Procrastinators always believe their own excuses. All excuses attempt to move blame away from the procrastinator. They get angry, insulted, or feel hard pressed when others don’t accept their excuses. To the procrastinator the excuse is not a lie; it is a fact based on how they see the world. XYZ circumstance is blocking them, they can’t do anything about it, so ‘not my fault’.
There are only seven real excuses. These seven can take on many variations, but once you know these seven, all permeations fall under one category or another. It is like dealing with a ball of yarn mauled by an enthusiastic kitten. The core issue is like untying the hardest knot. After that is gone all related, lesser excuses unravel on their own.
The 7 core excuses are:
- Habitual Lethargy (Out of energy)
- Lack of Direction (Not knowing what to do)
- Lack of a Plan (Not knowing how to do it)
- The Actions of Others (People blocking you)
- Perception of the Job (Thrill seeking)
- Expectations of Results (Perfectionism)
- Cultural Beliefs (Mechanistic Metaphor)
Source #1: Habitual Lethargy (Chapters 4 & 5)
After the fifth time you hit the snooze button, you drag your sluggish body out of bed and shuffle off to work like a zombie. You’re sure you got enough sleep but you still feel exhausted. Every day, work feels like pushing a never ending pile of rocks up long hills.
Lethargy can result from either medical or psychological problems, and the first thing we will do is determine which is which. If your lethargy stems from habitual choices, these chapters will show you how to reverse the dynamic and turn habitual lethargy into cultivating health and energy.
Source #2: Lack of Direction (Ch 3, 6, 7 & 22)
Say an archery instructor shows you how to use a bow. He teaches you how to string it, how to load and draw an arrow, the proper stance and how to aim. You know everything you need to know so you go outside to practice. But what are you going to shoot at? Firing arrows without regard to where they land is dangerous! Even if there were no risk to others, what would be the point of firing arrows into the air? How would you know if your aim is getting better or worse? Hitting a target is the most important aspect of archery; one could say that a clear target is as important in archery as the arrow.
While ‘starting with the end in mind’ (Stephen Covey) is also true for skills, it is more generally true anytime your mind starts any action. If you need to pee, you have a clear idea of how to get to the bathroom and what to do when you get there; and being very drunk you may not be as ‘successful’ as usual. Clarity of your target affects motivation to get started.
Corporate managers often do not communicate expectations to their employees. They assume the objectives of what they are doing are obvious and that everyone shares their values. The reality is that the priorities for an employee place, job security, getting paid, and least effort far above a lofty company mission statement. Most employees take the easiest path to finish a task looking for the minimal passable quality rather than stressing out to do an exceptional job which their supervisor can take credit for. This disjoint between management expectations and worker values can cause a project to get off track. The same sort of miscommunication can happen inside your mind. You (your conscious mind) may desire something, but you send conflicting images to your unconscious mind. Cognitive sub systems which operate outside of conscious awareness may hold values which conflict the directives sent to them. Erroneous beliefs and unrealistic expectations sit in your mind like little mental land mines and derail your motivation just as much as a disgruntled employee can upset the outcome of management. Lacking a clear target, you may need a few hundred arrows to hit something, when it is clear you only need a few. Harmonizing your conscious and unconscious efforts with well thought out goals are a great way to cut down your workload.
Chapter 3 looks at very direct solution involving clarification of goals called “Just Do It”. If it works for you… awesome. This chapter shows you the common way of thinking about procrastination that has been popularized in most self-help books. It serves as a starting point where the philosophy of hyper-productivity evolved from.
Chapter 6 is about goal setting. Yes, I know every author in self-help has beaten this topic to death. I have encountered hundreds of articles, journals, books, tapes and lectures on the marvels of goal setting. Most of them tell you a simple strategy: Do A, B, C and success follows. These ‘experts’ may have found something that works well for them and then parrot back the techniques without understanding the underlying principles for why they work. Chapter 6 is goal setting by taking a look at what’s going on ‘under the hood’ of your mind. By making more powerful goals, you can cut down on internal miscommunication; ergo less work, which is what this book is all about.
So what happens when shit hits the fan, and all your projects become due at the same time? Chapter 7 is about dealing with task overload and managing emergencies. This will be a weird chapter for people who deal with lots of emergencies. If you are constantly reacting to emergencies, then you may want to look back to the source of your problems. It isn’t about learning how to manage a hundred forest fires; it is about finding and stopping the asshole with the match. You need to carefully examine your habitual choices.
Long before you get to Chapter 22, you will have already found many answers to procrastination. This chapter follows from a discussion on the mechanistic metaphor which robs you of your sense of purpose. Finding your life purpose is a motivational turbocharger which fills your life with meaning, joy, and fulfilment.
Source #3: Lack of a Plan (Chapters 8 & 9)
High-value, meaningful goals require more time and effort to realize. Gaining professional credentials, owning a house, building a family are examples of common far reaching life goals. Large projects require more time and have many more chances to go off track before they are completed.
Chapter 8 will give you a strategy for creating large-scale plans by running them backwards so you can hash out more details that may have been skipped when you run them forward. Chapter 9 looks at a productivity hack where you sacrifice being bored to gain thousands of hours of both being entertained and moving forward on meaningful activities.
Source #4: The Actions of Others (Ch 10, 23)
Assembly line production has made things faster and easier. With less need to think about “what to do” workers can focus on the task at hand. Most companies produce a product or service which is the result of many individuals labouring in sequence. One person’s production becomes a resource for the next person in line. Unfortunately, assembly lines are prone to being slowed or stalled. As all focus is on activity, it creates inflexibility in the thinking of members involved. What is a supervisor supposed to say when a worker is sitting around because Bob didn’t do his job? It is an infallible excuse to procrastinate. The worker may even see himself as a victim of Bob’s incompetence.
Human are highly adaptive creatures. When something doesn’t work, you can do something else. Chapter 10 looks at developing flexibility in your methods so your productivity no longer depend on what others are (or aren’t) doing.
Getting more done with less effort can make others jealous; they may start throwing garbage your way. Chapter 23 has a few notes on how to interact with people who prefer to work hard and get little done. It is possible to have a strong sense of purpose and have good relations with those who don’t.
Source #5: Perception of the Task (Ch 11 to 13)
“Thrill-seeking Procrastination” is popular with young adults. Many young people see their lives like a TV drama in which they play a star role. They use procrastination to create symbolically fatal situations. After they survive the deadline, they feel a thrill in evading a metaphoric death. This rush encourages future procrastination.
Chapter 11 looks at the cause of thrill-seeking procrastination and how it relates to extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. While the focus is on university students, it does have wider application in showing how we tie our emotional states to external events.
It is easy to allow your environment to control you, making you feel like you’re on the defence and always reacting to whatever life throws at you. Chapter 12 is a practical technique to rewire external, environmental motivational triggers to ones inside yourself.
As 80% to 95% of university students suffer from procrastination, I wanted to do a chapter to help teach practical study techniques to give academic students an edge. While chapter 13 is written with university students in mind, the techniques and life management skills can be adapted to any life situation.
The young are going to be young, they are going to do weird shit. It is just a matter of establishing a balance to maintain high quality grades at the same time having high quality thrills.
Source #6: Perfectionism (Chapter 14 to 18)
The “invisibly obvious” describes something which few notice, yet it is clear once pointed out. When you know the answer to a puzzle before starting it, all the clues jump out at you. Lacking that foreknowledge leaves you floundering, not knowing what you should be looking for. Much of this book is invisibly obvious.
Chapters 14 to 18 show you the “invisibly obvious” link between procrastination and perfectionism. Our society promotes perfectionism as an ideal and it creates unrealistic expectations. When our initial results fall short of perfection, we believe we are a failure. Procrastination can allow people to maintain the ideal of perfectionism, while blaming failure on external problems (like not enough time).
This is such a major factor with procrastination and motivation that I have devoted five chapters to it. A full explanation of the connection is covered in Chapter 14. There are three different types of perfectionism; “One shot wonder”, “Hard at work”, and “Perfect time to start”. Each have their own chapters (from 15 to 17) along with specific strategies to deal with each. Chapter 18 is a discussion about learning to be perfect through imperfection.
Source #7: Societal Constraining Beliefs (Chapter 19 to 21)
I grew up in the generation where technology advanced at an exponential rate. Computers moved from being a ‘nerd only hobby’ to a central household appliance. One of my friends turned his bedroom into a shrine of tech. Wires and cables webbed a floor strewn with AD&D manuals and discarded pizza boxes. This tangle lead to a cutting edge IBM 486 using a custom version of UNIX and wired up with 8 independent 5400 bod modems. This virtual marvel could allow 300 users to share email, download text files, and even allow real-time chat in an all text based virtual ‘room’. Later, one of my high school buddies got a Commodore 64. Featuring an 8-bit processor, 64k of RAM and 256 colours, it was awesome.
Most young adults born in the 80s and 90s can’t comprehend computers this primitive. My whole life was on the bleeding edge of computer technology. Every year the buzz words were “better, more powerful, faster speed, bigger space, longer batteries, and smaller size.” We have seen a meteoric growth of computer technology over a 50-year period. It has been going upward for so long we have become accustom to it and we expect our exponential growth to last forever.
Chapters 19 to 21 are the exact opposite of what you would expect from a geek. It may change the way you look at technology and what you believe about where computers are going. I discovered a hidden belief which damages our sense of purpose, and it is one our culture has bought into so much that no one questions.
Chronic procrastination is procrastination to such a degree it interferes with your life. In 1973, 5% of the adult population had chronic procrastination. In 2019 this number has risen to 26%. This increase is due to this hidden belief I call the “Mechanistic Metaphor.”
Chapter 19 exposes the mechanistic metaphor, showing you how it came about and why no one questions it. Chapter 20 looks at the cost of carrying this belief. It damages your self-image, your motivation, and your interactions with others. Once your mind becomes aware of an unhealthy belief, it will automaticallyattempt to correct it. Chapter 21 provides you ammo to quash the mechanistic metaphor and concludes with a practical method for creating your own life metaphors.
