Because procrastination often results from anxiety, attempts to overcome procrastination by better application of time management techniques often fail. Virtually every approach to time management I have ever come across works beautifully as long as you consistently apply its principles. The problem is getting yourself to use the principles consistently: the barriers to doing so are almost always emotional rather than intellectual or external.
Procrastination allows us to avoid the anxious feelings we experience when doing certain tasks or facing certain problems. Our emotional "reasoning" tells us that we can avoid unpleasant feelings of anxiety by avoiding the activities that stimulate these feelings. But our emotional reasoning is short sighted; in the long run, continued procrastination increases our anxiety and can make relatively small tasks or problems into crises or disasters. Consider the case of Shelley, who had a strong tendency to put off paying bills.
When she lost her job, Shelley's inclination to procrastinate on bill paying became even stronger than it had been while she was employed. When she had a demanding job, she told herself that she neglected bill paying because she had little time for personal chores. When she became unemployed, this excuse became untenable. Even with plenty of time, she procrastinated; in fact, her procrastination became more pronounced. It became so pronounced that her gas and electric service was terminated, and the provider required her to pay a fee for resumption as well as to supply a substantial cash deposit.
What would have been a fairly simple task paying monthly bills became a crisis demanding a great deal of time, energy, and money to resolve. In putting off payment of bills, Shelley had been avoiding the guilt and anxiety she felt toward the issue of managing her personal finances. An experienced and effective businesswoman, she thought she should handle her personal finances in a more business like manner that she should formulate a monthly budget, that she should put aside a fixed amount each month for investment, and that she should become more familiar with her investment options and their tax implications.
Bill paying reminded her of her failure to meet her own performance standards, so she procrastinated: if she put off paying bills until the last possible moment, she was forced to pay them as quickly as possible, leaving no time to address longer term issues of personal finance. When she lost her job, she rebuked herself even more strongly for not having managed her finances effectively while employed, and she became more anxious about her current financial situation. Thus, her motivation to procrastinate became stronger, even though she had more time.
Shelley's experience exemplifies several characteristics of the procrastination response to anxiety. First, anxiety caused procrastination often looks and feels like lack of time or laziness when it is in fact neither. Second, self rebuke rarely motivates a procrastinator to stop putting off a task. Instead, it tends to increase performance anxiety and guilt, which often caused the procrastination to begin with. Third, procrastination can be part of a vicious cycle that starts with anxiety, moves on to poor performance due to anxiety caused procrastination, which lowers self esteem and increases performance anxiety, which in turn increases the inclination to procrastinate, resulting in worse performance, and so on. Fourth, procrastination has a tendency to spread to activities only peripherally related to the task, situation, or problem that originally generates the anxiety. There is no necessary connection between paying bills on time and managing one's finances more actively, but paying bills can remind one of the issue of managing personal finances and thus become a target of procrastination.
To further complicate matters, procrastination is not always bad. Sometimes it signals an un readiness to deal with a task and gives us the time we need to prepare ourselves for completing the task successfully. Many writers, for example, will "block" at points when they don't know what they want to say next. Their blocks force them to delay writing, giving them time to do more research and thinking, which helps them determine what they want to say and allows them to overcome their blocks. At other times, putting off a task reflects a rational organization of priorities. If you put off paying bills on Friday evening because a dear friend will be in town for only that evening, your procrastination represents a reasonable decision to delay your bill paying in order to take advantage of a rare opportunity.
The first step in dealing with procrastination is to explore its possible causes and to look for behavioral patterns. If you occasionally delay your bill paying a day or two because more pressing matters arise, your procrastination is not a problem. But if you put off paying bills until you get threatening letters and phone calls month after month, your procrastination is a potentially serious problem. Not all patterns of procrastination, however, are as easy to detect as in this example because many do not have such obvious and dramatic consequences.
To identify self defeating patterns of anxiety driven procrastination during your job search, start keeping track of what you have done each day and compare your "Have done" lists with your "To do" lists. Begin each day's work with a planning session: list and rank in order of importance the things you hope to accomplish that day. At the end of the day, list the tasks you have worked on or completed.
Do not simply check off items on your to do list. Tasks often turn out to be more time consuming and complex than we anticipate when listing what we want to do, so checking off items may not accurately reflect what you have accomplished. Bill paying again supplies a good example. In the course of paying monthly bills, which may normally take less than an hour, you may discover a possible billing error. You will then have to check your records to verify your suspicions, after which you may have to spend time on the phone to straighten out the bill with the organization that produced it. Finally, you may need to write a letter to accompany your payment. But before you send it, you may decide to get a photocopy for your own records. So, now you must make a trip to the closest photo copying machine. By the time you complete your bill paying, you may have spent considerably more time than you anticipated, but you will also have done a good bit more work. This additional work will not be reflected by a simple check next to "pay bills" on your to do list.
Save your lists, and after a week or two, look for patterns of procrastination by comparing your to do's with your have done. If you find that you consistently fail to complete certain kinds of tasks while generally completing other kinds, it's time to suspect yourself of anxiety driven procrastination. Suppose, for example, that you do a load of laundry each time "do laundry" appears on your list, but that you carry on your list "write follow up note to Mr. X" from one day to the next for over a week.
Chances are that you feel uncomfortable about writing to Mr. X or about composing follow up letters after interviews or about writing letters in general.
