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Procrastination
Preventing Procrastination Part Two: Learn to Stop Procrastinating
Prevent procrastination on all things involving learning.
Posted October 21, 2010
Procrastination silently sabotages your opportunities to learn to operate at higher levels of effectiveness. Preventing learning procrastination may be among your most important self-help improvement challenges.
When in a learning situation you can sing the manaña song, or proactively cope. Sing manaña and you are into a learning procrastination cycle. This is a needless delay in starting and finishing educational activities from learning math to curbing anxiety. Proactive coping is a joint learning process. You learn to stop procrastinating as you pursue educational activities at school, home, and work.
Prevention is doing something in advance to reduce the risk of a big problem happening later. This takes extra steps up front. This cost is far lower than going around the same procrastination revolving door.
Let's continue our procrastination prevention journey by looking at a sample of educational conditions that can set you up for procrastination. I'll follow with three techniques you can use in advance to prevent learning procrastination: accepting ambiguity, turning analysis into action, and resolving the double-agenda dilemma.
Are Some Learning Conditions a Setup for Procrastination?
You want to learn more about art history or how to assemble a propane gas cooking grill. You may do whatever is reasonable to get the knowledge or develop the skill. However, not all learning goes smoothly. You may feel frustrated following confusing instructions on how to assemble the grill. You wonder if the writers were pranksters.
Learning, frustration, and procrastination commonly intersect. In school settings you may have faced frustrating learning restrictions. You're told what to do. You're told when the work is due. You get penalized if you delay. Later in life this early reaction to learning spills over. You may flinch at learning situations that you associate with restrictive controls, and fall back on a pattern of academic procrastination.
Like Siamese twins, learning and evaluation are joined. You may tie performance scores and grades to your personal worth. This combination can evoke evaluation anxiety followed by procrastination.
You may not control some learning conditions, but you can command what you do. You can choose your psychological tools to prevent learning procrastination and to acquire beneficial new knowledge.
Accepting Ambiguity
The Greek goddess Athena came to life full grown and endowed with wisdom. For the rest of us, wisdom is gained through the hard knocks of wading through ambiguity to gain clarity and knowledge. Like Athena, a lifetime of easy wisdom is a myth.
New learning normally froths with ambiguity. It's how you handle it that makes the difference. Let's assume you are not sure what to do and you anticipate stumbling and fumbling and possibly messing up. Because of uncertainty about handling ambiguity, you're tempted to delay and you play procrastination pranks on yourself. You tell yourself you don't have the time right now to learn. Perhaps you will get to it someday. You can also take the alternative path and deal with the ambiguity in advance.
1. Work at philosophically accepting ambiguity as part of learning and life: it is as it is.
2. A complex learning situation has a simple place to start. What is that first step?
3. Profit from feedback. What did you learn from taking the first step? How can you apply this learning to the second step, etc.?
4. Give yourself a time or activity reward following each solid hour of learning activity. Take ten minutes to kick back to reflect and relax, or to have a cup of coffee or to check your email. That can keep your learning efficiency up.
Turning Analysis into Action
Procrastination prevention includes analysis. Analysis means breaking something down into its parts. Information from this analysis sets the stage for you to organize your resources to avoid procrastination barriers. Here is a prevention-oriented where, when, what, why, and how analysis:
1. Where questions ask for answers about locations for learning procrastination. Where are you likely to procrastinate? Is it at school? Is it at home? Is it at work? Is it in attending to your health? If you engage in health procrastination where does this delay occur? Do you put off medical or dental examinations? When you formally specify locations, you can formally foment a procrastination prevention plan and execute it when the time is right.
2. When questions ask for answers about your cycle of delay. Do you delay as long as you are able? How close do you get to a deadline before you start? To help prevent needless delays, set a deadline for starting earlier. What delayed reward can you give yourself that will stimulate you to start sooner and finish within a reasonable time?
3. What questions ask for answers about how your procrastination story unfolds. Do you see a learning situation as complex? Do you experience a twinkle of tension? Do you fix your attention onto something easier or safer to do? Do you tell yourself you'll get to it later and then repeat the cycle? Can you prevent the cycle by switching to a productive story?
4. Why questions ask for reasons for procrastinating, or the purpose it serves. Answers to why questions help you to identify underlying causes. Do you put off dealing with learning situations because you feel uncomfortable, uncertain, or rebellious? Do you fear getting a bad evaluation from yourself or others?
5. How questions ask you about prescriptions to prevent learning procrastination. If you think frustration is intolerable, how can you show yourself you can tolerate what you don't like?
Resolving the Double-Agenda Dilemma
Let's assume that you face a learning situation where procrastination feels tempting. You want to hook up a new surround-sound system to your television. You purchase the system, then duck learning how to put it together. How is this to be explained?
Ask yourself what is going on? Your inner noise may detract from setting up the sound system. (1) You see this challenge as too arduous. (2) You connect learning with frustration and you don't want to frustrate yourself. (3) You fear that if you try you'll fail and look dumb. Bottom line: you want a good result but get tangled up with the noise.
You face a classic double-agenda dilemma. Your first agenda is to have a great new surround-sound system hooked to your television. At the same time, you don't want to feel uncomfortable trying to figure out the instructions and the trials and errors that go with installing the system. Assuming you want to stop getting whipsawed by the second agenda, resolving the conflict takes at least two prevention measures: (1) learning to silence the noise; (2) learning to put the sound system together.
You are not a blindfolded passenger driven by procrastination noises. You can work your way through the noise distractions in advance. You can get a double reward: less interfering inner noise and a new external sound system. For example, if you identify with your learning performances and routinely give yourself a bad grade, work at separating your performances from your global worth and see what results.
For more information on how to get past the double-agenda dilemma, see: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-and-sensibility/201003/emot…
For more information on learning procrastination, see: http://www.amazon.com/End-Procrastination-Now-Psychological-Approach/dp…
