I procrastinate on the weirdest things.
Most of the time, I’m productive and clear on priorities. But sometimes, I get stuck.
In the aftermath of my move to Colorado, there are still many to-do’s that need to be mopped up for the car, for new medical care – all those annoying bureaucratic tasks.
Some of these I just haven’t taken care of yet, even though it’s obviously in my best interest to do so.
Why?
First answer is from the inner critic: because you’re a lazy bum. Not true, my more evolved self replies.
Or perhaps it’s a failure of time and energy management or an opportunity to delegate…. valid points to consider.
But a new answer came to me when I was preparing for a coaching session around persuasion.
Persuasion is one of my favorite topics because, when we want to have greater impact as a leader, much of that impact stems from moving others to action with our words.
That day, while researching the psychology of persuasion, I came across this observation:
People perceive expected losses more than expected gains.
It’s from the classic “loss aversion” study you may know: If you give people $50 and ask if they’d like to gamble to win more, they’ll do it. But if you frame the gamble as losing some of that $50 they won’t – even when the math is the same.
I’d always thought of these findings in economic terms. I had never applied them to myself or my work life – until that moment.
Psychologically, if you fear a loss, taking action is risky. You could mess up. And people (and organizations, unfortunately) tend to judge bad outcomes from action more harshly than equally bad outcomes from inaction.
Doing nothing seems safer.
It was hard to believe I felt this way about sending a fax to a health care provider, but there it was – I was afraid of the consequences of taking action.
Fortunately, the persuasion literature also had solutions to persuade me out of my procrastination. Here were some of the ideas:
- Time-box the task. Commit to it for 10 minutes. This works because structure feels safer than an open-ended effort.
- Treat the task like an experiment. It might not work the first time, and that’s OK. An experiment is less scary for the same reasons that a “trial period” or “pilot study” is easier for people to agree to.
- Use your “glow-meter” (a term I learned recently). When your glow, aka energy, feels a notch higher than usual, drop everything and tackle that difficult task.
Another method from the persuasion literature: put a cost on the inaction. Call out the downside of “doing nothing” – lost opportunity, lower credibility, or wasted time down the road. Though admittedly, this is hard to do when you’re already feeling guilty; it might work better for getting a plan approved at work.
And finally, it’s so easy to imagine everything that could go WRONG by taking action, it takes special effort to imagine what could go RIGHT.
Pay attention to the actual outcomes of choices you make throughout the day. You may find that your predictions are indeed skewed toward the worst, and taking action has a positive impact more often than not.
And so now, instead of delaying, you can act with the confidence borne of this important observation: we usually regret what we don’t do more than what we do.
What action will you take today that you are putting off?
