Procrastination despite having high drive to complete a goal.

Up until now we focused on procrastination, on how finding the bright side of goals, and how to overcome the perception of perfection can combat the habit of procrastination. This week we will take a look at factors that can lead to procrastination despite having well-planned goals and practical ways you can overcome them.

Most of us, if not all of us have been in the situation where we are standing in the graveyard of our goals, mourning the latest goal the was not achieved or even started. We start out with our goal, we have the drive, we have the outcome, the planning, and the benefits of achieving our goal. Yet, before we know it, time blew past us like Verstappen in his F1 car racing toward the championship and suddenly we are at the end of the week, month, year, and we haven’t achieved (or maybe even started) our goal. What happened?

In the book The thief of time, authors Wieber and Gollwitzer explained that the intention to complete a goal is the same between procrastinators and non-procrastinators, but there is a gap between the intention to complete a goal and participating in goal-related activities. They further suggested that the following factors contribute to the intention-behavior gap and ultimately to procrastination; getting started, staying on track, not abandoning failed courses of action and over-extension (ego-depletion).

Intention-behavior gap

Struggling to get started and staying on track by getting distracted are concepts that we have all encountered. We have all at one stage decided to sleep in in stead of getting up early to go work-out and we have all gotten side-tracked while working on a project by something like answering emails or quickly checking our phone. We will therefor focus on the other two factors; not abandoning failed courses of action and over extension. According to Wieber and Gollwitzer, people continue to do an action despite knowing that it will not help you reach your goal, because we want to avoid the emotional cost of making a mistake. Let’s say that you decided that you want to improve your fitness by aiming to participate in a 5 km event. You start improving your fitness by doing 10 push ups daily and while you know that these push ups will not improve your running fitness, you continue to do them because at least you are doing something. To avoid admitting that you have made a mistake you continue to do those push-ups.

Over-extension or ego-depletion happens when you spend so much of your willpower on one action that you have very little left for the rest of your daily tasks. This may happen when you start out with an action step that stretches you too far, such as starting with running 5 km everyday instead of a smaller distance and working your way up. After spending the willpower to go for that 5 km run, you find that you are now procrastinating on other daily tasks you normally completed.

All these factors contribute to making gap between intention and behavior even bigger, leaving space for procrastination. The good news is that these factors can be overcome with very practical tools. These are the if/then equation, improving in small increments and celebrating the small wins.

If/then equation

Wieber and Gollwitzer, present the if/then equation: if this happens, then I will do that. You can use the equation to get started, to prevent distractions, to measure if your activities are helping you reach your goals and to avoid overspending your will power. An example will be something like if I put on my running gear, I will go for a run. Or if I do not see results within a set time frame, then I will re-evaluate my action steps.

Improving in small increments:

James Clear in his book Atomic habits, speaks about 1%. Start with improving with just 1% every day, if you ran 100m continuous today, try to run 101m continuous tomorrow. All of these 1% increments will build in momentum and soon you will find that your increments are getting larger and larger. Jon Acuff in his book Soundtracks has the affirmation that small change adds up, meaning the little extra effort you put in today will lead to greater reward tomorrow.

Celebrate the small wins:

Make time for the activities that you do when procrastinating. If you achieved your goal-related task, then reward yourself with time to engage in the immediate reward activities.

Coach U:

Where have I been falling into procrastination most often? (Am I struggling to get started or have I over extended myself?)

What if/then equation can I put into place to help me overcome procrastination?

Have I been celebrating the small increments of progress?

How can I reward my small wins?

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