Do it Today Rather Than Tomorrow - How Procastination Harms You
It’s so easy to procrastinate. I even procrastinated writing this blog. I started writing it and then multiple times I just stopped and did something else.
There are aspects of the work of being a research scientist that makes it easy to procrastinate. After all, the next task in the lab is often not obvious and takes time to identify and plan. Certainly, in the training stage of our careers, being in graduate school and working as a postdoctoral fellow requires self-motivation; nobody is forcing you to perform another experiment. You’re in it for your own advancement and often supervisors are hands off. So it’s easy to just..not work.
Compounding these intrinsic factors of being a scientist are extrinsic factors such as becoming distracted with smartphones, social media and the Internet at our fingertips. The Internet has been described as a black hole for our brains and I know exactly what this means when I get started following links upon links.
And so, one wonders, how does anyone in the working world get anything done? How do we defeat the ease with which we can lose focus and lapse into hours of watching cat videos and Angry Birds?
In this blog I will share of the concepts I keep in my mind to prevent me from procrastinating (in theory), and strategies to rescue me from procrastination. Hopefully this will be helpful to you in identifying some of the strategies you could employ in your research careers.
Recognizing why you procrastinate
As in most avenues of life when we want to take control of a situation, the first step is identifying the source of the problem: identify what are the triggers for your procrastination. Are you procrastinating for a specific reason? Is it repetitive? Do you slack off with regularity at certain times during the day, or certain days of the week? Are there certain types of tasks that you tend to avoid doing?
There is always a cause to our procrastination and it is important to identify those that apply to you.
Being a scientist involves many concurrent tasks, like running experiments, running simulations, reading literature, writing papers, attending meetings and conferences, or the myriad other activities we do as scientists. So it’s easy to lose to become disorganized and leave our notes thrown around our desks. Also, because experiments and projects take many days to complete, we can lose focus. Or, we can get lost in the minutiae of the technicalities of performing our science that we lose sight of the bigger picture.
To me the easiest way to organize myself is to complete a task and organize my notes and materials related to that task right away. Or if I think of something I need to do, I do it right away instead of shunting it aside to the ever-growing “to do list”. I also organize my time as best as I can. I find it convenient to think of our schedule in blocks of weeks and I set goals for each week, at least a few days in advance.
I take time at least once a week to step back from what I was doing that week and put it into prospective of my overall role in the lab and my set of projects. Did the week’s activities get me closer to answering a scientific question? Did it get me closer to publishing? The answers to these questions will help me organize the following week’s activities.
I use the program Evernote to organize my projects and schedule. I update my notes within that program constantly and immediately. Find whatever method works for you to organize your time and to organize the bigger picture of your career.
• have you set (or been told) an overall direction to your work?
As I mentioned in my introduction, often in science we set our own directions and provide our own motivations. But certainly our supervisors play a role; your work must fit into the overall direction of the lab. Therefore, the direction and overall goal of your research is molded in collaboration with your supervisor. However, that’s not to say that all supervisors do a good job of this, and you may find yourself lost or unsure of what to do next in your work. Then you start procrastinating and avoiding being productive.
It’s important to regularly refresh the goals and direction of your work. It’s important to touch base with your supervisor or colleagues involved in your work and set goals and milestones. Communicate regularly and don’t let problems fester. I find that having clear milestones for a project help me from procrastinating, or at least it takes away the trigger for procrastinating based on being unclear of the direction of my work.
• are you technically prepared to do the work - do you know what comes next?
Sometimes we just do not have the knowledge of our fields well enough to be able to understand what to do next in our work. This clearly will lead to floundering and inefficient use of your time. So the easy answer to this trigger for procrastinating is to make sure you are up to speed with the literature and methods employed in your field, and make sure you communicate with your colleagues if you are unsure of what comes next in your work.
• are you happy in your work? Are you bored or insufficiently challenged?
The last, but certainly not the least important, trigger for procrastination that I wanted to point out here is emotional. If we aren’t happy with our work, we will find any excuse not to do it, including spending hours wasting time. If we aren’t challenged or stimulated, again, we will not work hard.
Being aware of your emotional state is necessary before you can address it and make some positive changes. Some of these changes may include changing your research project, trying new techniques, taking some time off, talking to your supervisor and colleagues and asking for new challenges, or finding a new way to approach your research question. Fundamentally, everyone has a different level of emotional interest or attachment to their work, but it is absolutely necessary to be satisfied with your work to be able to meet your maximum potential and productivity.
Recasting procrastination as “costs”
Just as a perfect vision of capitalism is supposed to work, in my life I have found that when I become aware of the costs of an activity (or inactivity), my habits change to reduce those costs. We can apply this way of thought to fixing procrastination.
We can think of the “opportunity cost” in procrastinating, where the time and effort spent on one activity, while having the benefit of advancing that activity, can also be considered a cost in that it takes time and effort away from spending on another activity. Practically speaking, every hour you spend trying to “zero” your inbox (which inevitably does not last long if you are anything like me), is one hour that is forever lost from performing an experiment in the lab or reading a paper. Therefore, it becomes critical to always consider whether you are making best use of your time, because that time cannot then be applied to another task.
It’s also helpful to keep in mind other consequences of putting off tasks. Often tasks that are put off from being completed become harder to complete the longer they are avoided. We becoming increasingly stressed if we know we are avoiding important work, which makes it more difficult to get into the proper mindset to actually perform that work. In research science, there is the ever-present fear of “being scooped”, and of course if we procrastinate we increase the odds of a competing researcher completing the work and receiving the credit before us.
The flip side of thinking about “costs” are the “benefits” of addressing procrastination. When we work hard and actually get things done, this unlocks so many benefits. These can include opening up more time and flexibility for future work, getting closer to the next step in our career progression or getting closer to a publication, feeling less stressed about avoiding work, and gaining a sense of accomplishment.
Addressing procrastination through baby steps that lead to balance
Having said all of this, we all need breaks and diversions from our regular work routines, and even I have advocated diversifying your activities in and away from research. I advocate finding a balance between work and play.
As well, you don’t have to “fix” your procrastination issues all at once. Make simple goals like cutting down your “procrastination time” by 50% over the course of one week,
and then another 50% over a second week. Accept that identifying the source of your slacking and making changes in your work habits may tack time.
Organize your schedule into blocks of “work” and “play” time, and then follow through with that plan and sticking to your structure. For example, you could say I will solidly work in the lab from 9 until 12, have a 30 minute lunch break, work solidly until 3 pm, have a short break, and then work solidly again until 6 pm. To me, this sets my mind at ease that I can focus on the task at hand rather than stress about what I should do, and I also am comfortable knowing that I will have relief breaks spaced throughout the day.
Prioritize tasks - accept that there are only so many hours in a day and you cannot do everything, so make best use of your time by tackling the most important tasks first.
Thinking of negative versus positive momentum
Finally, I wanted to discuss the role of momentum in productivity. Fundamentally, fighting procrastination is a fight against negative momentum. It is much easier to not do something than it is to actually doing it. So constantly avoiding doing tasks provides a momentum, in a negative sense as this is a momentum we do not want, and therefore the more we procrastinate, the more “negative” momentum we build. It only becomes harder to reverse the trend the longer we procrastinate and pile on to our “to do list”. This is a tradeoff for short-term gain at the cost of long-term pain.
Luckily, I find that tackling tasks before my “to do list” grows because of too much procrastinating is a powerful source of positive momentum. It feels good to get things done. This gives me energy to get even more stuff done. I harness this good feeling and build on it to turn around the negative momentum and build momentum towards the positive effects on my career that I listed earlier.
With patience, acceptance of the effort required, dedication, planning and execution, it is possible to defeat procrastination after all. The payoffs from being more productive are powerful and addictive and can provide amazing long-term, lasting benefits to your life and career!