Why Procrastination Doesn't Need A CureAnd Might Even Make You More ProductiveIs wasting time as productivity killing as we've always thought, or does it provide a creativity-enhancing escape from the chaos of the world? Stop dawdling and let's explore!By Belle Beth Cooper Editor's Note: This story contains one of our 11 New Years resolutions you can actually keep in 2014. For the full list, click here.Recently, I read a great book and promised to mail it to a friend overseas when I was done, about nine months ago. Today, I finally wandered down to the post office and mailed it, because the alternative was working on this blog post. This is classic procrastination at work.If youve noticed yourself doing this as well, you might have explored "cures" for procrastination, or tips to improve your productivity. Ill admit, Ive spent many hours procrastinating by exploring these very things. And weve even written a huge amount about these topics on here.

Somehow, the irony of wasting time reading about how to not waste time is never enough to get me moving.The interesting thing about procrastination is that we generally equate it with "being lazy" or "wasting time," and thus see it as a very negative traitone to be fixed or avoided. A New Yorker article explained how detrimental procrastination can be, psychologically:The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesnt make people happy.One study on procrastination showed that 65% of the students surveyed knew that procrastination would make them unhappy and wished to avoid it. It might be, however, that procrastinating can actually help us get more doneat least more of the important things. Lets take a look at how procrastination really works, and why it might not be so bad, after all.Why we procrastinateThe science of procrastination shows that it comes from two forces battling against each other in our brains. One is the limbic system, which is the "unconscious zone that includes the pleasure center." The other is the prefrontal cortex, often known as the "internal planner." So the limbic system fights for short-term pleasure, i.e. what we want right now, while the prefrontal cortex fights for whats best for us in the long run.According to Timothy A. Pychyl Ph.D., author of The Procrastinators Digest: A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, the prefrontal cortex is the portion of our brains that really separates us from animals, who are "just controlled by stimulus." Unfortunately, theres nothing automatic about this newer, weaker area of our brains. Unlike the limbic system, we really need to consciously kick it into gear to get things done.The limbic system, on the other hand, will take over as soon as were not consciously pushing forward on a task and make us give in to what feels goodi.e. procrastinating.So our procrastination effectively comes down to our biology. In fact, the economist George Ainslie even said that procrastination "could well be called the basic impulse."Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham has seen more than his fair share of procrastinators. He even says that the most impressive people he knows are all ["terrible procrastinators]." Paul has a couple of theories about why we procrastinate. One looks at the disconnect between working on important projects and the rewards we receive for finishing them:If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.Secondly, Paul points to the fear that comes with working on big, important projects:Big problems are terrifying. Theres an almost physical pain in facing them.Youve probably come across this before. Its what happens when we want to take on an ambitious project, and we suddenly find all manner of unavoidable obstacles in our way. When running errands takes up so much time that we cant even begin to write our novel, its often because fear is holding us back and our limbic system is taking overprotecting us from the unpleasantness that is fear, and taking us toward the familiar buzz of "getting things done" that meaningless errands can give us.Paul GrahamJames Surowiecki explained in the New Yorker that many procrastinators are self-handicappers: "rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle."Why procrastination doesnt need a cureIts true that most of us see procrastination as a bad thing, and its not difficult to find hundreds of articles or books telling us how to cure or overcome this flaw. But as Paul Graham says, strictly speaking, its impossible to cure procrastination:No matter what you work on, youre not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.Paul breaks down procrastination into three variants, depending on what you do instead of doing your work:1. You do nothing.2. You do something less important.3. You do something more important.Its easy to see how type three procrastination can actually be really beneficial to us. Instead of running errands, writing emails or doing housework, we could be focusing on our most important work.On the other hand, John Perry, a Professor Emeritus at Stanford, wrote in the Huffington Post that type two procrastination can lead to us producing better work when we get around to it. He said that since many procrastinators are perfectionists who dream of doing a perfect job of those most important tasks, putting them off can be beneficial:Leaving it till the last minute is a way of giving oneself permission to do a merely adequate job. Ninety-nine percent of the time a merely adequate job is all that is needed.Another benefit of type two procrastination thats sometimes pointed out is that we often have tasks to do that are not really important. By putting them off, theyll disappear eventually anyway, and well save ourselves from doing unimportant work. Ill let you decide whether you want to test this theory, though!Good procrastinationSo if we want to harness our procrastination into a positive trait, there are a couple of theories about how we can do this. The first is Paul Grahams idea of type three procrastination, or "good" procrastination.This is when we procrastinate on unimportant tasks, for instance errands or "busy work" so we can spend more time on our most important work. If I had worked on this post instead of going to the post office, that would be a good example.Errands is a particular type of distraction that Paul advocates for procrastinating against:Theres more to do than anyone could. So someone doing the best work they can is inevitably going to leave a lot of errands undone. It seems a mistake to feel bad about that.Theres an important reason that leaving busy work undone is useful for getting big projects done. Our important projects usually require two things that errands or busy work dont: large amounts of time, and being in the right mood. When were inspired to work on something important, it would be a mistake to waste that inspiration on getting unimportant tasks done, because we think we should. Channeling our energy into our big projects whenever we can might mean we dont keep up with household chores and smaller tasks, but perhaps Paul is right that this is a good thing.Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and youll leave the right things undone.John PerryStructured procrastinationThe other side of the "positive procrastination" coin is the theory of structured procrastination, which John Perry advocates as being the best way to channel natural procrastination tendencies into productivity. As he explains it, structured procrastination is:an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time.Structured procrastination is essentially type two procrastination, as mentioned above, although the art of tricking ourselves about the importance of our tasks comes into play as well. The idea is that while we think we are working on less important tasks as a way to avoid the big projects we should be doing, we are in fact tricking ourselves into working on our most important projects after all.The practice exploits the fact that we generally list our tasks by order of importance. More urgent or important tasks sit at the top of our to-do lists, although many other important tasks will also be listed. Natural procrastinators will usually avoid those important and difficult (or fear-inducing) tasks at the top of the list in favor of easier, smaller tasks further down.In this way, type two procrastinators can in fact get a lot done, so long as it helps us to avoid those big projects we think we should be doing.In 1930, Robert Benchley wrote this appropriate quote:The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isnt the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.What makes this strategy productive, however, is when we twist it to our advantage. By adding tasks to our to-do lists that seem urgent or important, but actually arent, we can trick ourselves into doing things that really need to be done, since we think were procrastinating on bigger tasks.Piers Steel, a psychologist at the University of Calgary pointed out that many procrastinators are already good at the kind of self-deception needed to wrangle our procrastination skills into useful habits:Productive procrastination is a bit of make-believe, along the lines of setting your watch five minutes fast. You know you did it, but you still pretend you didnt.How to make procrastination work for youIf youre a chronic procrastinator like me, here are some strategies to pull your procrastinating into line and get more done.Start smallPaul Graham makes a good point that working on our biggest, most important projects can be so scary and overwhelming that we sometimes need to work up to it. He suggests working on small tasks that can grow into big projects, or starting small and working up to larger tasks. We can also collaborate with others so that our part is smaller than the whole project, but we still have a hand in doing important work.Adjust your to-do listUsing John Perrys structured procrastination strategy, try adding tasks to the top of your list that seem to have urgent deadlines or to be incredibly important, but in fact can either be safely put off until later or not done at all. The tricky part is getting yourself to believe that these tasks are important and difficult, so that youll complete other tasks on your list in order to avoid them.Weve also talked before about the best ways to create a meaningful to do list, which might be a good place to start.Raymond ChandlerIf you can successfully implement this strategy, youll be well on your way to getting more done and being a productive procrastinator!Set boundariesNovelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler understood his own procrastination tendencies and used boundaries to help himself get work done. He used to force himself to write by setting aside writing time every day and ensuring he followed two basic rules:1. You dont have to write.2. You cant do anything else.In order to avoid the tedium of sitting idle for four hours per day, he became a highly productive writer.He explained how this same strategy applies to children in schools:If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored.Weve explored before in our scientific guide to saying "no" how important it is to be able to prioritize relentlessly.Increase your commitmentsAccording to John Perry, procrastinators often try to reduce their commitments, hoping that with fewer things to do, theyll actually get more done. John explained, however, that this removes the procrastinators most important source of motivation by removing any choice between important and unimportant tasks. With only a few tasks on your to-do list, you can only procrastinate by doing nothing:This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.So the lesson of all this research seems to be that procrastination is not uncommon, nor is it necessarily a bad thing. In learning to wrangle our tendencies to procrastinate, we can effectively get more done.What are your procrastonation habits like? Have you found a good way to overcome them? Let us know in the comments.If you enjoyed this article you might also like "The surprising history of the to-do list and how to design one that actually works" and "A scientific guide to saying "no": How to avoid temptation and distraction"Image credits: GrowHack, Mother Nature Network, Venture GalleriesBelle Beth Cooper is a Content Crafter at Buffer and Co-founder of Hello Code. Follow her on Twitter at @BelleBethCooper.This post originally appeared on Buffer, and is reprinted with permission. [Image: Flickr user Zaqi]

SURSA: http://www.fastcompany.com/3021253/work-smart/why-procrastination-doesnt-need-a-cure-and-might-even-make-you-more-productive

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