The reasons you procrastinate -- and how to finally stop

0:00Itamar Shatz:This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab. Financial decisions can be tricky. Your biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash financial decoder. You can say, I'm on a quest or I'm battling the dragon of procrastination, or you can visualize it as a journey. But the really important thing is to figure out what is going to motivate you. When I was a kid, my dad took us to the park and he just wanted us to learn that it's important to clean up, you know, your public spaces and people would leave their trash in the park.

0:40Lily Percy:And so we picked up the trash, but we were pretending that we were like pirates. So we'd pick up clothes hangers and be fighting with them like there were swords and we would have the plastic bags or whatever and tie them as bandanas. This is what I remember. that then grew into a whole scene in my mind and made the task much more fun.

1:03Itamar Shatz:Exactly. And ultimately, you're doing the same thing, but you're getting yourself to feel much more excited about it. You're reframing it in a way that makes it feel much more fun.

1:12Lily Percy:You're listening to Life Kit. I'm Mariel Segarra. And you just heard from Itamar Schatz. He's a social science lecturer at Cambridge University and author of the book, Solving Procrastination, which it would be great to solve. Although if you do procrastinate, and who doesn't, right? Give yourself a break. There's an evolutionary reason you do it.

1:33Itamar Shatz:Procrastination at its core is ultimately driven by our mind pushing us to pursue immediate pleasure and avoid immediate pain. Let's say we have to do something like write an email. If we feel scared for some reason, maybe we're worried that it will go wrong. We're worried we'll be criticized for it. Our brain says, you know what? It would be better if instead of doing this, maybe you could just browse social media right now or watch one more video or do whatever else that will help you avoid doing this. The problem is that in the modern world, this kind of response doesn't work for us because we're not dealing with a problem that we should have been dealing with.

2:09Lily Percy:On this episode of Life Kit, battling the dragon of procrastination. Starting here. Itamar says one big reason we procrastinate is that the task itself seems unpleasant. So what we need to do is make it more pleasant and thus more appealing to take action. I think of this as the Mary Poppins principle. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way.

2:34Itamar Shatz:One thing you can do to make a task more pleasant is something called temptation bundling. And that's when we take something that we really want to do, like listen to an audiobook, or listen to energizing music, or something else that we find enticing, and pairing that up with a task we don't want to do. So the way we might do this is say, you know, I really don't want to go running, but I really want to listen to my favorite audiobook. So I'm only going to let myself listen to this audiobook when I'm going running. Another thing you can do is trying to make tasks that we dislike less aversive.

3:06Itamar Shatz:An example of this is, let's say you decide you want to go exercising after you get home from work. And you notice that even though you're really motivated to do it, in practice, once you get home, you kind of end up sitting there and maybe wasting a bit of time and your motivation ends up fizzling out. And in that case, what might be the issue is that before you go to the gym, you have to get your bag ready and pack everything up. And that's kind of a bummer. And in that case, what you can do is say, you know what, I'm going to separate these two tasks. I'm going to deal with this bag thing the day before when I'm motivated and when I know that I don't have to take it with me yet.

3:43Itamar Shatz:And then the day after when you're back home from work and you're feeling maybe a bit more tired, it's already there. Takeaway one, make it more appealing to

3:52Lily Percy:take action. You can try temptation bundling where you basically give yourself a little treat like watching your favorite show when you do the task. You can do some of the work ahead of time, pack for the trip, or wash those fruits and vegetables so the task doesn't seem so involved when you have to do it later. And you can gamify. Try sprinting through the task, doing it as quickly as possible, and seeing how much progress you could make. Or, you know, pretend you're a pirate, or that you could make your clothes levitate themselves back into your wardrobe. Coming up, we talk about perfectionism and how it can lead to procrastination.

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6:14Lily Percy:One reason I procrastinate is that I want to do a good job. And that seems like it's going to take too much energy. So I do nothing instead. Maybe the problem is not that I'm trying to do a good job, but that I'm trying to do a perfect job. And I don't want to fall short of that goal. Itamar says, if this is true for you, if perfectionism is driving your procrastination.

6:37Itamar Shatz:What I would recommend is figure out what specifically good enough means for you. Get yourself to be okay with it and then focus on achieving it. So let's say you want to share a book that you're writing with people. Perfectionism in this case can be sort of a defense mechanism where you're saying, I just got to keep revising it. I got to keep revising it. I got to revise it again and again. And there it's protecting you from criticism because it's giving you a reason not to share it. And what you can do in that case and say, you know what? My good enough point is when I go over it, not actually finding any changes to implement.

7:08Itamar Shatz:And once you find that particular position, you can say, when I get here, I'm going to send it out because that is when it is good enough. Yeah.

7:16Lily Percy:I think about that too with speaking Spanish. I'm Puerto Rican on my dad's side, but I'm not a native speaker. So I can get in my own head a lot about it and think I'm never going to be perfect at this. I'm an outsider. and it gets to that point though of like aiming for good enough what is good enough it's being able to to speak spanish to my family and understand them you know it's being able to do ancestry research and and maybe read some books in spanish like that's my goal i would even say

7:52Itamar Shatz:for today you can say my goal today is to learn a word that i did not do yesterday my goal for tomorrow is to add one more word to that and just tackle it one step at a time instead of looking at the very end goal, finding those steps that we can focus on along the way. You know, if there weren't any mistakes and you knew everything perfectly, it wouldn't be really language learning. It would be just downloading the language.

8:14Lily Percy:Takeaway two, get comfortable with good enough and let yourself make mistakes. Okay, so we've been talking about ways that we can make it more appealing to take action. What about if the reason you're procrastinating is that you think the task is meaningless?

8:33Itamar Shatz:So when we evolved, most of the tasks were very visceral. It was get shelter or freeze to death, find food or starve, run from this line or get eaten. And now a lot of the tasks feel much more meaningless or nebulous. And there could be things like gather all these receipts, send them to your accountant so that you don't get a letter from IRS in, I don't know, a year or whatever it is. And that's much harder for our brain to feel connected to and to feel excited about. And there are a few things you can do there. One is to find the meaning. And that could be, okay, that's true that this whole task is a bit nebulous and meaningless, but let's think about the bad outcome here.

9:12That might be that I go to jail.

9:15Itamar Shatz:That might be that I get fired. That might be that I feel bad. And basically trying to get yourself to think about the actual outcomes and make them feel much more concrete. And the other thing you can do in this kind of situation is to reframe the task. So sometimes we get tasks that just feel meaningless, and there's not much we can do about them. In those kind of situations, what you can do is reframe it a bit by thinking, this task is meaningless, I'm not excited about it, fair enough, but I'm a person who gets things done. I'm a reliable individual, I'm a productive person. So my goal for finishing this as quickly as possible isn't to show that I care about this task, but to show that I care about getting things done.

9:57Lily Percy:Takeaway three, when a task feels unimportant, see if you can find the meaning. Like, okay, I don't want to do this paperwork. It's a lot of bureaucracy, but I do want to grow my business. And so this is necessary. Or if you can't find meaning in the task itself, find identity. I am a reliable, productive person who gets things done. After the break, we get acquainted with our future selves.

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10:47Lily Percy:I wonder, are there scenarios where we might decide that a task is something you actually don't need to do?

10:53Itamar Shatz:In my eyes, the best thing is to connect to your future self and think about whether they will regret your decision. So when you say, I really want to speak Spanish, but I'm kind of worried it will come off awkward or maybe I'll mispronounce words. Let's think about my future self. How will my future self feel? if I do give this a shot, even if I make mistakes, or if I decide not to do it. And basically trying to visualize how much regret will your future self feel and empathize with them.

11:23Lily Percy:There are certain things too that are like, it feels like you could do them at any time. Like the stakes are not that high if I don't speak Spanish today. But then at the same time, if I don't speak Spanish any day, then I don't speak Spanish. You know, and you could use that test and say, like, how would my future self feel about this? But my future self wouldn't care too much if I spoke Spanish today, but they'd want me to be practicing so that they had that tool available to them.

11:54Itamar Shatz:Absolutely. Then you can decide to do it on two levels. One is, OK, what will tomorrow me think and what will me a month from now think and try to think what both of them will care about.

12:03Lily Percy:It occurs to me that this step also requires some imagination, picturing your future self and empathizing with your future self.

12:13Itamar Shatz:Yes.

12:14Lily Percy:I've read one example of this is if you are not currently saving for retirement, that it can help to think about you at retirement age. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you probably look a little different then. And think about the freedom that you'll have if you set aside that nest egg now, the gift that you're giving to yourself.

12:37Itamar Shatz:Exactly. And basically, the issue that can happen is that there is something called temporal disjunction or self-discontinuity, where we feel that our future self is separate from us. And that makes us care about them less, which in practice means caring about ourselves less. And empathizing with our future self is a way to overcome that.

12:57Lily Percy:Yeah, it's almost this idea that you're like, well, I'm never going to get old or I'm never going to die. We know that these things happen, but we don't really believe that they're going to happen to us.

13:09Itamar Shatz:Yeah. Imagining what retirement will look like in decades is not something our brains were designed for. We were meant to focus on the immediate much more. But because that's no longer really an option for us today, it's important to get our brains to think about not just the immediate, but also about what will be better for us in the longer term.

13:26Lily Percy:Takeaway four. empathize with future you. If you delay this task, will you regret it later? If you do it today, how does future you benefit? Remember, future you is you. Now, so far in this episode, we've been talking about procrastination, which Itamar says is unhealthy delay, pushing off a task, even though that's going to harm you or make things more difficult. But sometimes it makes sense to delay. And sometimes, yes, we're putting off one task, but we're doing a different one that also needs to get done. That is called productive procrastination.

14:00Itamar Shatz:When I was writing the book, I actually did this a lot. So I structured the way I wanted to write the book and it was very sequentially. And then sometimes I noticed that when I'm writing, I just feel this inner resistance to writing a certain part. And initially I tried to force myself to write it and then I realized, you know what? What matters ultimately is that I make progress every single day. It doesn't matter that if I write this particular part right now, or if I skip to a different part that I feel like writing today. And basically, I gave myself permission to say, right now, I should be working on chapter 15.

14:33Itamar Shatz:But for some reason, I woke up today, and I feel like working on chapter 22. And then just gave myself permission to do that. And ultimately, that was much more productive than trying to stick to a strict schedule. Because, you know, the book still gets done at the same time. But it actually makes the whole process much easier and just feel much better as well.

14:52Lily Percy:Yeah, I get that. Because I also think like, sometimes you're in the mood for, or equipped in the moment for a certain kind of work, and not for a different kind of work.

15:06Itamar Shatz:And that's why two of my biggest tips, one is around ride the waves of your productivity rhythms. So figure out when you're ready to handle certain tasks, and then schedule the task for those times. So maybe in theory, you should open your day with emails, but actually you realize that in the morning before you've started, that's when you concentrate best. So you're going to schedule the deep work for that time when you're fresh and then do emails after. Or maybe technically dishes aren't the first thing you should do when you get home. But realistically, you're so tired for the first half an hour that you might as well do something mindless.

15:40Itamar Shatz:Give yourself some time to unwind and just do it then.