Do Your Struggle With Procrastination?

I found a note for you.

On Procrastination: The Time Traveling Mistake We Make When We Procrastinate.

Consider for a moment what procrastination actually is. The word is derived from the Latin procrastinaire, which means “put off until tomorrow.” Okay, sure, you know that. Here’s what’s more interesting: procrastination is also conceptually related to the Greek word akrasia, which means doing something despite knowing that it’s against your better judgment.

So, procrastination isn’t just about putting something off until tomorrow that you could just as easily take care of today. It’s also about knowing that even as you delay, you’re harming yourself.

Think about this definition in light of our present and future selves.

When we’re faced with an unpleasant task—say, folding the laundry or finally making that appointment with the cardiologist—and we decide not to do it, we prioritize our present self’s desire to avoid negative emotions. We get anchored on our feelings in the present. But procrastination presents an additional wrinkle: in putting something off until a later point in time, we’re also failing to consider how much our future self will want to avoid the same negative emotions that we’re trying to avoid right now.

I reached out to Professor Pychyl to ask him a bit more about this work. I was naturally curious whether he—an international expert in the study of procrastination—ever finds himself, well, procrastinating.

“Almost never!” he told me with a laugh. But not, he cautioned, due to some great virtue on his part. Instead, he reportedly recognizes procrastination for what it is: a desire to have our future selves do the things our present selves want to avoid. As he put it, “I know my future self isn’t going to want to do this thing any more than my present self does. And I have empathy for my future self: he’s going to be under enormous amounts of stress, so let’s just do this thing now.”

- Hal Hershfield, Professor of marketing, behavioral decision-making, and psychology at UCLA.

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You can read the full article here: https://behavioralscientist.org/the-time-traveling-mistake-we-make-when-we-procrastinate/

Do with this piece what you may!