Just Wait - Procrastination as a Tool for Success  Part One

By - karengray
02.22.18 12:03 PM

“I love to procrastinate!”

 

I read this statement, written by a very talented career coach in an article all about how to avoid procrastination. Her statement made me chuckle. It certainly got my attention,, and made me read the article. The article was full of wonderful advice and tips on how to better manage your time so that you stop procrastinating. And as I read, I felt more stressed and anxious with the pressure of having one more thing to do, and one more thing that I may not be successful doing.

 

Instead of adding another thing to my already overflowing to do pile, I wondered if there was a way that I could re-frame my idea of what procrastination is, and if I can use my gift of procrastination to my advantage.

 

And that’s when it hit me…I love to procrastinate too!

 

In fact, I waited until well past the last minute to write this article. (I do appreciate the irony.) And I am very glad that I did. This would have been a very different article if I had written it just to check the task off my list, instead of allowing myself the time to really think about how this idea can help people.

 

Historically, procrastination was not considered a bad thing. The Greeks and Romans generally regarded procrastination very highly. The wisest leaders embraced procrastination and would basically sit around and think and not do anything unless they absolutely had to.

 

The idea that procrastination is a bad thing didn’t really get started until the Puritanical era with Jonathan Edwards’s sermon against procrastination and then the American embrace of “a stitch in time saves nine,” and this sort of work ethic that requires immediate and diligent action.

 

This invariably creates another layer of stress, as we tend to view putting something off as a small failure. One of the first things we can do to take the pressure off ourselves is to adjust our understanding of procrastination.

 

Procrastination is just a natural state of being for humans. We will always have more things to do than we can possibly do, so we will always be delaying one or more tasks in favor of another. The question is not whether or not we are procrastinating, it is whether or not we are procrastinating well.

 

How Do I Know if I Am Procrastinating?

 

You are. We all are.

 

We, as humans, have the wonderful ability to constantly shift our priorities to line up with what is most important at any given moment. It is how our early ancestors survived in an unpredictable landscape, and it is how we navigate through our hectic and unpredictable lives today.

 

So How Do I Procrastinate Better?

There is “Good Procrastination” where we are shifting smoothly from one thing to the next. By choosing which tasks we can delay, and which tasks we need to move up, we are using our energies efficiently. The result is that we actually get more done and feel more productive and accomplished.

 

Another very important part of Good Procrastination is simply waiting. Not everything needs to be done right away, or talked about right now, or even decided without a good night sleep. When we delay action, we stop the habit of reacting to situations, and we take control of that aspect of our lives again.

 

In order to manage the delay to your best advantage, you need to follow two very simple steps. The first step is to ask yourself: what is the longest amount of time I can take before doing this? Step two is to delay your response or decision until the very last possible moment. If it is a year, wait 364 days. If it’s an hour, wait 59 minutes

 

When we use our ability to intentionally delay something, we allow ourselves to experience the situation and give it true and honest consideration and thought.

 

Frank Partnoy, author of Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, explains it like this:

 

“For example, a professional tennis player has about 500 milliseconds to return a serve. A tennis court is 78 feet baseline-to-baseline, and professional tennis serves come in at well over 100 miles per hour. Most of us would say that a professional tennis player is better than an amateur because they are so fast. But, in fact, what I found and what the studies of superfast athletes show is that they are better because they are slow. They are able to perfect their stroke and response to free up as much time as possible between the actual service of the ball and the last possible millisecond when they have to return it.

 

“The international dating service It’s Just Lunch advocates that clients not look at photos, because photos lead to snap reactions that just take milliseconds. It asks that they consciously not make judgments about a person when they first meet them. Instead, they tell clients to go to lunch, wait until the last possible moment, and then at the end of lunch just answer one question: Would I like to go out on a second date with this person?In the same way it frees up time for a tennis player to wait a few extra milliseconds, someone on a date will make a better decision if they free up extra minutes to observe and process information.”

 

And this logic applies to all of us, in everything we do. Be freeing up time, by taking a step back and allowing ourselves to process information, we give ourselves the ability to make better decisions - to do more and react less.

 

Next week we will take a closer look at the reasons we procrastinate, how to tell whether we are procrastinating in a way that helps, or harms us, and practical tools for managing procrastination and delay.∎


Karen Gray is a Registered Nurse, a Certified Hypnotist, and the owner of Green Mountain Hypnosis in Lebanon, New Hampshire. For more information on how you can use hypnosis to change your life, you can visit www.greenmountainhypnosis.com, or contact Karen at karengray@greenmountainhypnosis.com, or call (802) 566-0464.


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