Overcome Procrastination With The Right Solution
As you may know, the act of procrastination is something we all do at some point. It's a natural part of human nature and regardless of how good your intentions may be when you set that task to complete, there is definitely an inclination to avoid it. Sometimes we are fooling ourselves. The best way to overcome procrastination is not by only fighting the urge but instead understanding what causes it and figuring out how to change that as well.
Just about ten years ago, I came across a book called The Procrastination Equation written by Timothy A. Pychyl. He was talking about how we procrastinate, how we act differently when we are procrastinating than when we would be doing the task. He also said how we can get a better analysis of how others procrastinate by doing what he calls self-reflection. Basically, you sit down and reflect on just about anything (you do this for about 10 minutes) but instead of listing all the pros and cons of doing the task, you only write down the good and bad parts. This is similar to Pychyl's discovery that things like intelligence and personality are not related to procrastination at all. I started the self-reflection process and I would sometimes feel embarrassed how bad I was procrastinating. It wasn't tough; a lot of the time, I would sit and watch TV or read on my phone while procrastinating.
In this new article series, I am going to talk about what causes procrastination and how to overcome it with a cure that can last a lifetime. Now, we'll begin with Pychyl's work. Timothy A. Pychyl is a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is also the Associate Editor of the Journal of Psychological Science in the Public Interest and the Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy. Before that, he was professor at St. Lawrence University from 1997 to 2000 and Western Washington University from 1985 to 1997. What I am trying to say is this guy is all about research and he has done a lot of it in his own field.
Pychyl graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas College with a B.A in Economics and History and then went on to study at the University of Toronto where he got his B.A in Psychology and Philosophy, then a M.A, and finally his Phd from the same place. He is a highly respected individual in his field and has won several awards for his work. One of those was an award from the American Psychological Association for "Excellence in Early Career Contributions to Psychology" in 1998.
Pychyl's findings were presented on procrastination at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1998. He came up with a fairly simple equation for procrastination which is still used today. It's called the Procrastination Equation and it states:
D = prj + ptc + ep
So what this equation says is that he first discovered there are three main reasons why we procrastinate. These are: distancing, postponement, and avoidance. Distancing means that one wants to avoid the task. In other words, the task or whatever you want to get done isn't something you want to do but the task is still on your list. To be specific, the task is procrastinated. One way to put this is when you have a task and it's feeling like something awful that needs to get done but you give up because you think it's too difficult or too boring. The second part of this equation is postponed. This means that a task was started but was then put off for later (after more procrastination). For example, a project is assigned to you and you start it but then put off the project for just a little bit later. Then after that, you put the task off again and continue doing something else. The last part of this equation is called avoided. This means that you never even start the task at all because of procrastination. For example, you never even begin your project even though it was assigned to you.
One of the most important findings from Timothy A. Pychyl is his work on self-reflection and how this process can help us overcome procrastination. What he calls self-reflection is basically a detailed analysis on one's own procrastination behavior. He found that the process of analyzing your own procrastination behavior was the key to overcoming it. Specifically, he said that one should take about 10 minutes and write down everything you need to do for that day.
Conclusion
Pychyl's work is extremely important. It was something I used to help overcome procrastination. For example, when I had a deadline to finish a certain project and upon first thinking about it, I felt very excited to get started on it. However, a few days later, I found that my excitement for this task was gone. My excitement for finishing the task had disappeared and instead what replaced it was anxiety about sitting down and doing the task.