Ch07a: What is Overload Procrastination

Ch07a: What is Overload Procrastination?

What is Overload Procrastination? Here’s a simple metaphor to understand the idea: Think of a snowflake. It has no weight, and by itself does no damage. Except there is never one snowflake, they fall and fall and fall and fall. Eventually, there will be enough of them to start an avalanche, which can level a town. Your little choices are like snowflakes which create massive results. Little neglects every day can accumulate to create a situation which (like an avalanche) can overwhelm you. And when you think you are beaten, when the job is obviously too great for you to do no matter how hard you try, then it is illogical to do any work on it at all. This is how thinking you are overloaded leads to procrastination.

The Messy Home

I once visited a home where the term “messy” fell short of describing the epic level of squalor the place was in. The filth was hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced such a thing. Crack houses portrayed in movies were more hygienically sound. Years of accumulated trash hid the floor from view. Piles of mould ridden books, crumpled magazines and less definable garbage reached up to the ceiling. It felt more like a cave than an apartment. Food was left to rot for years, and bones of dead rats were visible. The smell was so nauseating, it still makes me gag 20 years later. Cleaning the property for sale required a renovation dumpster, a crew in clean suits, shovels and 2 weeks of effort. The mess was unbelievable, but the idea that someone actually lived there was far more horrific.

The tenants appeared to be normal folk; had you seen them on the street, you would imagine that their place wasn’t any different than your own. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could live in such a dump, I wondered how such a mess could happen.

Have you heard about the anecdote on “How to cook a frog?” If you place a frog in hot water, it will jump out right away. However, if you place a frog in room temperature water and slowly heat it up, the frog won’t notice until it’s hard-boiled. Both frogs and humans become accustom to the conditions they live in. If you tolerate a small pile of clothes, it becomes easy to tolerate a slightly larger pile of clothes. This is how a little mess becomes bigger, and bigger, and bigger. When I walked into that apartment, I was the frog that hopped into a boiling pot. I didn’t have years to get used to it. For the frogs who lived there, the change was so gradual they never noticed. They fell victim to slowly descending standards.

Small Choices, Big Results

You may reason that a person who has a clean apartment does more work because they value cleanliness. They spend extra effort to put garbage away, whereas the messy person is just careless. As counter intuitive as this may sound, it requires about the same amount of “effort” to have a clean apartment as it does to have a messy one. How much effort does it take to throw a ball of paper on the floor? How much effort does it take to toss it in the waste paper basket? If we are counting calories, it is about the same. Except a messy environment is one where you are more likely to lose things. So a messy person has to spend more time and effort finding things they lost.

Who cares about a single sheet of discarded paper? It is an insignificant action which leads to an insignificant result, right? It is insignificant the same way a single snowflake is. Except snowflakes are never singular. Snow keeps coming and coming. Soon all those little insignificant snowflakes creates an avalanche, which no one can stop.

Small deeds add up over time and produce very large results.

It doesn’t matter if these deeds are positive or negative. It doesn’t matter if your choices are to maintain or to neglect. It doesn’t even matter if you believe this. As you live your life, your small deeds accumulate and produce large results. Most people are ignorant of this; it is obvious as you can see the large negative results they create in their lives. The more you realize how small actions become massive results, the more you can use it to your advantage. You will be amazed at how fast small daily actions turn into massive change.

Task Overload and Procrastination

I imagine there were days when those tenants woke up and saw the mess for what it was. They may have even said something like, “Gee, I should really clean up this… hole. But wow, this mess is impossible and besides, I have other things that I need to do. I’ll just toss a bed sheet over it now and get to it later…”

How you look at a job says a lot about your motivation towards doing it. If you believe a job is small and doable, you are more likely to get started and get it done. As you see the job becoming larger and larger, your confidence fades. Habitual neglect compounds to create a situation so colossal you may feel it is impossible to fix. As soon as your mind declares the job to be “impossible” it not only becomes true for you but also absolves you from any responsibility to fix it. You may be aware you created the situation, you may be aware you have to deal with it, but as soon as you class it as impossible you disable your ability to do anything about it. So you procrastinate and the problem only gets bigger as you fall into the “I must but I can’t” dynamic.