Some more thoughts on procrastination. In my last blog post, I said that I thought that procrastination was the result of some irrational beliefs- but not the beliefs that people usually pointed to when they talked about procrastination. This lead me to think about how people decide to do various things, and how this might play into procrastination issues. Generally speaking I think the action decision equation goes something like this: If current pain + future pain > future gain, don’t do it! To be more precise I think that current pain should be read as ‘currently anticipated pain’.
Now, where I think the cognitive distortions come into play is in the evaluation of this equation. I’ve already said that I think that future pain might be rated as being very high (a.k.a. severe punishment!) by procrastinators. I also think, if there is some “pay attention to the negative, ignore the positive” cognitive distortion going on, future gain might be rated as low (or perhaps even non-existent). What’s more, I think there could be a few things going on with respect to the anticipated current pain, as well. First, I think it is probably that procrastinators (myself included) over-estimate the amount of pain and unpleasantness involved in the current endeavour. Second, perhaps we are somewhat intolerant of discomfort, which could also lead to a higher ranking of the immediately anticipated pain.
So, when I look at all of that, I might
ask myself why I ever
end up doing any projects at all! I think this might be explained by
adjusting the equation somewhat to read: If future pain of doing task +
current pain of doing task > future gain of doing task + future pain of
not doing task, don’t do task. In my case, as the deadline approaches, the
anticipated future pain of NOT doing the task seems to loom larger and
larger. Eventually, usually about 12 hours before the deadline, the right
side of the equation begins to out balance the left, and I start to do the
task.
I’m not sure why it doesn’t out balance the right hand side at the
beginning of the situation mind you- maybe the painful
anticipation of the bad
outcome only increases over time, and that eventually outweighs
the current pain of doing the task all together. Maybe.
posted at 22:52 on Mon, 10 Apr, 2006 |
path: /living
All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.