Procrastination: do it now or never

At the procrastination championship, I probably would not have won a prize, but I could have shown a good result. And, perhaps, would have received some kind of consolation prize. Alas, often I put things off until the last moment, whether it is working on material for a room, cleaning an apartment, or buying tickets for a vacation trip. For which then you have to pay with hassle, remorse, and even money. I went to the “anti-procrastination” training “The Time Is Now” with the hope of finally getting rid of this painful habit of doing everything at the last moment. Among the promised bonuses, two were especially attractive: “Stop feeling like a driven horse” and “Find a balance between work and leisure.” Maybe I’ll finally learn how to plan my time better… “There will be no time management” was the first thing the psychologists, Olesya Simonova and Andrey Kataev, who hosted the training, said to us, its six participants. The idea of ​​the training is different: to find resources in order to start and finish what has been started on time.

What exactly brought each of us to the training? When we began to talk about this, it turned out that we all procrastinate in different ways: someone because of frequent headaches, someone easily solves many daily tasks, but just can’t begin to complete one large-scale task: to start learning music , finish a diploma and even come up with … psychological training. Together, we tried to identify what actually makes us slow down in doing things. The result was such a list: fear of failure, laziness, lack of understanding of why to do it, lack of time / money, fatigue, character traits: scattered and spontaneity.

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• Procrastination: How to stop procrastinating

And so we draw. As best we can (the quality of the drawing, Olesya Simonova warns, does not matter for our work). We draw with multi-colored felt-tip pens, choosing from the list of reasons for procrastination our own, the one that prevents us from being consistent. On a large sheet of paper you need to draw her image, and then come up with a name for him. As a result, a collection of unprecedented funny creatures appeared. Each of us “presented” our drawing to the group, and then together we unraveled the meaning of these metaphors, born of our unconscious: what is pulling this cloudy creature down? what is this strange animal hiding from? what would help this couch potato to get up? I drew my scatteredness completely spontaneously, obeying some vague inner impulse. And when looking at the resulting “eight-saur”, I clearly understood why it is so difficult for him to move in the right direction: after all, his eight eyes look in different directions.

Define a task which each of us would like to solve thanks to the training, turned out to be not easy, because for this it was necessary to comply with several conditions: the goal should be formulated positively (without the “not” particle), be specific, time-bound, achievable and inspiring. “Defend my diploma in a year”, “get behind the wheel of a car again in 2 months”, “start music lessons in July” – everyone called his own. And I “guess” to organize my life in such a way that in a month I will completely free myself from work at least one day a week. But how can this happen?

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• “Think about it tomorrow”: 11 more ways to deal with procrastination

The facilitators of the training explain: procrastination simply has no chance when we have the necessary means to act: resources (strength, time), awareness, positive self-image, willpower (self-discipline). By doing exercises and practices, we learn to build up this inner potential. For example, with the help of one of the exercises, I was able to formulate more precisely why, in fact, I was going to free at least a day a week from work. It became clear that I was striving for an active and developing rest, which would allow me to “straighten up” internally and listen to myself more, add a sense of freedom, and allow me to experience joy. And as a result, there will be more energy to live the way I think is right. Of course, this is a much more powerful motive for overcoming procrastination than just “getting rid of trouble” with which I went to training.

Reframing is one way to work with unpleasant memories that provoke procrastination. Andrey Kataev invites us to watch a fragment from the English film based on the novel by Eleanor Porter “Polyanna”: its heroine, an 11-year-old girl, has an amazing ability to find a positive meaning in any phenomenon (1). This, in general, is reframing: the ability to see something positive in a situation. Each of us named examples of unpleasant events, and together we really found something positive in each of them.

Learn to forgive yourself. For me, prone to self-accusations (again I didn’t have time, I postponed it, I overdue it!), This topic turned out to be very valuable. Before, the thought that I have the right to forgive myself for not being able to, not having time, not doing it again did not occur to me. But the more we reproach ourselves, the more negative our self-image, which only leads to a new round of procrastination. In order to break the vicious circle and restore balance, in the training I learned to say to myself: “Everyone puts things off, and I put it off. I forgive myself for that.” And when there is a lot of work to do and we panic that we don’t have time to do anything, the best way out is to show mercy to ourselves and just … go to bed. It sounds paradoxical, but it really works: since then I have tested it on myself more than once.

This is just a small part what we were taught by psychologists for three evenings. In addition to several complex techniques, I added a dozen simple but effective techniques to my piggy bank. For awareness, from time to time I check my posture: is it comfortable for me to sit? Feeling an increase in anxiety, I begin to slow down my breathing to the maximum to 4-6 breaths per minute (a technique used by air traffic controllers). If I catch myself stuck on Facebook and putting off work, I tell myself, “I’ll be back on Facebook in 10 minutes.” Usually this is enough to immerse yourself in work and forget about the social network. (That’s how I finish this text.) I also reread the notes made at the end of the training. First, an encouraging letter to myself, which I ended with the words “Cheer up, have fun, lighten up!” Secondly, little notes that we wrote for each other, signed and unsigned. There are very touching and warm words, and besides – a painted battery with the caption: “Eat from it when you run out of strength!” And the truth is nourishing.

1. Dir. Sarah Harding, 2003.