Anyone who keeps putting off important work does not necessarily have to be lazy. This behavior may be due to a lack of impulse control. Such people are easily distracted, sometimes because their brains have learned that putting off tasks makes them happier than completing them. Every fifth professional procrastinates, does not do what is important. Answering every inquiry immediately is just as wrong, says business psychologist Florian Becker. The professor of organizational psychology advises prioritizing tasks. This helps twice: against procrastinating and also against purely reactive behavior.
For jobs and job offers in the IT industry, see also the job market on heise online:
How true is the often quoted saying: Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today?
When we look at the effects of procrastinating, there’s a lot of truth in that admonition. After all, delaying important tasks for no reason leads to feelings of guilt, worry and stress, because you know that it is not right to unnecessarily delay the start of a project with a deadline, for example.
What is the consequence of postponing and avoiding tasks?
One bad feeling. Procrastination also has harsh consequences. Studies show that people who constantly put off work are less successful at work because they perform less and therefore ultimately earn less.
Distractions with social media
Procrastination harms people, many know that. So why do they keep deliberately avoiding important tasks?
Most of the time we postpone unpleasant tasks that are not fun but still have to be done. This knowledge puts pressure on us and leads to a vicious circle: our brain learns that it can numb that pressure by distracting it with another task that promises immediate success. Tidy your desk – and it’s tidy. A post on social media – it immediately leads to likes. These successes release reward substances in the brain and it learns a dysfunctional behavior pattern: When pressure arises, then distract yourself with trivial things. Procrastinators have become accustomed to such behavior. Pseudo successes keep them from the essentials. That is her problem
Which type of person is prone to procrastination, which type is immune?
Younger people are more affected by procrastination than older people. Half of the students suffer because they don’t start learning in time and find it difficult to motivate themselves. 50 percent is a really big number. In the course of their lives, however, people develop strategies for dealing with certain situations. Therefore, procrastination decreases with age. People with poor impulse control are also at risk. Such persons are unable to control their needs of the moment, even though they know that they are harmful to them. Control always means sacrificing something in the moment to gain something in the future. Self-discipline is difficult but necessary, even against procrastination. About one in five adults suffer from severe procrastination to the point of being unable to act. In addition, people with mental health problems such as depressed moods are more at risk than others.
Higher risk of procrastination for highly qualified employees
Are there professional groups that suffer particularly often from procrastination?
Anyone who sits at the welcome sources of distraction – that is computers, mobile phones, the Internet – is constantly exposed to the risk of being distracted. Assembly line work tends to exclude that. The more independent and highly qualified the work, the greater the risk of procrastination. Many interrupt their work themselves: they read e-mails when they should be doing something else. They look at what’s going on on social media and on their smartphones. Knowledge workers are interrupted in their work every four minutes, mostly from within. As a result, they lose more than two hours of working time per day.
At what point is moving dangerous?
A subjective quantity is the point at which sufferers suffer and feel uncomfortable. Viewed objectively, it is reached when someone is no longer able to act at work, for example when they miss deadlines. Anyone who regularly finds it difficult to start an important task on time, who starts but then stops, or who delivers by halves, should know that these are alarm signs that procrastination wants to dominate their everyday life.
How can displacement for vulnerable people be avoided? Please give three tips.
First. Turn off anything that can distract you. Disable pop-up messages on the computer, define fixed times when e-mails are read, put the cell phone out of sight and put it on silent. Second: Discard false beliefs. Anyone who says they work best under pressure has a dysfunctional belief that leads to a late start. This is procrastination. And third: just start. This is a trivial, but effective instrument against procrastination, because whoever starts something usually continues.
Back to the beginning of our conversation: Is it easier for those who always do everything immediately, i.e. don’t put anything off until tomorrow?
no just do everything that comes up immediately – that’s not a good approach either. The right thing to do is to prioritize, to consciously say no once in a while or to push unimportant things to the back. Taking a meaningful rest break instead of posting an unimportant message. Or to think carefully about what you are doing before you start. All of this is not procrastination. Anyone who always does everything immediately is purely reactive, externally determined and no longer gets to do the things that are really important. This is just as harmful as procrastinating.
(axk)
