Rather, we hope this book will lead you to the freedom of choice that comes from self-acceptance. We want our readers to lessen their tendency to delay by being happy with their humanity, accepting their strengths and weaknesses, and being able to be with themselves liking the company they keep. But the fear, shame, dread, and self-loathing that go along with conflicted attempts to take action are surely worth banishing.
We no longer procrastinate the way we once did. Although Lenora does file a tax extension every year, it is a planned event, not a frantic, desperate solution to last-minute panic. And despite the fact that it took Jane five months to take her new PDA out of the box, she now manages to handle most of her responsibilities sooner rather than later.
In this book, we want to accompany you through the challenges of procrastination into a world of psychological growth, acceptance, and action. In sharing their stories, we hope you will better understand your own. It is in knowing your story, the narrative of your own life, that you will find the context for your procrastination. We believe this is crucial, for when we accept ourselves as we really are, rather than as we wish to be, we are most able to act in our best interest and not live at the mercy of procrastination.
We can only talk about these roots one at a time, so we must separate them in an artificial way. But in life, these roots grow simultaneously, interweaving and shaping each other as they grow. Human experience, like some weeds, is complex. The emotional roots of procrastination involve inner feelings, fears, hopes, memories, dreams, doubts, and pressures. Underneath the disorganization and delay, most procrastinators are afraid they are unacceptable in some basic way.
As painful as it is to judge yourself for your procrastination, self-criticism may be easier to tolerate than the feelings of vulnerability and exposure that come with trying your best A 1 text. We know this is uncomfortable territory, but when you avoid your feelings, you are always unbalanced, picking your way through a field of buried emotional land mines, fearful about when you will stumble into the next explosion.
We therefore invite you to explore this territory with us, to look at fear of failure, fear of success, fear of being controlled, and fear of intimacy or separation in relationships, because we believe that when you know what you feel and understand why you feel it, you are likely to be more confident, solid, at ease with yourself, and then able to proceed without procrastinating.
This attitude toward time fuels more procrastination. In addition, your sense of time may have created trouble in relationships with other people whose subjective experience of time is more naturally aligned with clock time. And when you have conflict with others about time, you might be tempted to procrastinate all the more. The biological roots of procrastination include your body, your brain, and your genetic inheritance. All play a role in your procrastination.
The field of neuroscience has exploded with exciting discoveries that may help you understand your procrastination in a new way. Family dynamics from your past probably continue into the present and play a role in maintaining a dynamic of procrastination that no longer serves you. Social and cultural concerns may also con- text. We encourage you to explore and understand these emotional, biological, and social influences without criticism or blame.
One of the themes of our book is that it can be exciting and interesting to learn from your experience—not denying it, forgetting it, or judging it, but accepting what is and making the most of it. Learning about the roots of your tendency to delay lays the foundation for utilizing the techniques to overcome procrastination that we offer in Part Two. But after a long night of celebration, and with all the Bowl games on TV, who has time for serious reflection?
By the end of January, when one friend has already lost ten pounds on her new diet and another has begun working on his taxes who are these people?
The word conjures up different images for each of us. If you are among the fortunate who are not severely afflicted, you may imagine a person lying in a hammock, contentedly drinking iced tea instead of mowing the lawn. The other denoted the harmful habit of laziness in accomplishing a task that was necessary for subsistence, such as failing to till the fields at the appropriate time of year in the Nile flood cycle. In , estimates of procrastination in college students ran as high as 75 percent, with 50 percent of students reporting that they procrastinate consistently and consider it a problem.
In the general population, chronic procrastination affects 25 percent of adults. If we want to stop procrastinating, why is it so difficult to do so? Research does not provide a simple answer to the mystery of why we procrastinate. Men procrastinate only slightly more than women, and there is evidence that procrastination abates as we get older.
Procrastination plagues people of all occupations. Under the constant pressure of grades and other evaluations, a student puts off writing papers and studying for exams, only to cram for days when time is finally running out. Self-employed people have only them- text. In increasingly competitive corporate settings, some people slow down instead of trying to keep up with the fast pace.
At home, the possibilities for procrastination are endless. This is an important distinction. One way to tell whether procrastination is a problem for you is whether you find it troublesome.
Here are some examples. There are also people who like to take life easy. At times, people deliberately choose to procrastinate. They use procrastination to give themselves time to reflect, to clarify options, or to focus on what seems most important. There might be one day when the relatives arrive for a visit, the kids need chauffeur service, the text. The important things get done more or less on time.
Procrastination is part of their lives, but in a minor way. They may be overly optimistic about how long it takes to complete a task, consistently underestimating how much time they need. Outgoing and extroverted, they are overly confident about postponing now and being successful later. There are two ways procrastination can be troublesome. People who procrastinate may suffer internal consequences, feelings that range from irritation and regret to intense self-condemnation and despair.
To an outside observer, many of these people appear to be doing just fine. They may be highly successful, like the lawyer who heads his own firm or the woman who is able to manage three children, volunteer work, and a full-time job.
But inside they feel miserable. They are frustrated and angry with themselves because procrastinating has prevented them from doing all they think they are capable of. Although they appear to be doing well, they suffer inside. Procrastination may lead not only to internal suffering but to significant external consequences. Some are mild, like a small penalty for a late payment.
A lawyer was disbarred because she missed too many court deadlines. We know a man whose wife left him because she got fed up with the way his procrastination at work interfered with family activities. The last straw came when he had to cancel their anniversary trip to Hawaii in order to meet a work deadline.
An accountant told his manager that he missed his deadline because his wife was in the hospital. When the manager called his home and his wife answered, he was fired for his deception. A mortgage broker spent his time helping others learn new computer software instead of reviewing mortgage applications.
He lost his job, had to move his family to a less-expensive neighborhood in the middle of the school year, and was unemployed for several months.
They compare the experience of procrastination to living on an emotional roller coaster. Their moods rise and fall as they attempt to make progress, yet they inevitably slow down. Your cycle may be drawn out over a period of weeks, months, or even years, or it may occur so rapidly that you move from the beginning to the end in a matter of hours.
When you first undertake a project, the possibility exists that this time it will be done in a sensible and systematic way. Although you feel unable or unwilling to start right now, you may believe the start will somehow spontaneously occur, with no planned effort on your part. It is only after text. Your anxiety builds and the pressure to begin intensifies. Having almost lost hope for the spontaneous start, you now begin to feel pushed to make some effort to do something soon.
But the deadline is not yet in sight, so some hope remains. By now, any remaining optimism has been replaced by foreboding. Imagining that you may never start, you may have visions of horrible consequences that will ruin your life forever.
At this point you may become paralyzed, a number of thoughts circling around in your head: a. You regret the behavior that has brought you to the edge of this precipice, knowing you could have prevented it if only you had started sooner.
The urge to reorganize the desk, clean the apartment, or try out new recipes suddenly becomes irresistible. Previously avoided but less onerous tasks cry out to be done now. You may watch movies, play games, get together with friends, or spend the weekend hiking.
Although you try hard to enjoy yourself, the shadow of the unfinished project looms. Any enjoyment you feel rapidly disappears and is replaced by guilt, apprehension, or disgust. As the cover-up continues, you may invent elaborate lies to cover up your delay, feeling increasingly fraudulent.
The ground may be crumbling away underfoot, but you try to remain optimistic, waiting for the magical reprieve that still might come. After all, they could get this done!
At this point you have to decide either to carry on to the bitter end or to abandon the sinking ship. Path 1: Not to Do a. Time is now so short that the project seems totally impossible to do in the minutes or hours remaining. Because you cannot stand the way you feel, the effort required to pull through seems beyond your capability and your tolerance.
You flee. You give up. So, like a prisoner on a death row, you resign yourself to your unavoidable fate. You might even find that you enjoy it! All your suffering seems so needless. When you play text. Your focus is no longer on how well you could have done it, but whether you can get it done at all. The idea of going through this process even once more is so abhorrent that you resolve never to get caught in the cycle again.
Your conviction is firm—until the next time. So the cycle of procrastination comes to an end with an emphatic promise to renounce this behavior forever. Yet in spite of their sincerity and determination, most procrastinators find themselves repeating the cycle over and over again.
Everyone is expected to perform perfectly all the time. And the cultural definition of success means having lots of money, power, prestige, beauty, brilliance—having it all. In short, success is defined in terms of perfection. But there must be more to becoming a procrastinator than simply being exposed to a high-pressured, perfection-conscious society.
If text. There are many people who respond to cultural pressures by exhibiting different signs of distress than the inability to produce—such as overworking, depression, psychosomatic illnesses, alcoholism, drug addiction, and phobias. To understand how you have chosen procrastination as your primary strategy for coping, we must look to the more personal dimensions of your life.
Earliest Memories Do you remember the first time you procrastinated? What were the circumstances? Did you put off doing something for school or was it something your parents told you to do? How old were you? High school. Even earlier than that? How did the situation turn out, and how did you feel about it? Here are a few examples of some early memories procrastinators have described to us: I remember it was in the second grade, when we were assigned our first paper. We had to write two paragraphs about mountains and hand it in the next day.
As soon as the teacher assigned it, I remember feeling scared—what was I going to say? Finally, the next morning over breakfast, my mother wrote it for me. I copied it and handed it in. At the time, I felt relieved. But I also felt like a liar.
My father checked it over before I could leave. After that, I stopped trying to finish quickly. I just daydreamed and dawdled around. Fifth grade. They made fun of me for being a goody-goody. I felt as though I was contaminated. So I stopped working and started procrastinating. Just like that. For many, the earliest symptoms of procrastination occurred in school—the first formal introduction of a young child to our larger, competitive society.
The tracking systems of many schools emphasize academic ability as the major factor for distinguishing between students, so you may have identified yourself as an A, C, or F kid based on which class you were in. The social cliques that form in school are often based on these distinctions as well.
Long after school years have passed, many adults still think of themselves in terms of how they were labeled as children. People may also continue to think of themselves in terms of the learning issues they had in school—trouble with reading or math, distractibility, difficulty processing information, or speech problems.
Procrastination may have been a strategy for covering up weak areas. Perhaps procrastination gave you some special protection in the classroom. Unfortunately, people sometimes forget that grades do not measure intellect alone. Whenever you started procrastinating, you know how hard it is to stop. In addition to functioning as a strategy for self-protection, procrastination is based on deeply held beliefs about life.
Everything I do should go easily and without effort. I should have no limitations. I must avoid being challenged. If I succeed, someone will get hurt. If I do well this time, I must always do well. These assumptions may be familiar to you, or they may be operating outside of your awareness. Either way, these are not absolute truths; they are personal perspectives that pave the way for procrastination.
If you think you should be perfect, then it may seem safer to procrastinate than to work hard and risk a judgment of failure. If you are convinced that success is dangerous, then you can protect yourself and others by procrastinating and reducing your chances of doing well.
If you equate cooperation with giving in, then you can put things off and do them when you are ready, thus maintaining your sense of control. Selfcritical, apprehensive and catastrophic thoughts can make it impossible to move beyond the inevitable obstacles of daily living.
We think that people who procrastinate in a problematic way do so because they are afraid. They fear that if they act, their actions could get them into trouble. They worry that if they show who they really are, there will be dangerous consequences to face. They are afraid, underneath all the disorganization and delay, that they are unacceptable, so much so that they may hide not only from the world but even from themselves.
As painful as it is to endure self-inflicted criticism, contempt, and disgust, such feelings may be easier to bear than the feelings of vulnerability and exposure that come with taking a clear look at who they really are. Procrastination is the shield that protects them. This concern reflects a fear of failure, and we believe that procrastination may function as a strategy for coping with this fear.
He was an academic star in college and was accepted into a competitive law school. He struggled often with procrastination, sometimes staying up all night to write his briefs or study for exams. But he always managed to do well. With great pride he joined a prestigious law firm, hoping eventually to be named a partner in the firm.
Although he thought a lot about his cases, David soon began to postpone doing the necessary background research, making appointments with his clients, and writing his briefs.
As a court date drew near, he would begin 19 text. By waiting too long to begin writing up his research, David avoids testing his potential. His work will not be a reflection of his true ability; rather it demonstrates how well he is able to produce under last-minute pressure. He is terrified that his best would be judged inadequate.
When they are disappointed by their performance on a task, they think not only that they have failed on that task, but also that they have failed as a person. Richard Beery, who was our colleague at the University of California at Berkeley Counseling Center, observed that people who fear failure may be living with a set of assumptions that turn striving for accomplishment into a frightening risk.
These assumptions are: 1 what I produce is a direct reflection of how much ability I have, and 2 my level of ability determines how worthwhile I am as a person—that is, the higher my ability, the higher my sense of self-worth. Thus, 3 what I produce reflects my worth as a person.
Your performance is a direct measure of how able and worthwhile you are—forever. For many people, ability refers to intellectual competence, so they want everything they do to reflect how smart they are—writing a brilliant legal brief, getting the highest grade on a test, writing elegant computer code, saying something exceptionally wise or scintillating in a conversation. You could also define ability in terms of a particular skill or talent, such as how well one plays the piano, learns a language, or serves a tennis ball.
Some people focus on their ability to be attractive, entertaining, up on the latest trends, or to have the newest gadgets. The performance becomes the only measure of the person; nothing else is taken into account.
An outstanding performance means an outstanding person; a mediocre performance means a mediocre person. For David, writing a legal brief for a case is the performance that measures not only his ability to be a good lawyer but also his value as a human being. As Dr. This means that regardless of how the text. Just imagine how well I could do if I really worked at it! As long as you procrastinate, you never have to confront the real limits of your ability, whatever those limits are.
Some people would rather suffer the consequences of procrastination than the humiliation of trying and not doing as well as they had hoped. It is more tolerable to blame themselves for being disorganized, lazy, or uncooperative than to view themselves as being inadequate and unworthy—the failure they fear so deeply. And it is the fear of this failure that is eased by procrastination.
People who worry about being judged inadequate or unworthy usually are afraid that is exactly what they are. If they take a realistic look at themselves and judge themselves to be lacking, they face another fear. They fear they are unlovable. Who could love me if I have nothing to offer? The World of a Perfectionist Often without realizing it, people who procrastinate are perfectionists. In an attempt to prove they are good enough, they strive to do the impossible, thinking that they should have no problem at all reaching text.
They usually put unrealistic demands on themselves and then feel overwhelmed when they are unable to meet them. Discouraged, they retreat from the demands by procrastinating. How in the world can I be a perfectionist? This kind of successful perfectionism feels like an essential part of your identity and is a basis for self-esteem.
In maladaptive perfectionism, there is a discrepancy between your standards and the way you view your performance, so you are prone to be self-critical and are more vulnerable to feeling depressed and having low self-esteem.
Although they strive for high goals, they are also able to tolerate the frustrations and disappointments of sometimes failing to meet those goals. They know that they can improve their efforts, and they work hard to do so. In contrast, the perfectionistic procrastinator usually expects more of herself than is realistic. A first-time novelist wants the first draft of his writing to be of publishable quality.
A college freshman who has not mastered time management or study skills expects to get all As his first semester. A young man wants text. As a result, the high standards that are intended to motivate people toward accomplishment often become impossible standards that hinder their efforts. An important question to ask yourself is: Are you setting standards for yourself that enable you to make progress, or do your standards lead you to become discouraged, frustrated, and stuck?
When perfectionism becomes a problem, procrastination is likely to become a problem. But they can make your life extremely unsatisfying and pave the way for procrastination rather than progress. Mediocrity Breeds Contempt. For some procrastinators the thought of being ordinary can be so intolerable that they want everything they do to be outstanding. They wish not only for ideal careers and relationships but also to make a masterpiece of the letter they write or the garden they plant.
If you expect your everyday performance to be up to the level of your ideal picture of yourself, then whatever you do is bound to seem mediocre in comparison. You devalue the average, the ordinary, the regular, regarding them with contempt.
This allows perfectionists to avoid feeling contempt for themselves when they are simply average. Excellence without Effort.
The perfectionist believes that if one is truly outstanding, even difficult things should be easy. Creative ideas text. Studying should be pure intellectual joy! Decisions should be made immediately with total certainty! Using such impossible standards, a person who must work hard, or even exert a moderate amount of effort to get something done, is likely to feel inferior. I play video games. Their disappointment at having to work hard prevents them from making the effort required to grapple with the material and master it.
Instead, they avoid it by delaying. In the long run, their need to be smart keeps them ignorant. Going It Alone. Even when it would be more efficient to get help, many perfectionists are bound and determined to work, and suffer, in isolation.
They may even take pride in this splendid isolation. Or they may come from a culture that does not endorse asking for help, where needing help is seen as a sign of weakness and a source of shame.
When the burden finally becomes too heavy, procrastination becomes a source of relief. Unable to do everything all by themselves, they resort to delay. There Is a Right Way. This is one of the most cherished notions held by perfectionists. They believe there is one correct solution to a problem, and it is their responsibility to find it. So, rather than take the risk of making the wrong choice, they do nothing. They knew the decision would change the course of their lives forever, and they wanted to be absolutely sure they were doing the right thing.
They made long lists of pros and cons for each town they were considering. Since they could never feel absolutely certain that any one location would be the perfect place to live, work, and raise children, they never made the move.
As long as Brenda and Charles put off deciding where to live, they can hold on to the illusion that there is a perfect solution and they can make a perfect choice.
Perfectionists fear that if they make a wrong decision, they will think less of themselves and their feeling of regret will be intolerable. But underneath this apprehension is a belief that they can and should be omniscient—able to read the future and guarantee how things will turn out. Mental health professionals Show[s] you how to fix this vexing, life-sapping problem. You may have already requested this item.
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Advanced Search Find a Library. Your list has reached the maximum number of items. Please create a new list with a new name; move some items to a new or existing list; or delete some items. Your request to send this item has been completed. In writing this book, we believe now, as we did twenty-five years ago, that loosening the grip procrastination holds over your life re quires both understanding what leads you to put things off and finding some way to take action.
Reading about techniques may text. So figuring out how to take ac- tion in new ways is vitally important. In Part One of this book we untangle the many and varied roots of procrastination; then in Part Two we offer suggestions that can help you take action.
Our aim is not to do away with procrastination. Rather, we hope this book will lead you to the freedom of choice that comes from self-acceptance. We want our readers to lessen their tendency to delay by being happy with their humanity, accepting their strengths and weaknesses, and being able to be with themselves liking the company they keep. But the fear, shame, dread, and self-loathing that go along with conflicted attempts to take action are surely worth banishing.
We no longer procrastinate the way we once did. Although Lenora does file a tax extension every year, it is a planned event, not a frantic, desperate solution to last-minute panic.
And despite the fact that it took Jane five months to take her new PDA out of the box, she now manages to handle most of her responsibilities sooner rather than later. In this book, we want to accompany you through the challenges of procrastination into a world of psychological growth, acceptance, and action. In sharing their stories, we hope you will better understand your own.
It is in knowing your story, the narrative of your own life, that you will find the context for your pro- crastination.
We believe this is crucial, for when we accept ourselves as we really are, rather than as we wish to be, we are most able to act in our best interest and not live at the mercy of procrastination. Related books. Future crimes: everything is connected, everyone is vulnerable and what we can do about it. Do It Yourself Volunteering. Popular categories Comics. DC Comics. Marvel comics. Spiderman comics. Burka Synopsis: Offers a practical, tested program to overcome procrastination by achieving set goals, managing time, enlisting support, and handling stress.
Based on their workshops and counseling experience, psychologists Jane B. Burka and Lenora M. Yuen offer a probing, sensitive, and at times humorous look at a problem that affects everyone: students and scientists, secretaries and executives, homemakers and salespeople. Procrastination identifies the reasons we put off tasks-fears of failure, success, control, separation, and attachment-and their roots in our childhood and adult experiences.
Burka and Yuen even provide tips on living and working with the procrastinators you may know. Wise, effective, and easy to use, this new edition shows why for 25 years Procrastination has been an immediate must-have for anyone who puts things off until tomorrow.
Coleman, Sr.
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