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Speaker 1: We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Tim Cycle. It
Speaker 1: is in the getting on with life that makes our lives,
Speaker 1: and that procrastination, in a very real sense, is an
Speaker 1: existential issue of not getting on with life itself. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have
Speaker 1: recognized the importance of the thoughts we have quotes like
Speaker 1: garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think
Speaker 1: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf Y, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Tim Sitchell. Tim is
Speaker 1: an associate professor of psychology at Carlton University in Ottawa
Speaker 1: and has garnered an international reputation for his scholarship and
Speaker 1: a global audience for his I Procrastinate podcast. He also
Speaker 1: writes a popular Don't Delay blog with Psychology Today. His
Speaker 1: new book is Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, A concise guide
Speaker 1: to Strategies for Change. Hi Tim, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Hi Eric, Thanks for having me. I am really excited
Speaker 1: to have you on. Your book is called Solving the
Speaker 1: Procrastination Puzzle. A concise guide to strategies for change. You
Speaker 1: actually have a couple of books, but this is the
Speaker 1: one that that I read to focus on for the interview.
Speaker 1: And I know procrastination runs rampant, you know, everywhere, and
Speaker 1: I know our listeners it's something they also are interested in.
Speaker 1: So I'm really looking forward to getting into that. But
Speaker 1: let's start like we normally do with the Parable. There
Speaker 1: is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she
Speaker 1: thinks about it for a second and looks up at
Speaker 1: her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins?
Speaker 1: And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by asking you what that parable
Speaker 1: means to you in your life and in the work
Speaker 1: that you do. Well. I've been looking forward to joining
Speaker 1: you on the podcast simply because I like The Parable
Speaker 1: so much. I read it and I've I've enjoyed parables
Speaker 1: since I was a young man, especially zen Cohens and
Speaker 1: things like that. And I see the same sort of
Speaker 1: wisdom in that parable. And it fits my research so
Speaker 1: much in the sense that even the most recent reas
Speaker 1: which we've seen come out of Germany using functional magnetic
Speaker 1: residence imaging on the difference in brains between those procrastinating
Speaker 1: those who don't, we see that the amygdala is larger. Uh,
Speaker 1: And it's about fear. It's very true in terms of
Speaker 1: understanding procrastination. So it fits with my research well. And
Speaker 1: in my own life, of course, I recognize it the
Speaker 1: habits that I developed, the things that I feed, the things,
Speaker 1: the things that I think make me happy but don't.
Speaker 1: When I feed those, they become habits and difficult to break.
Speaker 1: So I resonate to that both personally and professionally. That's wonderful.
Speaker 1: So do you have any parables of your own that
Speaker 1: are particularly important to you besides the Wolf parable that
Speaker 1: come to mind that might speak to procrastination? Yes, for sure.
Speaker 1: Act it's a zend story and it's the young novice
Speaker 1: who list the master and he said, Master, I've been
Speaker 1: doing my meditation and I've been working hard. How do
Speaker 1: I achieve enlightenment in the asked. He looks at him
Speaker 1: and says, have you finished your rice? And he said yes,
Speaker 1: then then wash your bowl. And that's the end of
Speaker 1: the story. And it's so powerful for me, because you know,
Speaker 1: that's what life is in so many ways, that it
Speaker 1: is in the getting on with life that makes makes
Speaker 1: our lives, and that procrastination, in a very real sense,
Speaker 1: is an existential issue of not getting on with life itself.
Speaker 1: And so I find that to be a very powerful
Speaker 1: thing that we can make more of many tasks in
Speaker 1: our lives. In fact, I teach my children that all
Speaker 1: the time. I'll say to my son, for example, when
Speaker 1: he was six, I said to him, you know, Alex,
Speaker 1: it's time that you started making your own bed. And
Speaker 1: of course he said, I don't want to. I don't
Speaker 1: feel like it. And my children know what I say,
Speaker 1: and to that all the time is as I didn't
Speaker 1: ask you what you want or how you feel. I said,
Speaker 1: it's time for you to make your bed. And that's
Speaker 1: you know, so much in that parable or that zen
Speaker 1: calling of what makes enlightenment in life right just taking
Speaker 1: the next right action act. So you just touched on
Speaker 1: something that I was going to read that you wrote
Speaker 1: because I love the way you say this, and I
Speaker 1: just think it puts this in perspective. And you say,
Speaker 1: when we procrastinating on our goals, we are basically putting
Speaker 1: off our lives. And you said you became more convinced
Speaker 1: of the importance of dealing with procrastination as a symptom
Speaker 1: of an existential malaise, and a malaise that can only
Speaker 1: be addressed by our deep commitment to authoring the stories
Speaker 1: of our lives. To author our own lives, we have
Speaker 1: to be an active agent in our lives, not a
Speaker 1: passive participant making excuses for what we are not doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's nice to hear my words right back to me.
Speaker 1: It because it's been a while since I wrote that book. Uh,
Speaker 1: And and I stand by that. It's it's good that
Speaker 1: I don't kind of craze to go who I wrote that. No,
Speaker 1: it is a sustinct summary of what keeps me interested
Speaker 1: in procrastination. Like, there's so many layers to my understanding.
Speaker 1: You know, I started briefly with thinking about the latest
Speaker 1: German study that was neurophysiological, you know, based and understanding
Speaker 1: brain differences. But like all explanations. We can take it
Speaker 1: at different levels of analysis, and for me, the most
Speaker 1: profound one is this notion of getting on with our
Speaker 1: own lives because the one non renewable resource we have
Speaker 1: in our lives is time. You and I don't know
Speaker 1: how much we're gonna have, but we know we can't
Speaker 1: make any more of it. And I think that's probably
Speaker 1: why in every great world religion there's some notion of
Speaker 1: the sin of sloth, because you can't waste this thing
Speaker 1: called life. And with procrastination, you know, for me, it's
Speaker 1: not a matter of becoming some uber productive earning machine,
Speaker 1: but a person who lives the life here she wants
Speaker 1: to achieves the goals that here she wants to achieve,
Speaker 1: and doesn't kind of stew on his own juices in
Speaker 1: the guilt and shame that's so commonly defines procrastination. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's such a big piece of it. I
Speaker 1: often talk with people about when we know there's things
Speaker 1: that we want to slash need to do, and we
Speaker 1: don't do them, it feels awful. And I think one
Speaker 1: of the most important skills we can build in life
Speaker 1: is to sort of make promises to ourselves and then
Speaker 1: keep those promises and procrastination stands kind of right in
Speaker 1: the middle of that. And you actually say that there's
Speaker 1: some research that shows that procrastination actually compromises our health
Speaker 1: in two different ways. Could you share a little bit
Speaker 1: about that. Yes, I'm working on another paper with my
Speaker 1: colleague at the University of Sheffield right now. We're reanalyzing
Speaker 1: some of our data and the first path is a
Speaker 1: direct path with stress across theination causes more stress, and
Speaker 1: of course we know there are many mechanisms in terms
Speaker 1: of our physical health how that undermines our immune system
Speaker 1: and creates uh less resistance to all sorts of illness.
Speaker 1: So procrastination stress route to an effect on our health.
Speaker 1: But there's also an effect in terms of fewer wellness
Speaker 1: behaviors and treatment delay, more treatment delay. So procrastination has
Speaker 1: indirect effects. So we have this this this direct route
Speaker 1: through stress, but there are two interesting indirect routes that
Speaker 1: procrastination has an effect on our health, and that's from
Speaker 1: fewer wellness behaviors. So we don't sleep is when we
Speaker 1: think we should be sleeping, don't exercise, don't eat well.
Speaker 1: These are typical wellness behaviors, and sleep is interesting on
Speaker 1: its own. I have colleagues in at Youtubect University in
Speaker 1: the Netherlands who've been studying sleep procrastination in fact. And
Speaker 1: the other indirect route is treatment delay. Oh, I'll get
Speaker 1: look look after that later, and that has significant effects,
Speaker 1: and I'm interested in studying that, especially in older adults
Speaker 1: when things are more fragile in terms of you need
Speaker 1: to have fixed things looked in sooner than later. So
Speaker 1: we have all these roots to the connection between procrastination
Speaker 1: and our health. The one we have the most research
Speaker 1: evidence on is the direct effects of stress. But then
Speaker 1: there's the indirect effects of fewer wellness behaviors and treat
Speaker 1: But delay, Yeah, actually makes me think of a story.
Speaker 1: And I'm not sure that I can blame this on
Speaker 1: having better control of procrastination or just pure terror. But
Speaker 1: this week I got a call from my dentist. I
Speaker 1: had been in last week to get some work done
Speaker 1: and they called and said, we see something in your
Speaker 1: X rays and we think we think it might be cancer.
Speaker 1: And I thought, oh my god. So I called oral
Speaker 1: surgeons until I could find one that would see me
Speaker 1: like now, and UH went over and got it looked at,
Speaker 1: and it was absolutely nothing. But again I think that
Speaker 1: was more driven by fear than not being a procrastinator,
Speaker 1: but it it just made me think of that when
Speaker 1: you were telling that story about delaying going to the doctor.
Speaker 1: That was one time I was not delaying. But you
Speaker 1: know there are people who get news like that and
Speaker 1: do put it off. It's quite incredible. Yeah. Yeah, Now
Speaker 1: I just was like, I don't I don't want to
Speaker 1: live for two weeks worrying about this, like, because I
Speaker 1: know I will, you know anyway. So there's lots of
Speaker 1: things that cause procrastination, but at the heart of it,
Speaker 1: you say that one of the biggest things is that
Speaker 1: it's a form of self regulation failure. Can you explain that? Sure,
Speaker 1: so many people think procrastination is a time management issue,
Speaker 1: and although time management is a necessary skill in our lives,
Speaker 1: it's not sufficient because you'll come to the point in
Speaker 1: time where you say, Okay, this is the project I
Speaker 1: said I'm gonna work on, but your whole body screams,
Speaker 1: I don't want to. I don't feel like it. You
Speaker 1: have an emotional response to the task at hand. We
Speaker 1: typically call that task aversiveness. We find it diversive in
Speaker 1: that we're anxious about it. We're bored, we resent it,
Speaker 1: we're frustrated by it. Any one of those emotions, or
Speaker 1: pick some of your favorites. So how do you get
Speaker 1: rid of those negative emotions because we don't want them.
Speaker 1: While we use avoidance as an emotion focused coping strategy,
Speaker 1: the problem is it's a misregulation of emotion because we're
Speaker 1: not really going to feel better in the long run.
Speaker 1: We're not regulating ourselves in a healthy way. But it
Speaker 1: gets reinforced because the moment you get rid of the task,
Speaker 1: for that moment, you feel better. So you get this
Speaker 1: negative reinforcement that creates a habit. So procrastinations an emotion
Speaker 1: focused coping habit. And it's a problem of self regulation
Speaker 1: in the same way that eating the second row of
Speaker 1: cookies in the bag isn't going to make you feel better.
Speaker 1: Putting off these things isn't gonna make you feel better.
Speaker 1: We have the naive belief is this is what we
Speaker 1: need right now. Present self believes he or she will
Speaker 1: benefit future self pays the price right And I think
Speaker 1: what's so tricky about procrastination or cookies or drugs or
Speaker 1: all these different things is if they didn't work at all,
Speaker 1: it'd be easy to see through them, but they work
Speaker 1: for like a minute or five minutes or ten minutes.
Speaker 1: They've got an initial okay, that feels better, and then
Speaker 1: it fades and we pay more later. And you've got
Speaker 1: a phrase that you use related to this um that
Speaker 1: that people can use, and you say it's I won't
Speaker 1: give in to feel good and recognizing that feeling good
Speaker 1: now comes at a cost. It does have this immediate fix,
Speaker 1: albeit really specious because even especially with procrastination and eating
Speaker 1: more so than the other alcohol and drugs work a
Speaker 1: bit longer because they can actually do a bit of
Speaker 1: mood altering, right, But the food and the procrastination, a
Speaker 1: part of you is quite aware of that. The guilt
Speaker 1: almost the surfaces immediately, especially for some of us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of my favorite ways to think about this, and
Speaker 1: I don't I would imagine being as involved as your
Speaker 1: and procrastination. You have seen um the posts he did
Speaker 1: in the Ted talk but um Tim Urban with the
Speaker 1: blog weight but why and um, you know, it's just
Speaker 1: so many brilliant things in there that but the one
Speaker 1: that struck me probably the most was this idea of
Speaker 1: the dark playground and the dark playground was all right,
Speaker 1: we've decided that we're going to procrastinate again. It's not
Speaker 1: usually that conscious of a thought, I'm gonna procrastinate, but
Speaker 1: we've decided we're going to do something else, right, But
Speaker 1: we don't really enjoy He calls it the dark play
Speaker 1: a ground because we're playing. We might be on Facebook
Speaker 1: or YouTube or playing solitaire or whatever it is, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't fully feel good because there's this nagging sense
Speaker 1: of I should be doing something different. And that that
Speaker 1: term dark playground really really helped me because I could
Speaker 1: notice when I was in it. I could notice that like, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not doing what I should do. I'm doing this thing,
Speaker 1: and you know what, I'm not even really enjoying it
Speaker 1: that much, not as much as I would enjoy it
Speaker 1: if I finished what I had to do and then
Speaker 1: went and did it. That's crucial that that self understanding
Speaker 1: is the impetus for true change. It doesn't make it easy,
Speaker 1: especially if you have a habit, because habits draw us
Speaker 1: back to it. But without that recognition, there's no real
Speaker 1: commitment to the change. It's when you recognize that, yeah,
Speaker 1: this doesn't work. I've had a belief for a long time.
Speaker 1: This makes me feel better, but it's not going to
Speaker 1: And then what you need to put into place. There
Speaker 1: just a few strategies that extract you from that kind
Speaker 1: of mental loop or that downward spiral you can get
Speaker 1: into that eventually leads into that negative spot. This would
Speaker 1: be a good time to introduce this topic. It shows
Speaker 1: up in a lot of areas of the book, um
Speaker 1: and I'm a big fan of it also, And it's
Speaker 1: the idea of implementation intentions, and you actually at different
Speaker 1: places in the book talk how we can use these
Speaker 1: to deal with kind of that part of procrastination. Can
Speaker 1: you explain what an implementation intention is and then maybe
Speaker 1: talk about how we can use them in relation to
Speaker 1: this self regulation. This is the work of Peter Gollwitz
Speaker 1: or at New York University, and he and his colleagues
Speaker 1: have done a great deal of work differentiating between goal intentions.
Speaker 1: We all have goal intentions. I want to write this,
Speaker 1: or I want to lose some weight, or I want
Speaker 1: to achieve that, or we can have avoidance goals. I
Speaker 1: don't want to end up here. And then the contrast
Speaker 1: that with implementation intentions, which is the how how are
Speaker 1: you can actually implement this goal because goal intentions don't
Speaker 1: have a lot more of motivational force, but an implementation intention,
Speaker 1: which they've shown over and over again in their research,
Speaker 1: makes it more likely that I'm going to act. And
Speaker 1: the classic implementation intention, in terms of what they've found
Speaker 1: in research, is most effective, is a conditional statement if then,
Speaker 1: or as I like to say, when then, when this happens,
Speaker 1: then I do that. And when we set things up
Speaker 1: like that, what happens is we put the queue for
Speaker 1: action in the environment. So, for example, I want to
Speaker 1: speaking of dentists as you did a few moments ago,
Speaker 1: I wasn't flossing my teeth enough and it was leading
Speaker 1: to some gum disease at the beginning of it. At
Speaker 1: least then my dentist would say, you really have to flost,
Speaker 1: and for the life of me, I just couldn't develop
Speaker 1: that habit. A little boy inside of me was resentful
Speaker 1: about it, and then the rest of me wouldn't remember.
Speaker 1: But an implementation intention really saved me, and it was
Speaker 1: simply that I leveraged a habit I already had. I
Speaker 1: did brush my teeth quite regularly, really regular day, every day,
Speaker 1: twice a day, and so I just made the intention
Speaker 1: when I pick up my toothbrush, I'll put the floss
Speaker 1: on the counter, and when I put my toothbrush down,
Speaker 1: I will pick up the flows the when then, and
Speaker 1: the most important one is really just getting the floss
Speaker 1: onto the counter, because sometimes I wouldn't even remember it.
Speaker 1: This prospect of memory is a big part of not
Speaker 1: being able to self regulate because you don't even remember
Speaker 1: what you're supposed to do. But the implementation intention puts
Speaker 1: that queue in the environment. Oh, I'm picking up my toothbrush,
Speaker 1: I'm putting the floss on the counter, and so I'm
Speaker 1: leveraging a habit already have. That's a really important part
Speaker 1: of this. And by putting the queue for the action
Speaker 1: into the environment, it helps me create a new habit. Now,
Speaker 1: what's interesting about all that is there's so many days
Speaker 1: where I thought, oh, I don't feel like I don't
Speaker 1: want to act like a little boy because we have
Speaker 1: a six year old alive and well in us, or
Speaker 1: a little girl as the case may be. And I
Speaker 1: look at myself and say, wow, you know, what were
Speaker 1: you going with this? You know how long it takes
Speaker 1: to flash your teeth. It takes like thirty seconds. And
Speaker 1: it feels great, and then I get on with that.
Speaker 1: So there's layers of working there, but the implementation intention
Speaker 1: was the foundation. I've mostly looked at implementation intentions really
Speaker 1: in you know, using the if then statement, but also
Speaker 1: a lot about you know, the studies that show if
Speaker 1: you decide how and when and where you're going to
Speaker 1: do some thing, you're way more likely to do it.
Speaker 1: So it's one thing to say I need to work
Speaker 1: out tomorrow. It's a different thing to say, Okay, I'm
Speaker 1: going to run for two miles at the park by
Speaker 1: the Lake tomorrow at six pm. Right Like, You've got
Speaker 1: a way better chance of doing it if you've got
Speaker 1: that second statement versus the first, I'm going to work
Speaker 1: out tomorrow. You know what interests me about implementation attentions.
Speaker 1: I did speak a great deal about it in the book,
Speaker 1: but since writing that book, I've focused a lot more
Speaker 1: on even finer tuned statement around this that I find
Speaker 1: is a real game changer for most people. And that
Speaker 1: really draws on the work of David Allen, who's written
Speaker 1: books like Getting Stuff Done and Ready for Anything. He
Speaker 1: argues really clearly, we don't do projects, we do actions.
Speaker 1: Because I would say to people, as as you saw
Speaker 1: in the book, a key thing is just get started.
Speaker 1: And people would say to me, Tim, if I could
Speaker 1: just get started, I wouldn't have a procrastination problem. That's
Speaker 1: not very helpful. And so as I thought through that
Speaker 1: and looked at how we think about uh getting started,
Speaker 1: the question then becomes what's the next action if we
Speaker 1: go back to you when you asked me earlier about
Speaker 1: the parables or stories in our lives and I went
Speaker 1: immediately to a Zen Buddhist cone or a Zen Buddhist story. Well,
Speaker 1: the Buddhists will also say that we have monkey mind
Speaker 1: busy places. You know, we think and we feel, and
Speaker 1: we think and we feel, and you can't get rid
Speaker 1: of the monkey. It's just part of the human condition.
Speaker 1: But as one monk I heard say so clearly and
Speaker 1: so eloquently, you've got to give the monkey something to do.
Speaker 1: And it's the same for psychologists will tell us, you know,
Speaker 1: you can have all these emotions, but you can't suppress them,
Speaker 1: and you can't ignore them. They're real, but we can
Speaker 1: direct our attention somewhere else. So now, not only do
Speaker 1: I think about implementation intentions is a really important tool,
Speaker 1: but I also use this simple statement of what's the
Speaker 1: next action, and I keep that action as small as possible,
Speaker 1: so it's a very low threshold for engagement, so that
Speaker 1: I look at and go, well, who could and do that?
Speaker 1: And that primes the pump for going. And I thought
Speaker 1: of that really when you were talking about the implementation
Speaker 1: intention to go for the run. Yep, the when or
Speaker 1: the how you're going to do it, and when and
Speaker 1: for what distance. But as soon as you said two miles,
Speaker 1: I thought, for many people that just sets up the barrier,
Speaker 1: or two miles that's too much, And so instead I'd
Speaker 1: be looking at at when I get home from work.
Speaker 1: The moment I get home, I'm gonna put on my
Speaker 1: running shoes and walk back outside the door. That might
Speaker 1: be as much as I have to say to myself
Speaker 1: to get me started. Now. The interesting thing about how
Speaker 1: predictably irrational human beings are is that as much as
Speaker 1: some of us almost fight with ourselves to get started,
Speaker 1: ten minutes later we're on the run and we think
Speaker 1: we could be in the next Olympics. We're just it's
Speaker 1: just so crazy, you know. We think, now I could
Speaker 1: run forever. It feels so good. So we go from
Speaker 1: not being able to run at all to thinking that
Speaker 1: we're an Olympic athlete. And of course that's just the
Speaker 1: way the mind is working, and we have to understand
Speaker 1: that we have these predict to the irrational aspects of
Speaker 1: our human thinking, and we have to have these hacks
Speaker 1: to work around them. Yeah, you you brought up in
Speaker 1: that statement there I think at least three different important points.
Speaker 1: The first is the ambiguity of a lot of the
Speaker 1: things that we have on our task list. I might
Speaker 1: have on my task list, I actually have had on
Speaker 1: my task list record video. I've got a video. I've
Speaker 1: got a record for something I'm doing well. The problem
Speaker 1: with that is that that is about eight or nine tasks.
Speaker 1: You know. First I have to uh write the script
Speaker 1: for the video. Then I have to get somebody to
Speaker 1: review it. Then I have to practice it. Then I
Speaker 1: have to set up the video equipment and set up
Speaker 1: the lighting, and then I have to record it. Then
Speaker 1: I have to edit it, I mean. And so when
Speaker 1: I have a task on my list like get video done,
Speaker 1: I'll procrastinate it forever because it's not clear what the
Speaker 1: next action is. And so, as you were saying, deconstructing
Speaker 1: that down to the very simplest and next action I can.
Speaker 1: I often say that, you know, ambiguity is really a
Speaker 1: huge cause of procrastination for people and when they look
Speaker 1: at their task list, because we tend to have projects
Speaker 1: on our task list, not tasks. Uh. The second thing
Speaker 1: that you talked about there is just that idea of
Speaker 1: getting started, and you know, you use the analogy I'll
Speaker 1: just put on my shoes. I mean I use that
Speaker 1: one all the time for the gym, like just get
Speaker 1: into your gym clothes, or just get to the gym.
Speaker 1: Or with cleaning, you know, all right, all you have
Speaker 1: to do is clean for three minutes. I set myself
Speaker 1: a timer and I get going for three minutes and
Speaker 1: I'm usually off. And then the last thing that was
Speaker 1: embedded in what you said is is a really important
Speaker 1: idea that you talk about. It is that we often
Speaker 1: think that the order of operation is motivation and then action,
Speaker 1: but it is just as common the other way around.
Speaker 1: If we can take the action, the motivation tends to
Speaker 1: follow after it. Yeah. I think this is a really
Speaker 1: important point that when I when I was writing that book,
Speaker 1: one of the things I focused on is that I
Speaker 1: don't know where we get this belief as adults, but
Speaker 1: we seem to have this belief that we have to
Speaker 1: be in the mood to do something, that motivation precedes action,
Speaker 1: but as you're noting, it's often the other way around.
Speaker 1: In fact, social psychologists showed us years ago that attitudes
Speaker 1: can actually follow behaviors, not behaviors following attitudes, and it's
Speaker 1: so true motivation. In fact, there's some very interesting research
Speaker 1: that shows even a little progress on a goal fuels
Speaker 1: our well being, which is a great thing considering what
Speaker 1: the procrastinations typically that downward spiral. So it's really the
Speaker 1: antidote in some ways to how do I get out
Speaker 1: of this trap? A little bit of progress fuels our motivation.
Speaker 1: We don't wait for the mood or the muse. We'll
Speaker 1: be waiting there a long time. Yeah, exactly. And you
Speaker 1: know that idea of I have to feel like something
Speaker 1: to do, it is so fundamental to this whole issue
Speaker 1: of procrastination. And you know the phrase I uses you
Speaker 1: know that I don't want to let my moods drive
Speaker 1: my action. And I usually make a joke out of that,
Speaker 1: like if you had a mood system like mine, right,
Speaker 1: if you let your moods drive your actions. It would
Speaker 1: be a disaster. And my past is littered with disasters
Speaker 1: of allowing my moods to determine what I do. Because
Speaker 1: you know, people have some you know, some people wake up,
Speaker 1: you know, peppy and happy and ready to take on
Speaker 1: the world every day. And then there's the rest of
Speaker 1: us who, um, you know, often don't feel that way.
Speaker 1: And it's learning to get started even when we may
Speaker 1: not feel like it that is so critical. But I
Speaker 1: want to bring up another point. This leads us into motivation,
Speaker 1: and we talked about how, you know, if we can
Speaker 1: just get started, motivation or our attitude changes. Just getting
Speaker 1: started makes us feel better about the task. It makes
Speaker 1: us feel better about ourselves. But let's talk about the
Speaker 1: role of remembering our motivation as a way to help
Speaker 1: us with self regulation and as a way to deal
Speaker 1: with um potentially depleted willpower. In what regard eric, remembering
Speaker 1: our motivation like remembering our commitment to what it is
Speaker 1: we're trying to achieve. Yeah, or you know you've got
Speaker 1: to You've got a chart in the book where you
Speaker 1: show this idea of you know, it's worthwhile to look
Speaker 1: at your goal and look at the costs associated with procrastination,
Speaker 1: as well as the benefits of acting in a timely
Speaker 1: manner as a way, you know, for me, I sort
Speaker 1: of think of that as like remembering my why, Like
Speaker 1: why is this important? Definitely? For sure? In fact, everything
Speaker 1: is foundation. The foundation for all of this is in commitment.
Speaker 1: And even Peter Gollwitzer, who's written extensively on implementation intentions,
Speaker 1: is acknowledged in quite a few papers and book chapters
Speaker 1: that without commitment and won't happen, there's no technique that's
Speaker 1: going to save you. You do have to be able
Speaker 1: to look at your own life and understand why it
Speaker 1: is that you're even going to use a strategy like
Speaker 1: what's the next action or when then? And so we
Speaker 1: have to have a clear idea of the meaning behind
Speaker 1: our goals. In fact, another way that I often think
Speaker 1: of it, and I learned this from my past own
Speaker 1: dissertation advisor who worked with an area called personal projects analysis.
Speaker 1: The balance between meaning and manageability. It's always a balance
Speaker 1: between those two. It has to be meaningful for us
Speaker 1: to want to do it, but it also has to
Speaker 1: be manageable. It goes back to your notion of ambiguity.
Speaker 1: I've certainly found in our research that uncertainty is a
Speaker 1: very high correlative procrastination and uncertainty. It can be there
Speaker 1: when you have ambiguous schools. So but if you if
Speaker 1: you focus only on manageability the next steps and you go, oh,
Speaker 1: like a monkey could do this, what, I'm not interested anymore.
Speaker 1: But if you work only on meaning, then you don't
Speaker 1: know how to manage it. So it's this interesting balance
Speaker 1: and at any given time, some days I have to
Speaker 1: emphasize more than why, which is your original question about
Speaker 1: you know, why would I engage in this? Why is
Speaker 1: this important to me? And other times I know exact
Speaker 1: actually why I want to do it, and then the
Speaker 1: question becomes more of yeah, but how am I going
Speaker 1: to manage this? And then I go back to Okay,
Speaker 1: what's the next action? Or do I need to call
Speaker 1: a friend? That sort of strategy. But it is this
Speaker 1: balance between meeting and manageability. And then there's other times,
Speaker 1: whereas I said in the book, sometimes you simply have
Speaker 1: to look at the cost, like what is this going
Speaker 1: to cost me if I put it off? Yeah? Exactly, um.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things that you talk about
Speaker 1: is that sometimes when we do stop to think about
Speaker 1: it for a second. We will say something to ourselves
Speaker 1: like it's just not important, or um, you know, a
Speaker 1: variety of other things. So there there are common biases
Speaker 1: that get in the way of us looking at this
Speaker 1: clearly and um. One of those is, you know, saying
Speaker 1: to ourselves, for whatever reason, it's not important, right and
Speaker 1: and being able to recognize that if it's something that
Speaker 1: we thought was important before, when we weren't faced with
Speaker 1: the task, it's probably important. And you use an implementation
Speaker 1: intention here actually say if we say it's not important,
Speaker 1: then we stop and remind ourselves that this is self deception.
Speaker 1: Or if I say it's not important, then I will
Speaker 1: just get started. But there's some other biases I thought
Speaker 1: would be useful in talking about. One is prefer tomorrow
Speaker 1: over today, because this is such a classic one. I'll
Speaker 1: do it tomorrow, And I think inherent in i'll do
Speaker 1: it tomorrow is I will feel like doing it tomorrow,
Speaker 1: which is obviously a fallacy. So let's talk about that bias,
Speaker 1: about how we prefer tomorrow over today and how we
Speaker 1: think we'll actually want to do it tomorrow, and why
Speaker 1: that's so easy to do. Well, there's two things that
Speaker 1: happened there, and they're both grounded really very well in research.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, Dan Gilbert at Harvard University, who
Speaker 1: studied a great deal of book affective forecasting. We know
Speaker 1: what weather forecasting is trying to predict what the weather
Speaker 1: is going to be like tomorrow. Affective forecasting is how
Speaker 1: are we going to feel tomorrow? And what he's learned
Speaker 1: through his research is that we rely on the present
Speaker 1: to predict the future. So we all know what it's
Speaker 1: like to go grocery shopping when you're hungry versus when
Speaker 1: you're full. Your car looks distinctly different. Hunger you're pulling
Speaker 1: a second card fully your favorite snacks, and when you're
Speaker 1: just finished a big meal, when you're going shopping, go oh,
Speaker 1: I don't need so much milk this week. And again,
Speaker 1: we're predictably irrational. So how that applies to procrastination is
Speaker 1: that that moment when you decide, no, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to do this today, how do you feel? A lot?
Speaker 1: And I give talks to students or general audiences, the
Speaker 1: first word that comes to mind is relief, and then
Speaker 1: many other people just say I feel good exactly, So
Speaker 1: that when you use that momentary feeling to predict how
Speaker 1: you're gonna feel tomorrow. You say, oh, yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: feel like it's tomorrow. So there's one cognitive bias that
Speaker 1: leads us to believe I'm going to want to do
Speaker 1: this tomorrow. But more importantly, and this is something that
Speaker 1: I didn't write back in two thousand and ten two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven was some work by hal Hirshfield at u
Speaker 1: c l A who's used functional magnetic residence imaging to
Speaker 1: look at the brains of people while they were thinking
Speaker 1: about either their present self, their future self, or a stranger.
Speaker 1: And to make a long story short, what he learned
Speaker 1: was that the areas of the brain that are active
Speaker 1: when we think about present self are different than when
Speaker 1: we think about future self. In fact, the areas of
Speaker 1: the brain that are active when we think about a
Speaker 1: stranger are the same areas it's processing information about the
Speaker 1: future self. So we seem to think about future self
Speaker 1: like a stranger, and that leads us again to think, uh,
Speaker 1: that that's that person will handle that, and so tomorrow
Speaker 1: that person will feel like a present self is processing
Speaker 1: information much differently. So these are biases in the way
Speaker 1: that we think about the future. In fact, we've done
Speaker 1: some research on that too, where we had people imagine
Speaker 1: their future self, in this case students, because that's a
Speaker 1: population we're working with, uh And when they thought more
Speaker 1: about future self, present self, made different choices. And in fact,
Speaker 1: how Hirshfield did some of this research too before we did,
Speaker 1: but he did it with digital avatars, so you'd see
Speaker 1: a picture of yourself either as you look now or
Speaker 1: your off digitally aged into your sixties and lo and behold,
Speaker 1: if you're sitting in experimental situation looking at your older
Speaker 1: self and the experimental task is to allocate funds, you
Speaker 1: allocate more funds to retirement savings because you've got future
Speaker 1: self in mind. Without that, you spend money differently. And
Speaker 1: we found the same thing with students. If they could
Speaker 1: think about themselves at the end of the term, they
Speaker 1: made different choices now. And one of the mechanisms that
Speaker 1: seems to be at work there is you develop more
Speaker 1: empathy for future self and you think, yeah, that's really
Speaker 1: jerk and future self around. And in fact, when I
Speaker 1: give public talks, I draw on Richard Taylor, a the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize winning economists from the University of Chicago, who
Speaker 1: won his Nobel Prize for showing how we're predictably irrational,
Speaker 1: And as he summarizes that, he says, you know, we're
Speaker 1: more like Homer Simpson than we are homo economicsts. And
Speaker 1: it makes me smile because I love Homer. And I'll
Speaker 1: put up a picture of Homer and Marge, and Marge
Speaker 1: says to Homer, you know, Hoy, someday these kids are
Speaker 1: going to be grown and you're gonna regret not spending
Speaker 1: more time with them. And Homer goes, yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: problem for future Homer man. I don't envy that guy.
Speaker 1: And he just gets it right. And so this future
Speaker 1: self present self diconomy is really important, and we've seen
Speaker 1: it in all sorts of studies that to the extent
Speaker 1: that we're biased towards present self and we want that
Speaker 1: immediate mood repair. If we don't think about future self,
Speaker 1: present self always dominates, and we see that in cartoons
Speaker 1: and other things as well. Everyone knows that future self
Speaker 1: hates present self because futureself always getting jerked around. So
Speaker 1: if we can remember that this is these are some
Speaker 1: of the biases that are operating, it helps us develop
Speaker 1: more empathy for future self and we make different choices. Now,
Speaker 1: let's talk about one other bias that you mentioned in
Speaker 1: the book. And um, I thought this one was really
Speaker 1: interesting and you refer to it as self handicap to
Speaker 1: preserve self esteem. My colleague at the University of Sheffield
Speaker 1: who started her graduate studies with us here at Carlton
Speaker 1: University in Ottawa, she did some research looking at how
Speaker 1: people make upward and downward counter factuals. And so let
Speaker 1: me just take a minute and talk about what those are.
Speaker 1: Downward counter factual we're really familiar with them. They happen
Speaker 1: all the time, they have they started school all so
Speaker 1: you get a C grade and it's not what you're
Speaker 1: hoping for, your shooting for an A. Let's say, but
Speaker 1: your downward counter factual is at least I didn't fail.
Speaker 1: It's counter factual to what happened. But you say, at
Speaker 1: least I didn't fail. So what's the purpose of that, Well,
Speaker 1: it makes you feel better. You weren't happy about getting
Speaker 1: the C. But when you've put it against failing, you
Speaker 1: feel better. The upward counterfactual is just the opposite, of course,
Speaker 1: and that is well, if I had studied harder, if
Speaker 1: I hadn't gone out last night, maybe I would have
Speaker 1: gotten an a same thing you could imagine getting a
Speaker 1: little fender bender. Well, at least no one was killed.
Speaker 1: The downward counter factual, the upper counter factual, maybe I
Speaker 1: shouldn't look at my phone when I'm trying to park
Speaker 1: the car. So you learned from upper counter factuals, and
Speaker 1: lo and behold when Future looked at the difference between
Speaker 1: procrastinators and non procrastinators, not surprising that they made more
Speaker 1: downward counter factuals. Again, kind of underscoring this notion of
Speaker 1: it's about feeling good, the same strategies being used, but
Speaker 1: nothing's learned. And so it's interesting for us to stand
Speaker 1: back and listen to the self talk. Am I making
Speaker 1: downward counter factuals? Because if I am, again, it's all
Speaker 1: about making myself feel better rather than learning from the situation.
Speaker 1: And if you look at any of the popular self
Speaker 1: help around motivation and productivity, it's how do we effectively
Speaker 1: learn from our mistakes? Because there's that's the only way
Speaker 1: we learned, And the downward and upward counter factuals that
Speaker 1: you hear as inner talk can be a real clue
Speaker 1: to the habits you've created. In your own life around them,
Speaker 1: and so essentially part of what you're saying is that
Speaker 1: we might procrastinate to give us away to have an
Speaker 1: excuse for why we didn't do better later. Well, that's
Speaker 1: self handicapping thing. It's a little dicey that I've got
Speaker 1: colleagues and I happen to be in that camp who
Speaker 1: would argue that procrastination isn't a self handicapping technique. Because
Speaker 1: if I delay on purpose to protect my self esteem,
Speaker 1: then it's really a different form of delay because I'm
Speaker 1: doing it quite knowingly. I do think that their secondary
Speaker 1: gain and procrastination, you can use it to protect yourself.
Speaker 1: Not a bad grade for you know, working one night,
Speaker 1: but that's quite purposeful. I don't believe that we procrastinate
Speaker 1: to self handicap. Uh, we can delay to self handicap,
Speaker 1: but I want to there's a fine line I would
Speaker 1: argue between that sort of delay and procrastination, assuming that
Speaker 1: that's all happening at a conscious level. Right. So yes,
Speaker 1: if I consciously say, oh, well, I just won't study
Speaker 1: so much so I don't feel bad if I don't
Speaker 1: do well, that's very much a conscious decision, and that's
Speaker 1: not procrastination. And that's actually a point you make very
Speaker 1: early in the book. Is not all delay is procrastination.
Speaker 1: There are valid reasons to delay, so you know, but
Speaker 1: but on a on a more subconscious level, perhaps there
Speaker 1: might be some of that. It's it's always interesting because
Speaker 1: I hear people use the term a self sabotage, and
Speaker 1: I never quite know what I think of that term.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether that's just like sort of woo
Speaker 1: woo word that sort of you know, brings up a
Speaker 1: lot of different things, or whether there's really something to that,
Speaker 1: and it might be similar to what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1: I am self sabotaging by unconsciously putting something off because
Speaker 1: I will feel better about it later. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: there's some truth in that, and it's become a habit
Speaker 1: in your life. You're you're working very hard to protect
Speaker 1: your self esteem. I know that my colleague Joseph Ferrari
Speaker 1: at De Paul University in Chicago, and some of those
Speaker 1: earlier research showed that procrastinators generally didn't want to get
Speaker 1: feedback that would reflect on them in a way they're
Speaker 1: gonna affect their self esteem. So you could see that
Speaker 1: sort of protective factor coming up, so that you delay
Speaker 1: needlessly and in a way that's going to be self defeating.
Speaker 1: But part of the motivation for that is that your
Speaker 1: fear you're going to fail anyhow. And in fact, when
Speaker 1: we listen to UH procrastinators in either therapy sessions or
Speaker 1: in research, I'm thinking of Bill McCowen Louisiana State has
Speaker 1: done some interesting research where he had students, when they
Speaker 1: were procrastinating, go online and talk about what they were
Speaker 1: thinking and feeling, and he captured a lot of the
Speaker 1: irrational thoughts and there were things like, well, what's the
Speaker 1: point of me trying? I'm not any good anyhow, So
Speaker 1: sure we get that sort of thing happening inside of ourselves,
Speaker 1: all this negative self talk, and then procrastination could become
Speaker 1: a mechanism which was self protective, and in that sense
Speaker 1: we might be talking about this elusive notion of self sabotage. Well, Tim,
Speaker 1: we are at the end of our time, and this
Speaker 1: has been enormously helpful and a fun conversation for me
Speaker 1: because I'm so interested in this. You and I are
Speaker 1: going to continue the conversation in our post show conversation,
Speaker 1: and a couple of things we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: our um the procrastination is not only an inability to
Speaker 1: get started. Sometimes we get started and then we get
Speaker 1: off track from a variety of ways, and we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about how to bounce back from that type
Speaker 1: of procrastination in the post show conversation listeners. If you're
Speaker 1: interested in that, you can join us and be a
Speaker 1: member of the one you Feed Patreon community and you
Speaker 1: can get access to all the post show conversations, add
Speaker 1: free episodes and many episodes by going to one you
Speaker 1: feed dot net slash Support. Again, Tim, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: We'll have links in the show notes for where people
Speaker 1: can see you and see your book. And I just
Speaker 1: thought it was a great book and this has been
Speaker 1: such a fun conversation for me. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Thank you Bye. If what you just heard was helpful
Speaker 1: to you, please consider making a donation to the One
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