Run an errand. Clear out a space. Complete a household chore. And maybe most distressingly, write a college level essay. All excellent opportunities to practice a skill many of us have refined to an art form--procrastination. I don't need to define it. You know more than you'd care to about delaying the completion of aversive responsibilities. So that's a behavior we'd all like to extinguish. Right? Nope. Wrong approach, and predictably ineffective. As I'll address more fully in a later blog, the thing to do about ineffective behaviors is to purposefully replace them with effective ones. Nixing an ineffective habit, if that's even possible, just leaves a vacuum, and that vacuum get filled in time, usually with that same behavior.
Consider this. Practically all of us procrastinate. We may have differing motives--anxiety being a common one, and some would be frank and say laziness--but we all do it to some degree. It seems to me, though, that if an ineffective behavior is so nearly ubiquitous, there must be a more fundamental cause. And here I rely on one of my favorite axioms: Whenever a person persists in a behavior which plainly isn't working for them, they inevitably have a "good" reason for doing so...just not a good enough reason. Read over that last sentence again. It's golden. So the trick is to discover what that inadequate but compelling reason is. And in the case of procrastination, the "good" reason is that procrastination has a certain merit.
Let's go with the college essay. It's due in three weeks, the first essay of the semester, so there's a lot you don't know about the professor's expectations. It requires a bit of reading and some online research. There's a rubric structuring the essay. And, when it's assigned, you have no notion whatever how you'll approach it. You avoid thinking about it, consciously. But your mind appreciates it's importance, and the underlying anxiety you're pushing away is evidence that, subconsciously, you're actually at work thinking it through. You're procrastinating, yes, but you have a "good" reason for doing so, beyond any character flaw or underdeveloped skill set.
The "good" reason is that you will actually be better organized and prepared to write the essay in three weeks than on the day it assigned. But that's inefficient and sloppy. You can do better. Go ahead and procrastinate, but strategically. Recognizing the subconscious power of your mind to address important tasks, feed that process. On the day your receive the assignment, or perhaps the next day, casually spend half an hour breezing through your text, reading an article on the web, developing a question or two about any aspect of the assignment. Feed that natural process with something tangible to work with. A few days later, again casually (no notes required) spend another half hour consuming anything related to the exercise.
How and when you actively begin purposefully composing the essay is an unrelated matter. The point I'm making is that you can replace ineffective and sloppy procrastination with a strategic approach. It really works. Years ago, I introduced this concept to my Freshman Rhetoric students, and the response was universal. In addition to making the actual composing better organized and considered, it changed the emotional dynamic. Ordinary procrastinating is anxiety producing, and that's a downward spiraling emotional obstacle, amplifying a harmful sense of guilt and inadequacy. Knowing that your approach is rational and productive allows that natural impulse to procrastinate to enhance the sense of power and control over an aversive task.
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