- Procrastination: The Deadly Art of Delay
- Tips for Finishing on Time
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Procrastination: The Deadly Art of Delay
When everything is going well—you started with a good estimate and you managed to overcome all the unexpected issues along the way—something still is likely to stand between you and finishing on time: procrastination. At the point when you need to summon your strongest motivation, the work suddenly seems boring and unimportant. Most of us struggle with procrastination in one way or another. Let's see what researchers have to say on this subject.
Sometimes people think they put off work because it's boring, or because they believe they work better in a crunch. But researchers have found that these perceptions are just conscious representations of something else that's really going on underneath. In almost all cases, procrastination is avoidance behavior caused by bad feelings about the task, or a fear of what the outcome means. [1]
Two of the most common reasons for feeling uneasy about a project:
- You feel the activity was forced on you
- You fear that the outcome says something about you as a person.
Nobody likes to feel enslaved, so we tend to avoid all situations in which we have no choice. Equally, nobody is comfortable with the prospect of a diminished ego, so we steer clear of projects where self-image is at risk. When we think we'll be evaluated for the outcome, and we aren't highly confident in our abilities, we tend to put off work. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Procrastination and perfectionism are often symptoms of the same problem. There is a positive kind of perfectionism, in which people play close attention to details, try hard to do a good job, and usually wind up accomplishing what they set out to do and on time. Then there's maladaptive perfectionism, which occurs when people try to be outwardly perfect to compensate for low self-esteem. People who suffer from maladaptive perfectionism frequently procrastinate. They're obsessed with putting out external signs that are inconsistent with their true beliefs. For example, they appear to be confident, when they actually have great doubts about their own abilities to get a job done. They perceive failure to be an indication that they're incompetent, and they avoid working on a project either to set up an excuse in the event of failure ("I didn't achieve high results because I didn't really try") or to minimize the discomfort of working toward something that might reveal their incompetence.