Procrastination and Motivation – let’s do this

I was recently asked to work with the Year 12 (final year) students of one of Melbourne’s best secondary schools. As a time management specialist and global speaker I am not intimidated when it comes to taking to a stage – my usual crowd is full of seasoned business people, hardened executives, and time poor professionals of every ilk. But this audience was different – facing up to a hundred or so 17 year olds who probably thought I looked like their mum (and so why listen to me, right?) was more than a little daunting.

Prior to the event, I sought advice from my own kids (now in their early 20s) about how to approach the crowd – my children shared some sage advice – don’t make stupid jokes because no-one will laugh; don’t ask questions of the audience because no-one will answer; and don’t talk for too long because no-one will listen.

This filled me with confidence.

In the end, the answer was pretty simple – I asked the students to anonymously submit questions to me prior to the event: ‘Ask me anything you want to know about managing your time across the year and in the all important exam period’.

And I hit the jackpot. The questions came rolling in. Overwhelmingly the questions covered to 2 key themes:

How do I start to motivate myself to study?

How do I stop procrastinating?

Let’s start with Procrastination. 

Procrastination is not a time management issue. It’s an emotional coping mechanism for dealing with challenging (AKA ‘bad’) feelings such as anxiety, insecurity, imposter syndrome, perfectionism or boredom.

When we are faced with a task that we don’t really want to do this can spark a ‘bad’ feeling, and so we avoid the task in order to stop feeling bad. This avoidance provides a feeling of temporary relief (AKA ‘a reward’). And – because our brains simply LOVE rewards – the next time we are faced with a task that invokes ‘bad’ feelings, we opt for avoidance because our brain knows this strategy will provide a reward. And then we repeat this pattern again and again and again. This is why procrastination is a cycle.

The irony with procrastination is that we can hold two competing feelings at the same time – we know our avoidance of the task will make us feel better RIGHT NOW, but we also know (at exactly the same time) that our act of avoidable will make us feel worse IN THE FUTURE.

Procrastination is an act of embracing short term relief in the face of long term pain.

Let’s talk Motivation 

Flip the ‘Procrastination’ coin over and on the other side you will find ‘Motivation’. Motivation is the process – either intrinsic (an internal reward such as seeking joy) or extrinsic (an external reward such as obtaining money or recognition) – that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviours.

When you are motivated, procrastination is rarely an issue. When you lack motivation, procrastination is often the issue.

While procrastination is not a time management issue, there are a number of time management related strategies that you can implement to overcome (or avoid) procrastination and to tap into your inner motivator. Here are 7 of my favourites:

1. Give your brain a BBO (a bigger, better offer). If you are prone to avoidance then you need to give your brain a bigger, better reward than the reward of avoidance. This will be different for everyone, but chocolate works just fine for me.
2. Remove temptation – think about what you generally do when you engage in avoidance: do you grab your phone; switch on the TV; check the stock market; call a friend? Knowing your routine of avoidance allows you to remove the temptation before you start the task – put your phone or the remote control away or better still, give them to someone and ask them not to return them for an hour.
3. Plan the night before:
   – Work out what your first, second and third high value tasks (HVT) will be for the next morning. A HVT is a task which is core to your role, at your skill level or level of experience and which is revenue generating or cost reducing.
   – Lock the HVTs into your calendar as a deadline (see number 4 below for more on deadlines).
   – Work out what the first step for each task will be and add a note about this to your calendar deadline  – this way you will hit the ground running when it’s time to start the task.
4. Set Deadlines – leverage Parkinson’s Law for every single task you need to deliver. Parkinson’s Law states that a task will expand to fill the time made available for it. If you have 2 days to prepare the report, it will take you 2 days. If you have a week to prepare the report, it will take you a week. If you don’t have a deadline for the report, it just won’t happen.
5. Set concrete goals such as ‘I will work for 45 minutes on this task and achieve these 3 outcomes…’ as opposed to thinking ‘I will just do my best’.
6. Gamify your rewards – research shows that people work harder for uncertain rewards than for certain rewards. For example, if you have a 50% chance of receiving either $150 or $50, you will work harder (time + effort) than if you have a 100% chance of receiving $100.
7. Don’t get caught in the ‘middle’. Research shows that for longer projects/ pieces of work, people work hard at the start and end of the project but tend to cut corners in the middle stages of the project. Avoid doing this by setting weekly targets/ milestones rather than monthly ones or simply move the middle (for example – for the year 12 students, rather than thinking of July as being the ‘middle’ of their final year of school, they should think of July as being the start of the last 4 months of 7 years of secondary education.)

Turns out that final year high school students aren’t that different to seasoned execs after all.

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Written by Kate Christie.

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