Procrastination 101

No matter how hard we try, we all end up procrastinating. But some of us overcome procrastination and become the leaders leading the remaining of us. This divide fascinated me for most of my life and I have finally decided to dissect the phenomena to see what it is and how to be more productive than ever.

So basically in today’s article, I will be discussing the science of procrastination and transforming this phenomenon into multiple segments making it easy for you to understand. And while I will be writing up about Procrastination, I will sum up the article with a piece of actionable advice for you to follow and overcome procrastination.

Everyone who has talked about Procrastination referred to the mathematical equation provided by Piers Steel. The equation states that Motivation is equal to expectancy into value divided by impulsiveness and Delay. Now the most important point here to remember is that motivation is the exact opposite of procrastination.

Don’t worry, I will not leave you hanging with this complex equation. To understand it, let’s break it down.

For easy understanding let’s break down the components of this equation. It starts with expectancy reward, value, and impulsiveness. Here expectancy means how much you are interested or focused on achieving your goal. And the reward will be an anticipated result.

This makes expectancy directly proportional to reward. The more focused you are in expecting a successful result, the more effort you will put into achieving your goal.

Whereas value reflects the pleasure you get while doing a task. It also helps in finding how much the reward is enjoyed after the task. And this is how value is also directly proportional to the reward of completing a task.

And the final component of the equation is Impulsiveness. It refers to how easily someone gets distracted. For a fact, I know that there are a million ways to be distracted easily. For example, Facebook, Instagram, and Netflix attracted me the most. These were the distractions I had to get rid of to be productive. And distractions add to delay.

So the formula is to maximize expectancy and value to stay focused and motivated to eliminate the delay and look at the reward.

I know you will be having some thoughts of what actionable steps you need to follow to be productive. Well, to devise an actionable plan you need to divide your routine into multiple steps:

First, break down the steps. Any task you need to do needs to be broken down into multiple stages. This helps to increase expectancy as we tend to complete smaller tasks quickly and easily as compared to big tasks.

Number two, just begin. One of the toughest parts to accomplish any task is to start it. I overcame the delaying task by following Pomodoro Technique. This technique helps you divide your work into a 25-minute working block. And having a five-minute break after every 25-minute block. This helped in completing the smaller tasks in junks and increased my expectancy to complete the whole task.

Number three don’t expect too much. It is simple. Baby steps my dear friend, baby steps. Don’t plan on completing the whole project in one day. Challenge yourself until you have completely opted for this style and know your limits.

Number four, focus on outcome and value. Remember this, the more focused you are towards the outcome of the task, the more value you will put in to complete it. There are things which you want to do just because that needs to be done and there is no other reason. Well to enjoy what you do, you need to find the value which you can put in to enjoy the outcome or look forward to the reward.

Number five has un-stretchable timelines. I had a very bad habit of spending more than the allotted time on many tasks. And then I read the Parkinson's law. It helps you to restrict yourself to completing a task in a certain timeline. That’s all. Let me explain this to you. If you have allocated 25 minutes to a certain task, but you liberated yourself and extended the timeline to three hours, then you’ll end up consuming those three hours entirely. This happens only when you relax your timelines.

And last number six, understand yourself. The issue here is, in general, whatever worked for me may not work for you. Everyone is different and has different working mechanics. But from the above-mentioned six steps, I very highly doubt that any of these will not work for you and I am very confident that these six pointers will work for you as well.

Now I know, some of you have other tips and tricks in addition to the ones listed above. And I’d love to hear from you about them. Share your experience to overcome procrastination with the rest of us and let's help each other out.