These days I usually find myself in the first or second category. There were a few years when I did my taxes months before the deadline. This year I got them in a few weeks before the deadline, last year I was a few days late and I had to pay some minor penalty. This is all fairly average.
There are lots of web posts on procrastination, lots of lists of tips for how to get yourself motivated, and what the science is behind procrastination. An interesting article appears in the "Association for Psychological Science", the article "Why Wait? The Science Behind Procrastination" describes a variety of issues that lead to procrastination. From the article:
“What I’ve found is that while everybody may procrastinate, not everyone is a procrastinator,” says APS Fellow Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University. He is a pioneer of modern research on the subject, and his work has found that as many as 20 percent of people may be chronic procrastinators.
“It really has nothing to do with time-management,” he says. “As I tell people, to tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up.”
...
There’s no single type of procrastinator, but several general impressions have emerged over years of research. Chronic procrastinators have perpetual problems finishing tasks, while situational ones delay based on the task itself. A perfect storm of procrastination occurs when an unpleasant task meets a person who’s high in impulsivity and low in self-discipline. (The behavior is strongly linked with the Big Five personality trait of conscientiousness). Most delayers betray a tendency for self-defeat, but they can arrive at this point from either a negative state (fear of failure, for instance, or perfectionism) or a positive one (the joy of temptation). All told, these qualities have led researchers to call procrastination the “quintessential” breakdown of self-control.
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“The future self becomes the beast of burden for procrastination,” says [Fuschia Sirois of Bishop’s University, in Canada]. “We’re trying to regulate our current mood and thinking our future self will be in a better state. They’ll be better able to handle feelings of insecurity or frustration with the task. That somehow we’ll develop these miraculous coping skills to deal with these emotions that we just can’t deal with right now.”
In Recovery we focus on trivialities, small details like deciding to do unpleasant tasks approximately on time, and this is a good way to practice and learn by taking small steps. We emphasize the importance of being average, and of accepting that temporary setbacks are a part of getting better.
While tax forms are due on a yearly basis, I struggle similarly with daily tasks. Getting dishes done by 10:30pm at night is always a bit of a stretch, sometimes they aren't done until 11pm. I occasionally resent the task and have never learnt to enjoy it, but this is a far cry from where I was 20 years ago.
In the late 1990s I stopped answering my phone, eventually it was disconnected because I didn't pay the bill. I went to a place beyond procrastination, and into a dark bleak zone of not caring or doing anything at all. The list of things left undone was endless- dishes, taxes, laundry, cleaning, paying bills, calling my parents, going to work, and just about every other basic element of life maintenance stopped. My symptoms of depression weren't of sadness, or apathy, but manifested more as a confused cloud of nothing, only occasionally punctuated by self-pity and a 3am run to the 24 hour store for a bag of groceries. No motivation, no interest, no action, no clear feelings or choices, no decisions, no life at all, hard-core nothing-ism.
Doing nothing for me arose because I was waiting for motivation. I was treating my mental state as I would my physical state if I had the flue. When I have the flue, the best thing is bed-rest, soup and time. After a few days with the flue if I've had a solid rest usually I feel better. I imagined that my motivational problem was similar. I was waiting to feel better enough to get back in the swing of things. I figured I just needed one more day of rest, another day in bed, one more sick day and then my motivation would come back... This for me was a devious trap, one that I fell into again and again, and it quite literally consumed years of my life.
In Recovery we say "be self-led not symptom-led". There is a good book by Robert Courtade which presents a clear and concise summary of the Recovery method titled "Self-help for Fear and Anger: The Recovery Method". He writes:
The basic Recovery Method idea is that a human should use will-power to choose the action rather than allowing symptoms to dictate behavior. Bob learnt the tools and is now in the driver's seat. His symptoms are no longer controlling his life. The symptoms he does have are less severe now and less limiting.
Reading about the tools is self-leadership. Attending group meetings is self-leadership. Spotting the tool that pertains to a situation and acting appropriately is behavioral self-leadership. To work effectively with someone who irritates us is self-leadership. The self-led person embraces secure thoughts.
Developing leadership is a long term process. It requires effort. It can be uncomfortable. The benefits are significant and worth the effort. The alternative, which is to allow symptoms to guide us doesn't work.
The trap that I had fallen into is a common one and the recipe for finding motivation that Recovery provides is not obvious in my opinion. Many people wait for motivation or inspiration before starting certain tasks, and for some people that spontaneous desire to take care of certain mundane chores comes without much effort- I personally have never been so blessed. In Recovery we say, "we don't wait to get better to do things, we do things to get better".
While there are many paths to procrastination, my particular false belief is this one; that if I wait a little bit longer, I will feel like doing the unpleasant task. I falsely believe that no matter how unpleasant the task is, the future me (for some unknown reason) will be more willing to do the task than the present me.
In David Burn's book "Feeling Good", he writes:
What, in your opinion, comes first- motivation or action? If you said motivation, you made an excellent, logical choice. Unfortunately, you're wrong. Motivation doesn't come first, action does! You have to prime the pump. Then you will begin to get motivated, and the fluids will flow spontaneously. Individuals who procrastinate frequently confuse motivation and action. You foolishly wait until you feel in the mood to do something. Since you don't feel like doing it you automatically put it off. Your error is your belief that motivation comes first and then leads to activation and success. But it is usually the other way around; action must come first, and the motivation comes later on.
In Recovery we say "anticipation is usually worse that realization", and this is something that I've also learnt to embrace. When I think about doing unpleasant tasks, usually I imagine that they will be much worse than they are. I know that my anticipation is often not realistic and that I tend to imagine that a task will be painful and horrible, when in fact it will just be dull. I do things in part-acts; when I work on my taxes I never sit down and say I'll finish this today, I say, I'll work on this for 45 minutes, I'm pretty sure I can work on it that long today.
I don't enjoy doing dishes, taxes, paying bills or taking out the garbage. I don't do these things promptly, efficiently, with any finesse or any joy. I also don't hate these tasks, or tell myself that I'm the kind of person who shouldn't have to do these things. I have stopped waiting to want to do dull and boring tasks. I have accepted that I will never want to do any of these things, but that these are things that I want to have done, and that while doing them may be unpleasant, it is never so unpleasant as not doing them at all.
More Information
Procrastination and Perfection
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