How Procrastination Can Be Symptomatic Of Deeper Fundamental Troubles

When faced with an unpleasant or daunting task, either in personal or professional activities, many people can be tempted to procrastinate. Some procrastination takes the form of dismissing the unpleasant task as something to be done later and then putting it out of mind. At other times, procrastination occurs by wasting one’s time with meaningless pursuits, games and amusements. To complicate matters, not every form of procrastination can be easily dismissed as purely wasted time. For business people and office workers who handle a variety of related tasks every day, certain types of work can actually function as a tool for procrastination. In some cases, tasks that are smaller, simpler, or that might easily be delegated to an intern are used as a diversion from important, complicated, intimidating tasks.

Implications For Time-Management and Prioritizing Skills

In order to work effectively, people need the ability to budget their time. In the typical professional environment, people are given more work than they can realistically handle within normal working hours. Even people with a reasonable workload could improve their business prospects by taking on additional tasks or taking time to make aspects of their work more efficient. For all of these reasons, it is extremely important to be able to manage one’s time successfully. Effective time management takes the ability to weigh the amount of time free against the tasks that need to be actioned and to decide on a schedule for completing the undertakings. Unfortunately, procrastination interferes with the ability to budget time by inflating the amount of time needed to reach a certain milestone or level of completion. For this reason, repeated procrastination can be seen as a sign that an individual lacks the ability to set his or her own time management goals or lacks the discipline to adhere to those goals.

In situations where multitasking is required, procrastination could also be a sign of failure to properly organize priorities. Allowing trivial tasks to take time and energy away from more important goals indicates either an inability to recognize the most important tasks or a lack of concern about whether the most important goals are accomplished in a timely fashion. However, a failure to prioritize might not be entirely the procrastinator’s fault. An employee who does not have enough information to form an overall picture of his or her employer’s goals might not have the perspective to prioritize effectively and might therefore end up wasting time on trivial goals believing that they are important.

It should be remembered that, while occasional procrastination might signal some sort of underlying problem, it is not necessarily a sign of a character flaw or skill deficit. For example, a lack of motivation due to a real or perceived shortcoming in the reward for good time management could be at the root of procrastination.  One example of this might be a work environment in which an employee receives the same compensation regardless of whether his or her deadlines are met. This could result from a poor performer realizing that procrastination is routinely tolerated, but it could also result from a high performer perceiving that outstanding time management is never rewarded. In a work environment, instances of procrastination can reveal overall communication and employee relations issues as well as the underlying issues of individual employees.

Procrastination Emerges As A Problem For Many People

The difficulty of certain tasks often provokes a desire to delay or otherwise waste time before getting down to business. These impulse to procrastinate can impact people’s lives as an occasional temptation or as a nearly overwhelming habit, depending on the temperament of the individual.

In three particular areas of activity, namely college, business enterprise and home life, procrastination can give an especially detrimental effect. A closer look at the inherent factors for procrastination in each of these settings can help illuminate a few of the influences in the decision to procrastinate.

For many students, procrastination emerges as a significant problem during the first years of college. The college procrastinator is frequently an individual who, for one of several possible reasons, did not learn effective time management strategies during high school. Often accustomed to senior high school assignments that are strictly short or that have been broken down into a series of smaller assignments by the high school instructors, the college procrastinator is at a loss to adjust to college’s long term assignments. In some cases, the college procrastinator underestimates the difficulty of a term paper or end-of-semester project because the professor does not constantly remind the class about the upcoming deadline.

For this reason, the difficulties faced by the college procrastinator could be seen as a failure to adjust from a structured, orderly learning environment into an environment where independent time management skills are indispensable. When the need for discipline and organization has been recognized, a few simple tools, such as a day planner, may aid the college procrastinator organize a self-structured series of goals and deadlines for long-term assignments.

Whereas the college procrastinator might put off a hard assignment by playing computer games or socializing, the business procrastinator is frequently more subtle in his or her strategy. Rather than engaging in insignificant amusements, which might be reprimanded if discovered, the business procrastinator often wastes time on activities that is in fact part or his or her job description but that are not the most meaningful tasks at the moment.

In some cases, a deficiency of confidence in the ability to successfully complete challenging assignments compels the business procrastinator to pursue leisurely, straightforward minor tasks. In other situations, an inability to separate between high- and low-priority assignments causes the business procrastinator to perceive that the uncomplicated tasks are just as essential as the complicated ones, leaving the business postponer no reason to pursue the more troublesome tasks.

To redress this circumstance, the business procrastinator first must determine to recognize which projects have the most potential to impact the success of the business itself and to bear upon the course of business in the long term. Once this has been executed, the business procrastinator can break up long-term, complex chores into a series of manageable deadlines so that they are not quite so intense.

Instead of being unable to face a deadline, the home-life procrastinator is ofttimes uncomfortable with the perpetual nature of daily home-related tasks. Yard work, home repairs, cleaning and meal preparation can completely assume the uninspiring role of regular inconveniences in a person’s life. As unfinished chores accumulate over time, the home-life procrastinator begins to feel the pressure of house work intruding on the joys of everyday life.

To counter this situation, a specified time should be set aside each week to schedule a reasonable number of weekly chores. By naming which tasks should be accomplished on which day, the home-life procrastinator can gain control over the amount of work. And by confining certain tasks to certain hours, the procrastinator can stop feeling at fault about any unfinished chores provided that he or she has achieved the jobs set aside for the present day.

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