Procrastination is a topic that is often brought up by clients in our workshops. There are often many causes for it. Some are slightly more obvious reasons such as a lack of interest in a particular task, perfectionism, feeling overwhelmed and perhaps a general lack of motivation.

Others might be less obvious reasons like not matching the task to the time of day that best suits your cognitive energy, or not matching the task length to your optimal attention span.

However there is a reason that seems to be more and more prevalent, that many people aren’t consciously aware of which is taking a lot of valuable energy and time from people…

It’s lack of clarity – So what exactly do we mean in the procrastination context? Well there are a few elements:

  • Having so much to get done that you literally don’t know where to start.
  • This can also lead to prioritisation difficulties throughout the day leading to increased transition time between tasks just thinking about what to do next.
  • Being double and triple booked for meetings, and being so overwhelmed wondering which one is more important that you don’t make it to any of them.
  • Lack of clarity around how you are best to structure your day according to your energy levels and attention span.

All this lack of clarity results in being so overwhelmed which then perpetuates a vicious cycle of declining clarity. Eventually you won’t know where to start, when to stop, and what to go on with next.

And this cycle is repeated throughout the day losing valuable energy and time each time we need to decide what to start or what to go to next.

And even if you have the best plans for what you plan to do during the day, the constant barrage of emails and Teams messages is leading to a constant re-evaluation of priorities throughout the day. Gosh – that’s a lot for our poor brains to have to consistently evaluate!

Ironically it’s giving people more feelings of being tired and stressed which is also lowering their resilience.

So if people had clarity about all of the above, valuable energy and time could be better spent actually getting through the work instead of overthinking the execution.

So how do we get more clarity around our execution in real time?

Some neuroscience can come in super handy here….

  • Switch off notifications to stop the constant re-evaluation will give your brain a break and save time. Even if you were to access messages every 15 minutes or 30 minutes, this is better than your brain having to reevaluate every time it is distracted by another message.
  • This then leads nicely into focusing on one thing at a time. Obviously switching off notifications will help with this and it allows your brain to use less cognitive energy than it would if you were trying to do three things at once. This saves valuable cognitive energy for reprioritisation when you need it.
  • Before you log out in the evening – quickly review the next day and have a rough plan of what absolutely has to get done and when is the best time of the day for you to do each of those tasks according to your energy levels rather than just the most urgent thing first (assuming your most urgent thing isn’t due at 10am). When you start to procrastinate less you are less likely to be working on adjusting time basis.
  • Being ruthless about meeting attendance can also help here. Often we don’t start something because we don’t have enough time in the diary before the next meeting.
  • Just start. Give yourself permission to just do one tiny little thing to get you started on a task. Often it’s that first bit that’s the hardest.
  • Reward yourself for progress. If you are lacking motivation, it won’t just come and hit you in the face. Motivation is created when we accomplish something small and we celebrate even if it’s in a very small way. Feeling that accomplishment for just small progress is enough to give you a hit of dopamine and therefore the motivation to keep moving forward. So it can also help to break tasks down so that you have natural points to celebrate along the way. If you wait until you complete the whole task before you celebrate that can be a long time to wait for your motivation hit.

 

Many people spend plenty of energy credits feeling annoyed with themselves for procrastinating. It can also lead to leaving things to the last minute and causing unnecessary energy credit spend for other people who work with you.

I constantly say to people in our workshops, remove ambiguity, remove ambiguity, remove ambiguity and when you’ve done that go back and remove some more ambiguity. With greater clarity it’s far easier to increase productivity and reduce procrastination which are great ways to save valuable energy credits.

Of course, if you’d like to find out more about how to improve performance with less effort why not either book a Performance Call or sign up for our next 20/20 session or one of our open workshops here

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