If you’ve ever delayed a dental appointment, postponed your purpose of joining the gym until next month and never find the time to sort out those damn papers or fix the leaky kitchen faucet … don’t worry, you’re not the one unique. Postponing unfinished business , or putting off what you could do today until tomorrow, is a very human habit known as procrastination. And it is very common even though it has a high cost, since avoidable delays generate productivity losses, in addition to causing emotional havoc, mainly by reducing self-esteem.
Scientists from the University of Constance (Germany) have studied procrastination in depth and have come to the conclusion that people behave this way because they believe that tomorrow will be more suitable to implement what was planned . They have also shown that the tendency to procrastinate is less if the task is stated in very concrete and specific terms. The normal thing is that you go through three different stages during procrastination: a first stage of discomfort for that activity that you have to do, a second of occupation through other less important activities and a third of justification in which the famous phrase usually appears from “tomorrow will be another day.”
Studies seem to indicate that procrastination is related to worse psychological health, there is a connection between people who leave things for another time and problems of anxiety, stress or depression. It also appears to be more common in younger people and to be a behavior that is present in both genders.
For his part, Piers Steel, a researcher at the University of Calgary, has developed a formula (dubbed the theory of temporal motivation), which, he says, explains procrastination: U = EV / ID .
‘U’ refers to the usefulness of the task once it has been carried out, and its value is proportional to the product of expectations (E) by the value we give to finishing the work (V), and inversely proportional to immediacy (I ) and the sensitivity of each person to delays (D). According to the Piers Steel formula, the tasks that we want to see performed better and that we attach the most importance to are the ones we most often put off for later. More than laziness, Steel says, ” what’s behind procrastination is an excess of perfectionism .”
Some techniques that can help control and even avoid procrastination are based on imposing strict daily work times , avoiding distractions or dividing the work or objective to be completed into concrete and simple tasks that we are able to handle and seem easier to us.
