

We’ve talked about how not doing well in your classes is another cost of procrastinating.

What are the benefits?

You might be saying to yourself that probably there aren’t any benefits to procrastinating.

You wouldn’t be doing it if there weren’t benefits so what are some of the benefits?

To me, you get to hang out and have fun with your friends.

That sounds like a pretty good benefit.

You get to have some fun and watch T.V. and get on Facebook.

We’ve talked about that.

There clearly are some benefits. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be doing it.

What you sort of have to say is do the costs outweigh the benefits?

Typically if students really sit down and think about it, the costs do outweigh the benefits.

Do that cost benefit analysis when you’re in id or ego or in that communication battle of should you make the decision to go ahead and focus on your work and manage your time well.

Little Steps For Big Feats

The other thing to think about is little steps for big feat.

It may sound like a huge feat having to do a research paper or to read a chapter.

If we think about reading a chapter, one thing that you might do in terms of little steps for big feat is look at the next chapter in one of your courses that you have to read and then look at the main headings.

Let’s say in your particular chapter there are ten main headings.

You don’t have to do that big feat.

You don’t have to read them all at once.

Instead, little steps – read one main heading a night and that might be a way to chunk it.

Look at your tasks and see if there are ways that you can break them down into smaller units and then that big feat won’t seem as daunting.

Tune Out Negativity

The other to do to combat procrastination is to tune out negative thoughts.

Negative thoughts usually get in the way of us taking action so you may look at all of the work that is piling up and just say I don’t feel like doing that or I don’t want to do it right now.

Instead, you have to say something like I’m going to get it done

I know it’s only taken me an hour to read a chapter before.

At five o’clock, if I sit down and do it right now, I’ll be done by six and then I can reap the reward of having to put in the work that I’ve had to put in and I’m not going to let the negative thoughts get in the way of me taking action.

Reward Yourself

The last thing I want to talk about is clearly in- between all of our procrastinating that we all do, the truth is we do get some work done.

So the other thing that you want to think about is giving yourself credit for everything that you do get done in a day.

One strategy for that is to look at your task list of the things that you did and at the end of the day write down everything that you got accomplished so that you can really see that you have gotten things accomplished despite some procrastinating.

The other thing that you want to do in closing is really give yourself credit for a job well done in the things that you do get finished.

And I tell students a good thing to do is for example, use your replacement activities as a reward for your procrastination.

So if you tend to use Facebook as a replacement activity, you could instead of using it for a replacement activity you could turn it around for a reward and what you might do is say, ok I have this chapter to read, it’s going to take me an hour to read this chapter and at the end of it I’m going to give myself permission or allow myself to get on Facebook for 15 minutes.

If you’re somebody who tends to use the cell phone as your replacement activity, what you might want to do is say I’m going to do an outline for the paper that I’m doing, once my outline is done I’m going to call that favorite friend on the cell phone.

So, in closing, what I would do is pick one strategy that is using your replacement activities or reward for the next week and try that as you begin to combat procrastinating and accomplish your goals.