I Can’t Stop Procrastinating Over Time Management

Did you make a new year’s resolution to better manage your time? Are you really serious about it this time? When I get fed up with myself and determined to make a change, I like to be armed with the knowledge and resources to do it right!

For example…
In a concerted effort to get fit I’ll buy new gym gear, stick inspiration pictures on the fridge (past clippings have included Jessica Alba’s butt and “I was looking down!” shots of me sporting a double chin). I also spend hours downloading healthy recipes and new tunes to sweat to – any sort of “prep” that helps prevent me from actually exercising.

So it’s not even ironic that my efforts to time manage have wasted time I could have spent managing my workload! Instead, I made a very impressive, colour-coded book titled Task Prioritisation with segment headings like; Future Content Ideas, Network Leads I Need to Chase and – toward the back of the book – URGENT: Admin Stuff Already Overdue.

Although it may not be true for all people experiencing time management issues – one of the biggest hurdles standing between you and a productive work day of ten hours or less, could be procrastination.

So why do we – as goal-oriented, career-driven people – keep putting things off? Finally, a team of international psychologists has decided to stop procrastinating over it and find out.

Working on the idea that there might be some connection between how we think about certain tasks – which often results in postponing them – they complied questionnaires for a group of students with instructions for them to respond by email within three weeks. They also threw in a cash incentive for completion, to prevent three weeks becoming three months… or longer.

The study, reported via the Association for Psychological Science, explained; “All the questions had to do with rather mundane tasks like opening a bank account and keeping a diary, but different students were given different instructions for answering the questions.

“Some thought and wrote about what each activity implied about personal traits: what kind of person has a bank account, for example. Others wrote simply about the nuts and bolts of doing each activity: speaking to a bank officer, filling out forms, making an initial deposit, and so forth. The idea was to get some students thinking abstractly and others concretely.”

The return rate – some never made it – and time frame on those that did, showed a stark contrast from one group compared to the other. Students prompted to think abstractly displayed levels of procrastination that would make a primary school kid avoiding homework, look like a scholar.

Those made to focus on when, where and how to get the job done, completed and returned their answers much quicker. The psychologist’s opinion was, “Merely thinking about the task in more concrete, specific terms makes it feel like it should be completed sooner and thus reducing procrastination.”

My take on that is, perhaps the bigger picture can seem too daunting. To return to the procrastination that’s holding up my time management success; maybe I got caught up in how I’m going to fix it for life. I’ve gone and launched a business so I have to work out how I’m going to do things right. But along with most aspects of running a business I’m not confident (yet) in what is right and will be successful.

Instead of busting a gut to immediately replicate the time-management-matrix-success of the Stephen Covey’s who have come before me, maybe I just tackle tomorrow first – starting with a non-threatening to-do list and red pen to tick off whatever I can manage.

What are your thoughts? Do you get a different message from the ‘procrastination study’? Tomorrow I’m going to publish here at SNOBS, the ‘guide to time management’ article that inspired this article. It began as a joint effort from myself and work experience writer Ashleigh McIntyre – the original concept being our researched list of the Time Management Top 10.

It didn’t get published on the date I had set – three weeks ago – because there’s so much out there on the topic. Who can guess what will work for one person versus the next and how could I slap a “Top 10″ on a list of time savers I haven’t managed to implement for myself?

BUT it’s high time I put an end to my (sometimes) perfectionist-driven procrastination – to just get on with the damn thing! I hope you can visit again tomorrow, and maybe throw your own tips in, with mine and Ashleigh’s…