New Research on How to Stop Procrastinating. For Good, This Time!
(Photo: Thinkstock)
Procrastination, the sworn enemy of all projects and plans, may be easier to beat than you think. New research suggests the trick is how you count down to that all-important deadline.
Whether you’re talking work projects, academics, your personal life, or even DIY home improvement (how’s that un-mowed lawn looking?), the tendency to put things off is a disease that eats away at our best intentions.
In some cases it’s a terminal disease: how many people have permanently put off plans to start a workout routine or learn a second language?
From delayed workouts to unfinished projects to unfulfilled New Year’s Resolution, many of our lives are a series of jobs we have no problem picturing ourselves doing — we just don’t get around to them.
The word that’s killed many a good intention Photo: Thinkstock)
“Why do we have these imagined futures? Why is it there’s so much gap between imagining and doing?” asks University of Southern California psychologist Daphna Oyserman. She and Neil Lewis of the University of Michigan set out to answer that question.
In their new study, published in Psychological Science, Oyserman and Lewis may have at long last found the cure to the project-killing disease known as “procrastination.” They’ve found the solution to beating this powerful foe may be simple: adapting how you measure the time you have to complete a task.
WATCH: Why Do We All Procrastinate
In their study, Oyserman and Lewis learned that if test subjects thought about a far-off deadline in terms of days, rather than months or years, they perceived the event as happening sooner. For instance, when asked a standard hypothetical question about preparation for an upcoming event — such as “Dan/Elizabeth is preparing for his/her midterm. When do you think the midterm is?” — respondents judged the event to be sooner if it was measured in days rather than months.
And when the events needing our attention are perceived to happen sooner, people are more motivated to take action. In the study, test subjects were more likely to plan to start saving money sooner when told they were retiring in 10,950 days than if they were told they were retiring in 30 years — even though they’re pondering the exact same amount of time.
“Even when it’s a lot of days — 6,000, 9,000, 14,000 days away — people focus on the unit, not the number,” Oyserman tells Yahoo Makers.
Why does shifting from years to days cause us to act sooner? According to the study’s authors, it’s all based on two factors. One is called temporal discounting — the theory that people may place a higher premium on their current, here-and-now needs and desires while discounting any possible losses they may incur in the future. It’s the theory that explains why an anonymous writer I happen to know very well opted the other night to watch "Game of Thrones” instead of writing a piece for a popular and essential DIY site that wasn’t due until the next day.
(Photo: Thinkstock)
Another factor at work in procrastination, or lack thereof, is “identity-based motivation theory.” This is the theory that people are more likely to act if they perceive their current, present self is connected to their future selves. In the aforementioned — and extremely hypothetical example — the writer might have opted against watching “Game of Thrones” and started working on his assignment had he felt a greater connection to the future version of himself: i.e., the version sitting bleary-eyed at the office the next day after having to stay up late writing to meet his deadline.
That’s where the study comes in. It shows us that converting far-off deadlines into what Oyserman calls “fine-grained time metrics” (such as days) rather than “gross-grained time metrics” (such as years) allows us to draw a more tangible connection to our future selves. “One way to get people to act on future identities is to cue them to think in more fine-grained proximal units about the future,” Oyserman says. “When I think about my future self it feels like the same person I am now.”
Take the two long-term tasks specifically addressed in the study: saving for retirement and saving for your child’s college education. Each seems very far away, say if you’re 35 or if your kid’s a baby. “When I imagine myself as the parent of a college student, it feels like somebody completely different from who I am now; what I would be doing as a retiree doesn’t fit with the way I am now,” Oyserman says people might tell themselves in those situations.
But knowing that your retirement, or your kid’s acceptance into college is days away (even if it’s a lot of days) rather than years away changes the game. “Thinking in days makes you feel more connected to your future self,” Oyserman says. “It makes it not feel like it’s this weird other person. It feels like it is you.”
The secret to avoiding procrastination is to mentally link your present and future selves. You can do that by thinking of days as years. (Photo: Thinkstock)
We can apply this thinking to shorter term projects too. If you’re putting off planting your tomatoes, mentally connect yourselves to the person who will have some nice tomatoes in “x” number of days rather than a few weeks. Or, hypothetically, the next time you’re tempted to put off an article until later in the evening, rather than saying to yourself, “I might be sleepy tomorrow,” imagine yourself practically falling asleep at your desk a mere 720 minutes later.
Oyserman believes her study’s findings have implications far beyond that of procrastination. It could change the way we feel about those failed New Year’s Resolutions or other times we’ve fallen short. “When we fail, often there will be a subgroup of us who will turn that inward and say [to themselves], ‘You didn’t care enough, you weren’t disciplined enough, you lazy person, you,’” says Oyserman. “These studies show that really it’s not about character. It’s about framing it in a way that gets you going.”
So find ways to make Present You and Future You really close. You’ll procrastinate less. You’ll get more done. You’ll save more money. And you’ll get a lot more sleep.
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