3.32 How to work out why you procrastinate and what to do about it

Pretty much every PhD student struggles with procrastination yet the advice is often very generic. In this episode, I talk about a theoretical framework that helps us better understand why each of us, as individuals, procrastinate so that we can make more tailored plans to support ourselves. I also explain why it’s totally understandable that you procrastinate and why we know it’s a modifiable behaviour – i.e. you can change!

You can find the link to the Svartdal and Lokke paper here.

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Have you ever found yourself procrastinating and then realizing that you are really behind because you're procrastinating, and then asking yourself, ah, why? Why do I keep doing this? I know it doesn't help. I know I'm gonna have to do the work eventually.

And I'm making it so much harder for myself, yet I can't stop doing it. If you find yourself thinking those things, you are so completely normal. And today I'm gonna help you figure out exactly why it is totally understandable that you do this and how you can better understand your specific reasons so that you can then figure out how to address it, and at the end, I'm gonna tell you ways that I can support you in addressing it in the future too.

If you're new to the podcast, I'm Dr. Vikki Wright, the host of the PhD Life Coach. I'm an ex- professor and now certified coach [00:01:00] working with PhD students and academics, and notably running the PhD life coach membership where we talk about procrastination all the time.

So today's episode's been sort of inspired by a couple of things. This quarter in the membership, we've really been focused on setting up systems. We've been thinking about time management and task management, and how you start your days and finish your days, start your weeks, review your weeks, all this good stuff, right?

It's been amazing. The students got tons out of it, but one of the things that has become really clear is that sometimes even when you have the best systems in place, we still sometimes procrastinate. I do! I'm not up to date with everything that I'm intending to do right now. It is completely normal, and so we end up talking about procrastination and overcoming it a lot already, and that it was from there that I decided that next quarter in the membership, which starts at the end of April. So in a few weeks time, if you're listening to this live, we are gonna be [00:02:00] focusing on procrastination, distraction, and getting stuff done. So this episode's partly inspired by this being a real focus of the membership at the moment, but it's also inspired by a recent research article from a couple of years ago, that I came across recently and thought took a really interesting approach to analyzing and under standing procrastination. I'm gonna link the full title in the, uh, show notes, but essentially it's by Svartdal and Lokke. They are Norwegian researchers. It's published in Frontiers in Psychology, and they are looking at what they call the a, b, C of academic procrastination, and they conduct what they call a functional analysis, and there's many elements of this that I found really useful. I am gonna add some of my own stuff in, which is entirely based on anecdotal evidence and not the systematic research that they've done, but I still think it's useful. So I'm gonna share with you some of the stuff they talked about, some of my insights and by the end of this episode, I want you to have a much better [00:03:00] understanding of why you procrastinate and what is individual to you. 

Because I've talked about procrastination before. Those of you who have been here for a long time, those of you who have binged my episodes, thank you, I love you, will know that I've done eight ways that you're secretly procrastinating or how to stop procrastinating parts one and two, and I talk about some of this stuff in those episodes, but what I haven't really talked about is the individual differences.

That all of you will have similar patterns as to why you're procrastinating, but your exact reasons are different and the better we can understand that stuff in a compassionate and curious way as usual, the better we can understand that the better we can target the support specifically for you.

So the first argument that this paper makes that I love is that you are not an idiot for procrastinating. They don't phrase it exactly like that, but that's my translation of what they say. You are not an idiot for procrastination. Often procrastination feels like [00:04:00] a completely illogical thing to do. We know that it's not helpful. We know it doesn't move us towards our goals yet we keep on doing it. Sometimes that feeling of it being illogical can make it so much worse. Partly because it makes us wanna beat ourselves up about it, and partly because it makes it really hard to address. If you don't understand why you are doing it, how on earth do you try and change it?

And that's where we usually try and change it, either with a new system, so everyone wants to know exactly how I set up my task management systems, et cetera, et cetera. Or we try and fix it by kind of beating ourselves into it, like, I need more discipline. Must make myself do it. And neither of these things work.

There's no system that's gonna fix this for you. I can give you recommendations of principles of things that'll help, but it's not the system's fault. Okay? And similarly, no one ever beat themselves into sustainable behavior change. It's just not how it works. Okay? 

So what this [00:05:00] paper argues instead is that procrastination is an adaptive response to challenging circumstances. What that means is it has benefits associated with it. Now, those benefits are very immediate benefits, and we'll talk about exactly what sorts of benefits. In the long run, you get real disadvantages, but in the short term, you get real advantages. And that's the basis on which they decided to do this functional analysis, this understanding that this is a functional behavior, and if we know it's a functional behavior, we can work out what are the benefits we get from it. IE, why do we do it? But we can also recognize that it's therefore learned. That by doing it, getting positive outcomes in the short term, at least we reinforce that behavior of per procrastination, and that helps explain why we keep doing it. And the gorgeous thing [00:06:00] is that if we know that something's functional and therefore we know how to address it, we know it is learned, then we also know that it has the potential to be modified.

Because if you've ever told yourself, I am just someone who procrastinates, I am a procrastinator, it can feel like you've got no control over that. It's just who you are, especially if you've got things like A DHD, which inevitably make procrastination more common and more challenging, it can be really easy to be like, well, there's literally nothing I can ever do about this. I just have to put up with it. But if we can recognize the functions that these behaviors are having, recognize that it can still be modified, then with support, we can change the ways we are procrastinating.

So what do they mean by a functional analysis? Now, I'm not gonna try and give you a full rundown of the entire paper. It wouldn't do them justice, and I'm not an [00:07:00] expert in their methodologies by any stretch. But essentially they looked at what are the antecedents of procrastination. IE what are the things that happen before procrastination happen?

That kind of prompt procrastination. What are the behaviors that we see with procrastination, and then what are the consequences of those behavior? And they're particularly focused on the immediate consequences. Okay. Antecedents behavior consequences. Now, those of you who know me well, who've been listening for a while, know that I have a beautiful black Labrador who's laying next to me, farting outrageously while I record.

Um, and this is very much like dog training, right? We try to, at the moment, the antecedent of seeing another dog, means that Marley exhibits behavior of barking, unfortunately, and the consequence for him is that we usually move away from that dog, which is exactly what he wants, right?

So you can see [00:08:00] there that sort of effect of there's the antecedent, there's the behavior, and then there's the consequence. Okay? For him, barking is a functional behavior because it leads to what he wants, which is to get the hell away from that dog. And the same is true with you guys. 

So what we're gonna think about today is what are the antecedents of procrastination? What are the behaviors that we see and what are the consequences? And importantly, what are the individual differences that you guys might be experiencing that enables you to figure out a more kind of tailored to you reason that you are procrastinating? 

So let's do antecedents First. The antecedents that they identified from the literature were three main categories. The first is situational temptation. So this is where, frankly, there's something you'd rather do. So this is where maybe your phone is next to you and you find yourself scrolling online. This is where a friend comes and chats, and [00:09:00] that's more fun than doing the work you're intending to. That's where even looking out the window and enjoying the view rather than doing your work. Okay, so there's situational temptations. If you've listened to my podcast about managing distraction, where I talk about the push and the pull, this is really the kind of pull towards something that's fun. Situational temptations pull you towards them because they feel rewarding in some way.

The next category they came up with was Task aversiveness. This is what I was referring to as the push, the things that make the task something that you don't want to do. Maybe it feels like a lot of effort. It feels difficult. You don't think you're good enough, you don't know where to start. You're confused, you're unsure, all those things, okay? That's task aversiveness, and that pushes you away from doing the task that you intended to do. 

The third antecedent that they identified is one that we haven't talked a lot about in the context of procrastination and distraction and things before, and [00:10:00] that is lack of energy. So many of you will have noticed that if you've slept well, you are rested, you are much better able to get on with your tasks, but that when you are tired, fatigued lacking focus. It's a real struggle and you procrastinate more that has been really evidenced in the literature. It's going to increase the extent to which you want the situational temptations. It's gonna make the kind of going and doing something warm and cozy, much more tempting, and it's gonna make the task feel harder.

Now this I hadn't really thought about before, but it really reminded me of some research an old colleague of mine used to do. So there was a colleague that I worked with back in Birmingham called Frank Eves, who was really interested in stair climbing, how we get people to climb more stairs as a sort of environmental manipulation to increase physical activity. And one of the really interesting things that he did was he got people to stand at the bottom of a set of stairs. He got them [00:11:00] to try and guess the steepness of the stairs, and he had a variety of different ways that he did that. But essentially he was trying to get them to say, did they see it as steep or not steep or anything in between?

And he found that people who were heavier themselves, people who were older, people who reported being tired, people who were carrying heavy bags, perceived the stairs as steeper than people who didn't. Now, they weren't being asked to climb up it. They weren't saying, do you wanna go up there? They were just asked to perceive it and they were encouraged to be as accurate as possible.

And what that shows, I think it really supports this notion that when we've got less energy, or more effort is perceived to be needed, the task looks worse. Okay, so that's the other antecedent here. So we've got situational temptations, we've got task aversiveness, and we've got a lack of energy.

I want you all to have a ponder on which of [00:12:00] those is most common for you. Is it usually that you're distracted by something fun, even when you don't particularly hate the thing that you're intending to do? Is it that it's really driven by the fact that you have so many negative emotions to do with your PhD or whatever it is that you're trying to do? Or is it that you are regularly lacking the sort of energy to be able to actually do things that are more effortful? 

Now they identified these three things. They identified these three things, but then they also argued that there were other factors that interacted with this, and I think we will recognize some of these. One is the temporal distance of the goal. So one of the issues with PhD is a lot of your goals are really, really distal, right? They're a little way away. And what the research shows is that the further away your goal is, the more likely you are to procrastinate. You haven't got that kind of urgency effect that you get when the deadline is looming. It feels like you've got lots of time, and that temporal distance can make you more likely to [00:13:00] procrastinate even with the same level of temptation, aversiveness, and energy. 

The second thing they looked at, which I thought was really interesting, was they looked at interactions with personality traits. So those of you familiar with psychology will know the big five, kind of the big five psychological constructs that we can all rank ourselves on. And they found that some of these actually relate to which forms of procrastination are more tempting. So those of you who are higher on extroversion, you enjoy the external stimulation and you get energy from that, you are more likely to be tempted by situational factors than people who are lower in extroversion. So think whether that relates to you. If you are someone who considers yourself extroverted, are you more likely to get tempted by talking to your friends, by going online, by watching tv, and so on.

They also found that people who are higher in neuroticism, so a tendency to sort of be anxious, worry [00:14:00] and ruminate, were more likely to be avoiding the task itself. They were more likely to find it aversive, something that they were worrying about and to not like those emotions and to ,therefore avoid doing the task on that basis.

So again, if you are somebody who would consider yourself to be higher in neuroticism, I want you to think about whether it's the aversiveness of the task that is driving you away more than the distractions of other things.

The other factor that's not part of the big five. But the other factor was impulsiveness and people that are much more impulsive, ADHDers I'm looking at you here too, were much more likely to into situational temptations. So it wasn't so much that they were particularly averse to the task they were intending to do, but they were really impulsive about, oh, I want to do that and go off to do the situational distractions.

The other big five item that they mentioned is conscientiousness. And I'm gonna tell you what they found and then at the end when I tell you my, like additions, I'll [00:15:00] tell you the bit that I actually changed based on no data whatsoever, but my own personal opinion. Go with it. Um, they found that people who were conscientious had lower levels of procrastination across the board. So lower susceptibility to situational temptations, more ability to do tasks that were aversive and less likely that low energy would prevent them from doing their tasks. So those are the antecedents and the ways that different individual factors can interact with them.

Hopefully, you are already starting to get some understanding of your own individual tendencies, and I'll just let you know now. I have my wait list open for the PhD life coach membership, and everybody who is on the wait list got on last Friday, got a diagnostic tool to help them better understand exactly why they procrastinate, which of these factors is most important to help them then build a more personalized plan for addressing procrastination.

Now, if you are not already on the wait list. [00:16:00] That's okay. I'm gonna send this to anybody who joins between now and the launch, the wait list doesn't obligate you to do anything. It doesn't mean you've got to join. It just means that you are gonna get the information about membership and you will get a variety of freebies on the way.

So if you wanna join, I'll put the link in the show notes, but basically go to my website, the PhD life coach.com/membership and you'll find it there. It's the top this button that says the membership at the top. You'll find it you're clever people.

So that's the A of this functional analysis. The B is behaviors, and I don't think we need to spend too much time on this. It's not rocket science, but essentially they found that some of the behaviors we saw were things like delays in completing tasks, so actually not hitting deadlines and things like that. Procrastination led to things like delays in starting tasks. So this is all those of you who put it off, put it off, put it off, and then actually get it done at the last minute. Okay. Looking at you, there's delays in starting, and then there's also procrastination where we're avoiding [00:17:00] sustained effort at a particular thing.

So any of you who avoid things that are less novel and interesting, that require just ongoing consistent action, that is also a different form of procrastination. So again, I want you to think which of those things is most you. Do you actually procrastinate past the point where it needs to be completed? Are you late handing lots of things in? Are you someone who delays starting but gets there in the end? I find myself in that category mostly, or are you somebody, I think I fall in this category too. Um, are you somebody that doesn't like sustained continued action or finds it difficult to continue to pursue something that just requires sort of consistent effort?

So moving on then to the consequence, we get two different types of consequence. The first is what's called negative reinforcement. This is where when you take this behavior, you no longer have to experience the [00:18:00] bad thing. So if you are somebody who avoids taking on a task, because it feels like it's gonna be really difficult or loads of effort or those sorts of things, then you are gonna experience negative reinforcement.

You are gonna have negative feelings when you think about, or you do the task, and so you stop doing it and those negative feelings are removed so you get immediate relief. You are no longer in that short moment, you are no longer experiencing those negative emotions. And just like Marley barking, that reinforces the behavior. The dog has gone away. He no longer has to look at the dog. He's a happy boy. He is rewarded by not having those negative feelings anymore. 

The second one is kind of the flip side is positive reinforcement and this is often gonna be those of you who are sort of susceptible to situational temptations is where you [00:19:00] were feeling rubbish because you were thinking about this piece of work, but you are now feeling happy because you are watching Netflix or whatever.

 And that's where you get positive reinforcement that this new task has come in and you now feel better. It's all about emotion alleviation. Okay, but which way round it is. Are you relieving it solely by removing the negative thing, or are you relieving it by swapping it for a positive thing? Again, can help us to make strategies to address this in the future. I think I'm a positive reinforcement girl.

Now what they go on to discuss is some of the ways that we can intervene in this, and they don't go into lots of detail about this. This is stuff that I'm gonna be addressing throughout the membership in quarter two, which runs from beginning of May through May, June, July. Um, but they basically clump them into emotional regulation skills and situational modifications. so this is either [00:20:00] learning to regulate our emotions in the sense of not generating such negative thoughts about the work we need to do, reducing the positive thoughts around the other stuff, but also around emotion tolerance. How do we allow ourselves to experience negative emotions and do the task anyway? And that's something that we work on in the membership all the time. And then the other element of is situational manipulation. If the main challenge is around distractions, we can do quite a lot by changing the way we set up where we work and how we work. Which of those are likely to be more useful for you will depend on what you've learned about yourself from the rest of this analysis.

If you are mostly driven by avoiding task aversiveness, you maybe need more of the emotional regulation. If you are mostly driven by situational temptations, you probably, in my opinion, need both.

This is why those of you who maybe have high [00:21:00] levels of anxiety, find your hard work difficult and think that that's a bad thing, worry that you're not good enough. Putting your phone in another room doesn't fix it, because if your driving force for procrastination is not wanting to experience those negative emotions, your phone being somewhere else is not gonna fix it for you.

 Whereas if you are somebody who, the temptation of your phone is a far greater driving factor than avoiding the work, that sort of basic situational modification is much more likely to be effective. 

Now, I said at the beginning that I was gonna add in some completely unscientific, but in my opinion, extremely useful extras to this. And that's where we've got to now. So the first one is, I think the point about conscientiousness is different in PhD students. So what they were saying was that people who are high in conscientiousness, so that kind of desire to do the right thing, were much less prone to procrastination and I think across most employment situations, and indeed undergraduate degrees, maybe even [00:22:00] masters.

That's probably true. And that's because in my opinion, at those levels, there is a manageable amount of work. It might feel like a lot, right? But it's finite, it's defined, it's quite well, you know, instructed all of those things. And so somebody who is conscientious can get it all done. What I have seen a lot with my clients and my past students in where when I was still supervising is that at PhD level conscientiousness can become completely unrealistic.

So what I often see is conscientious people who are used to being able to do it all. They're used to be able to tick all the boxes, you know, and by working hard, they just get it done kind of thing. Realize that at PhD there is no getting it done. There is no finish line where you've been conscientious enough and that can lead to procrastination. That sudden change to your sense of self where you're like, oh my goodness, being able to do all this is who I am. [00:23:00] I can't do all this. That level of negative emotion can really increase procrastination in my experience. So I if you are someone who identifies as being very conscientious. You are always trying to do the right thing, try and get things done. I want you to think about how that affects your procrastination. 

The second one, and I touched on this in my episode called eight Ways You're Secretly Procrastinating. So if you haven't listened to that, go check it out is that this paper focused a lot on pleasure as the distracting emotion. That you go and do something enjoyable. You chatter with a friend, you go online, whatever it is. In my experience, probably, particularly with conscientious people, it's not just about pleasure that distracts you. In my experience, it is tasks that make you feel organized, tasks that make you feel useful, that make you feel recognized, where you can see your progress. This is talking to any of you who clean to [00:24:00] procrastinate, who help other people to procrastinate, those sorts of tasks too. so if you are thinking, I do procrastinate, but I don't procrastinate by scrolling or eating or whatever, I just spend more time than I intended on my emails or helping other people or whatever. I want you to think, are you seeking the emotions associated with those other tasks? Feeling purposeful, feeling valued, all that good stuff, because I don't think this is just about pleasure. 

The third thing that I don't think they touch on is the shame people experience when they experience procrastination. So they had that A, B, C, the antecedents, the behavior, the consequence, that immediate consequence. And then there's this implied consequence of not completing the task, which it seemed, I don't wanna put words in their mouth 'cause they didn't say this explicitly, but it seemed was mostly focused on the kind of pragmatic things of being rushed, [00:25:00] not finishing a task, missing deadlines, all that sort of stuff.

I think there is also, and we know there is also an emotional consequence of procrastinating, if we allow ourselves to tell ourselves that we're terrible people, we're bad, we're lazy, we're useless if we procrastinate. And what I think that does is it contributes into the antecedents. So for me it becomes this spiral where you've had this immediate relief by procrastinating, which is positively or negatively reinforcing, whether it's the removal of the aversive thing or whether it's the giving you of the pleasurable thing.

But then after that. If you allow yourself to judge yourself, you then plunge into a really aversive set of emotions where you are feeling shame, embarrassment, frustration, annoyance, all that stuff. And I think that then also gets linked with the tasks. So I think it heightens that [00:26:00] task aversiveness. So I think there's two places this gets reinforced. It gets reinforced because you are having a pleasurable, or at least a neutral experience by procrastinating immediately. And then after that you are really increasing the task aversion, which then makes the temptations much more tempting. It makes the task aversion much more something you want to avoid. It is also exhausting. So it probably also that spiral that staying awake at night thinking you haven't done the right thing also probably adds to the lack of energy part as well. So I think that bit adds to, creates this much more steep rollercoaster. And the reason I emphasize that is because for me, that's the first bit we address. Everyone who comes to me, everyone who joins the membership wants me to like wave a magic wand and stop you procrastinating. I truly believe the first step is to get to [00:27:00] a stage where you still procrastinate, but you don't hate yourself for doing it. Because if you can get to a stage where you don't hate yourself for doing it and you're like, oh, well that's what everybody does, it's okay. I'll get back on. So much easier to start the task again. 'cause you haven't suddenly made it way more aversive by wrapping a load of shame and embarrassment and frustration around it, it's just not as big a deal. Much easier to find solutions. So we really work in that space as well as in the actual behavior change space.

My fourth and final point is for all of you who sit down intending to write, for example, as your kind of intended task, end up doing something else that was not writing, but was potentially useful. All those of you who call it like procrastivity and all that kind of stuff. Doing procrastination tasks that are actually something that needed doing, like clearing your inbox or whatever and then saying, okay, yeah, it's okay though because it, that stuff did need [00:28:00] doing okay. This is almost the opposite of the shaming. So some of you will go to, I'm terrible, I didn't do what I intended, da, da, da. Others will go, well, I didn't do what I intended, but you know what? It did need doing, and at least I was productive. And it's done now. And actually, you know what? I'll take that. And I don't wanna make you shame yourselves, but I also don't want you to let yourselves get away with that either, because I actually think it's really dangerous. When we intend to do one thing and we end up doing something else, but that that thing is in some way worthy or useful or whatever. You can really reinforce the procrastination behavior because you are actually praising yourself for it. You can make it way more okay in the future, that if something feels difficult or uncomfortable, you don't fancy it at the moment, oh, well do something different. I. Okay. I think it reinforces the pattern and I think you need to be really careful of it.

Now, that's not to say some of [00:29:00] you will remember, I did an episode a while back with Alison Miller of the Academic Writers Space, and she talked about working with the you that turns up. I am not saying that you shouldn't sometimes mindfully and intentionally change your intentions for a session. So let's say. You had intended to write this morning and you slept really badly last night. You haven't had your comments back from your supervisor, you thought you were gonna have, and you go, you know what? I am not in the head space for this. This is not a useful thing. I could maybe make a little bit of progress, but actually I think I'll be better off waiting. Instead I'm gonna do this other useful thing. That's not procrastination, that's strategic delay. As long as you there in the moment, like, and like approve of your decision to change it. And you then stand by that in the future. That's strategic delay. [00:30:00] 

If, however, you kind of don't really make that decision, but you just go, oh, I'm just gonna check my emails to warm up a bit, give my brain in gear, and then oopsies.

Two hours later, I've still been doing my emails and I haven't written anything. That's procrastination. Even if you did useful stuff and by rewarding yourself for it and telling yourself it was okay, you make it much more likely you'll do it again in the future. so again, that's something that we work on in the membership is how you can tell the difference between making a strategic decision to change your intentions versus just procrastinating by doing something else that seems vaguely useful.

So hopefully by listening to today, you have a much better idea about why you specifically procrastinate, what that procrastination specifically looks like for you, and what immediate benefits you get from doing it. If you want that deeper analysis of it, you want to really understand, make sure you're on my wait [00:31:00] list and you'll get the freebie that will support you to do it.

In the membership next quarter, we are gonna be working on this in much more detail, so with this insight, you will be perfectly placed to really change this behavior going forward and be able to achieve the goals that you want.

If you have any questions about the membership, you can always message me through the website or DM me on Instagram. I'm at the PhD life coach.

I will give brief shout outs about the membership in all of the Monday newsletters for anyone who's on the newsletter. But if you want the more detailed stuff and all the freebies gotta be on the wait list. Uh, the membership opens on Monday the 28th of April, and the new quarter starts at the beginning of May.

If you join on the Monday though then you'll be in for an extra week, and so you'll have access to all the sessions and workshops that week too, so you get a little added bonus if you join early. Wait list members might even get an opportunity to join a little earlier. Just saying thank you all so much for listening, and [00:32:00] I'll see you next week.

Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you like this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at the PhD life coach com.

You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics time.