Procrastination can be debilitating for teachers and students alike. We often treat procrastination as either a mental issue or a time-management issue. I was inspired by Jason’s series on self-control, especially his latest article on attention and willpower. I think learning more about procrastination ties right into his ideas. However Tim Pychyl in his book Solving the Procrastination Puzzle suggests that procrastination is actually an emotional issue. In this article we’ll explore some strategies to help us and our students overcome procrastination.
What is Procrastination?
Why do today what can be done tomorrow? That is the mantra of procrastination. A popular video by Tim Urban describes the pleasure-seeking monkey and the anxiety monster who vie for the controls of our impulsive minds. When we have projects with deadlines, there is a mounting pressure as the deadline approaches. So delay bumps up against a real sense of impending doom if we miss the deadline. But what if we are delaying something that doesn’t have a deadline? What if our goal is something like traveling overseas someday? Or what if our goal is to become a better person? No deadline triggers forward movement, and we can live eternally in the malaise of perpetual delay.
Tim Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Carleton Univesity in Ottawa and director of the Centre for Initiatives in Education, defines procrastination as “the voluntary delay of an intended action despite the knowledge that this delay may harm the individual in terms of the task performance or even just how the individual feels about the task or him- or herself” (Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, 2) In other words, we know full well that we are not accomplishing the work we’ve set ourselves to do, and so we feel bad about our work and ourselves as a result.
There are plenty of delays, though, that are not our fault. Sometimes we get stuck in traffic. Sometimes we have to wait for other people to accomplish their tasks before we begin our own tasks. Procrastination is different than these kinds of delay in that we actually have the intention to work on something but decide not to. The time and resources are available for us to accomplish the task, we just choose not to do it. Frequently we will choose to do something else, something we did not intend to work on, in place of the task we were intending to work on. How often have we allocated time to do a task, say write a blog post, and then decide to organize the desk drawer? I mean the pens needed to be sorted into blue-ink and black-ink piles, what better time than now, right? Pychyl writes, “we need to understand this reluctance to act when it is in our best interest to act” (Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, 3) This is a key idea, the self-interested aspect of the work we procrastinate on. The accumulation of negative feeling through procrastination occurs because there’s some level of understanding that we are sabotaging ourselves.
Why Do We Procrastinate?
In his book The Productivity Project, Chris Bailey summarizes Pychyl’s work on procrastination. There are numerous reasons why we procrastinate, but Bailey identifies six triggers:
Boring
Frustrating
Difficult
Unstructured or ambiguous
Lacking in personal meaning
Lacking in intrinsic rewards
Productivity Project, 58
These triggers help us understand why a student is delaying their active engagement with an assignment. The work itself might be difficult or fraught with frustration. Much of the work we do in education contains an element of challenge to help our students grow. When we see them procrastinating, we can explore whether the difficulty is shutting them down. Procrastination can occur because the work lacks meaning or excitement. It can be boring to work a full set of math problems. Running through all the major and minor scales on the piano can lack excitement and meaning. The work could be unstructured or ambiguous. Open-ended projects can shut us and our students down simply because there is a lack of clarity about the parameters of the project. Any or all of these triggers can combine to create a perfect storm of procrastination.
Each of these categories are negative triggers that lead us to delay our work. Note how much they connect to emotional states. If an assignment lacks excitement, I am liable to get bored. My emotional state will seek out something more exciting, overruling my motivation and better judgment. If a task is difficult, it might trigger emotional self-doubt that I have the ability to rise to the challenge. In order to create strategies to overcome procrastination, it is necessary to consider what the negative trigger is for any specific task or project.
How Do We Overcome Procrastination?
Once we have identified the negative trigger, we can position ourselves to overcome procrastination. The idea here is to flip the negative. How can I leverage self-interest to turn a boring assignment into an interesting assignment? How can I convert an ambiguous, unstructured project into one that has a clear roadmap? How do I transform a difficult task into one that is easier to accomplish? Bailey applies this approach of flipping the six negative triggers to doing taxes (Productivity Project, 64-65). But we can also apply the approach to student assignments.
Is the assignment boring? The student can identify a context that is exciting. Maybe doing the homework at Starbucks adds just enough variety to life to break through the perception of the work as being boring. The student could also identify ways to create games out of the work.
Is the assignment difficult? Helping the student break the assignment down into smaller tasks can often help them to see easier steps. The same could be said if they find the assignment ambiguous. Lay out a plan that has clear and doable steps. As a teacher, the steps might be intuitive to you, so doing a little more work at your own planning stage could help make assignment instructions easier for your students to understand.
“Why am I even required to do this assignment?” your student might ask. This in an intrinsic value question. Many times the rewards for finished work are remote. Few children connect their current homework to future career success. Perhaps letting them see how their work is making their minds more powerful will provide intrinsic value. Perhaps enabling them to see the current work as a rite of passage to the privileges older students have will give them a sense of the value of their work. The key is finding a reward that unlocks the intrinsic value of the work. Throwing candy at a child for finishing an assignment may seem like a reward for hard work, but it can undermine the intrinsic value of the assignment. In the face of a culture so ready to replace intrinsic reward with mere trifles, I’ve found the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason so meaningful. She cautions against the use of prizes, rewards and punishments, since students are already naturally inclined to love knowledge and their attention is drawn to the intrinsic interest a subject holds (Towards a Philosophy of Education, 7). We want a sense of satisfaction and great mastery to propel students to see that hard work can be meaningful and satisfying rather than an obstacle to a trivial reward.
Conclusion
Procrastination shows up when we need to do difficult work. More often than not, work that is meaningful and purposeful is challenging. Students don’t just need to learn the content of our subjects, they also need to learn how to manage their motivation so that they can overcome procrastination to accomplish work that will lead to lives with meaning and purpose. An anti-procrastination program is a worthwhile thing to have our students practice. Talk about these things in the classroom, helping them to identify when procrastination takes places and give them strategies to beat the procrastination monster. Maybe not today, but they might thank you tomorrow.