Introduction
This is the inaugural post in a new series, in which I will explore the ideas behind each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. The concept for this series arose as I was writing the book. With each exercise, I found that I there were materials that I really wished I could have incorporated into the book. But most of these materials existed on-line. And to my mind there’s just no good way to incorporate on-line materials into a physical book. So, rather than sprinkle the pages of the book with a bunch of web addresses, I decided to supplement the book with a series of blog posts in which I can link directly to on-line material. These posts will undoubtedly vary in their narrative coherence. Some will be short essays. Some will take the form of a list. All will include links to the additional reading (or listening) references which appear at the end of each exercise.
If you haven’t yet read the book, you won’t have all of the information you need to place the material in these posts in context. Even so, you should find some interesting and entertaining things here. My hope is that you’ll find the information in these posts both fun and helpful as supplements to the book. I would like for this to be a dynamic project and a conversation, so I’m also hoping that readers will suggest additional on-line materials and will provide links in the comments section. My plan is to post an entry about a new exercise about once a week.
The roots of this exercise and the concepts behind it
Procrastinate was the very first exercise I wrote for the book, and it is one of the exercises which is most directly drawn from traditional psychotherapeutic techniques. It is an example of “prescribing the symptom” (a concept which I discuss elsewhere in the book), a technique which is meant to put the patient into a therapeutic double bind. The beauty of a well-executed double-bind is that it creates a situation in which every outcome is positive. When you are instructed to perform a “negative” behavior such as procrastination, you have two choices: you can follow the instruction or you can disobey. If you disobey you win, because you have overcome your procrastination. If you follow the instructions you also win, because you have transformed the act of procrastination into a conscious choice, thus demonstrating the power that you have over your own behavior.
This technique is most useful in situations where we feel powerless..or rather, where we aren’t acknowledging the power that we have. It works by giving us access to the part of ourselves that is making the choice to engage in the behavior. It’s a technique which, to the best of my knowledge, was developed by Milton Erickson, whom you can see at work in this video:
Erickson made use of small variations in habitual behaviors as leverage for larger change. In my exercise, the goal is slightly different. I want the reader to experience the “negative” behavior of procrastination as a conscious choice. The larger goal for me (as it is in all of the exercises in the book) is to enhance your “observing ego,” so that you have a greater ability to observe the workings of your own mind.
Another example of a therapeutic double bind
Recently a patient was describing to me how she frequently found herself doing things for other people that she really didn’t want to do. She was puzzled by why she kept doing this. I had her walk through one specific example of this behavior, in as much detail as she could. She described a recurring scenario in which her husband would ask her to do something that he was perfectly capable of doing for himself (“honey, would answer the phone, it might be my boss calling”). When this happened, she had a distinct emotional reaction: an initial flare of anger, followed quickly by an emotional damping down and a cognitive rationalization (“don’t make him get mad at me”). Then she proceeded to resentfully do what he asked.
I instructed her to keep doing exactly what she had been doing over the next week. But to observe herself as she engaged in that behavior. And each time she observed herself repeating this pattern, I told her to say to herself, calmly and without judgment: “I am choosing to do something that I don’t want to do.”
When she came in for her next session, something had shifted. She didn’t feel helpless anymore in the face of her husband’s intimidating demands. In fact, she confessed, she’d disobeyed my instructions by starting to tell him to answer the phone for himself.
The technique worked because rather than trying to force her behavior to change it created a sort of cognitive dissonance in her own self-awareness. She was forced into a more mindful state about her own behavior. Being able to observe herself in this manner gave her the room to start making different decisions. By failing, she found success.
Etymology
The word “procrastinate” is rooted in the Latin verb that literally means in favor of (pro) tomorrow (cras). I find this interesting because, offhand, I can’t think of another English word that has the Latin root “cras” with this meaning. (If you know of one, please leave it in the comments.) There’s a nice explanation of the etymology at Word Power.
Procrastination: the traditional view
Here’s Ellen DeGeneres, with your basic stand-up comedy riff on procrastination:
Here’s an animated version of the same theme:
There are a few million variations on this theme. Procrastination is a universal experience, but the way we usually think about it isn’t particularly complex. The joke is simply that we humans keep hitting our head against the same wall, over and over again. We try to overcome our weakness, but after a few seconds we succumb.
Traditional techniques for fighting procrastination
Just as humor about procrastination tends to hit a single note over and over again, traditional advice for over-coming procrastination tends to try to stare down our resistance to getting things done by using strategies aimed at forcing our behavior to change, as evidenced in instructional videos like these:
And you’ll find similar advice on sites like these:
The idea, as I see it, is that you can change your behavior by forcing your behavior to change. But as those who have read The Next Ten Minutes will be aware, I’m not a big believer in this approach. I actually to think that trying to keep yourself from procrastinating is a fool’s errand. If you try to engage it in hand-to-hand combat, it’s not going to go well. In fact, you might actually wind up strengthening the very behavior you’re attempting to suppress.
Meditation on procrastination
That’s a lot of carping about the unhelpful ways that people try to help us with procrastination. But there are also some people out there who think about procrastination in really interesting ways. For instance, I rather like this approach to “structured” procrastination because it attempts to make use of the inevitability of procrastination rather than trying to defeat it outright:
And this is a wonderful piece which looks at the psychological mechanisms underlying procrastination, leading us to think differently about how our minds are working when we’re in the process of procrastinating:
Finally ,here’s another very good essay on the psychology of procrastination, which gets you thinking differently about the whole subject, and which might just inspire you to get some really important things done:
Procrastination songs
In my fantasy about this series I have a theme song for each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. But I’m off to a bad start because I honestly cannot think of many hit songs about procrastination. Some people have suggested John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels,” but that’s not really about procrastination. It’s about detachment. The best procrastination songs I can find are home-made, like the one below. (If you can think of any good songs about procrastination, please list them in the comments.)
Half-assed procrastination
One more thought. In one of the variations on this exercise in the book I ask readers to do something that they’ve been putting off, but to do it without enthusiasm. I challenge readers to see if they can mindfully do a half-assed job on something. It’s a challenge because usually when we do a half-assed job on something it’s a sort of semi-conscious protest.
This variation relates to an idea that has been bouncing around in my head for a long time, one which informs the entire book. I believe that we often discount the value of positive behaviors which we perform poorly or inconsistently. I’ve thought about this a great deal in regards to my own meditation practice….or lack thereof. I know that I am an extremely inconsistent meditator. What I’ve found though, is that this awareness of how poorly I meditate tends to keep me from meditating at all. In writing The Next Ten Minutes I attempted to turn this idea on its head. Because I truly believe that even meditation practices that are done poorly and without much commitment are beneficial. And I believe that giving ourselves permission to practice meditation in a half-assed manner is a great way to build a micro-meditation practice into our daily lives. Rather than telling ourselves that we are failing because we can’t focus on our breath for more than a few seconds, why not build a practice whose goal is to make the most of those few seconds that you can meditate?
Toward that end, I created the League of Half-Assed Meditators, which now has its own page on Facebook. When I come across articles or research supporting the benefits of “micro-meditation,” I link to them there. If you too believe that taking a single, focused breath can make a positive difference in your day, then I encourage you to join the group.
Further reading
The individual reading references for this exercise are:
You can find an Amazon list of references for this exercise here. The find a full set of lists for every exercise here. And if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, I’d love to hear them. Please leave them in a comment.
Open questions
Finally, a few question for discussion:
- What is the most effective tool you’ve ever found to distract yourself from a task that you know you should be doing? Or, to give the question a more sinister twist: if you were a secret agent whose task was to keep your enemies from being able to concentrate on their work…what program or website would you sneak onto their computer to achieve your goal?
- And what are your ideas for further variations on the basic procrastination exercise?
Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Relax Your Face – here.
