How To Stop Procrastinating: 4 New Steps Backed By Research

When people make hard tasks into habits, it tends to use less willpower. You’re thinking about it less. Think about brushing your teeth. Anyone who has children knows that getting your kids to brush their teeth is like fighting demons. Everything about it is hard. When you think about it, it’s not hard for us as adults to brush our teeth. The reason why is because as that behavior becomes a habit, it requires less and less willpower. It starts drawing on different parts of the brain than the prefrontal cortex where decision-making occurs and activities that require willpower occurs. That’s the lesson. If there are some things that are hard to do, that you want to make them more automatic and less demanding of willpower, then by deliberately making them into habits, by paying attention to cues and rewards, you gain a strength over how to influence that.

One way to use habits to fight procrastination is to develop a habitualized response to starting. When people talk about procrastination, what they’re usually actually talking about is the first step. In general, if people can habitualize that first step, it makes it a lot easier.

For instance, I’m going to set a timer for five minutes. I’m going to surf the web for five minutes. As soon as the timer goes off, I’m going to do “X”. Whatever “X” is, for the first step. One of the things that’s important, is to recognize that you can’t simply extinguish this craving for entertainment or novelty — the things that drive procrastination. Instead, what you need to do, is you need to indulge that craving but indulge it in such a way that the recovery is very easy. Pete Gollwitzer calls this “Implementation Intentions.” He says, “Let yourself procrastinate for five minutes but set the timer. As soon as the beeper goes off, you know that you’re immediately going to start writing the memo or start answering emails.” The lesson there is, “Don’t just try and power through not procrastinating.” Instead, come up with a plan where you allow yourself to indulge this craving you have, which isn’t going to go away, but do it so the recovery is encapsulated.

What we studied in this project was whether these rituals are really of beneficial effect in terms of bringing you confidence and potentially impacting your performance positively. That is actually what we found. What is interesting about the studies is that we also have physiological measures. What we find is that if you engage in a ritual prior to a potentially high anxiety task, like singing in public or solving difficult math problems, you end up being calmer by the time you approach the task, and more confident in what you’re about to do. As a result of that, you actually perform better.

There’s this fundamental finding in science that some habits seem to matter more than others. When researchers look at how people change their habitual behaviors, they find when some changes occur, it seems to set off a chain reaction that causes other patterns to change as well. For some people, exercise is a good example of this. When you start exercising habitually, according to studies, you start eating more healthfully. That makes sense. You start feeling good about your body. For many people, when they start exercising, they stop using their credit cards quite so often. They procrastinate less at work. They do their dishes earlier in the day. It seems to be evidence that for many people, exercise is a keystone habit. Once you start to change your exercise habits, it sets off a chain reaction that changes other habits as well.

The power of a keystone habit draws from its ability to change your self image. Basically, anything can become a keystone habit if it has this power to make you see yourself in a different way.

The research shows that every habit has three components. There’s the cue, which is a trigger for an automatic behavior to start. Then, a routine, which is the behavior itself. Finally, a reward. The reward is really important because that’s how your brain essentially learns to latch onto a particular pattern and make it automatic. Chocolate, after running, is an obvious example of a reward that many people enjoy. It doesn’t have to be chocolate. What matters is that if you want to make a behavior into a habit, you need to give yourself something you enjoy as soon as that behavior is done. It could be a piece of chocolate. It could be having a smoothie. It could be relaxing for 15 minutes and taking a nice shower. What’s important there is that people give themselves a reward.

Compare that with how most people try to add an exercise routine to their schedule. They wake up in the morning. They go for a quick run. They get home and they’re behind schedule. They have to get their kids ready for school and out the door. Rush through a shower. Then, they’re late to work. They’re anxious about getting to their desk. What they’re effectively doing is punishing themselves for exercising. Your brain pays attention to whether you had something you enjoyed or something you didn’t enjoy afterwards.

One of the big important things is that when you’re trying to change a habit, there’s this key important ingredient, which is that you have to believe that change is possible. Particularly, at an inflection point, where there’s some kind of crisis or challenge to the change. You need to have some level of belief that you have, what’s known as an internal locus of control. The ability to change your behavior. Part of getting that belief, oftentimes, comes from participating in change in a group environment.

The first reason is that you get positive reinforcement from other people. Friends tell you, “You’re doing great! It seems like you’re making some progress.” They help positively reinforce it. The second part of it is that you see other people achieve changes. There’s this basic comparative psychology that says, “Jim across the room; Jim has been sober for four months. I think Jim is a moron. If Jim can do it, I certainly can do it.” That’s very important to making change seem feasible and possible.

If you try to transform everything at once, it tends to be very, very destabilizing. In general, what people should do, is they should think of change as a project. It’s a project that takes a while. That means you do little experiments to see what new routines work. If you say, “This week, I’m going to focus on this one habit. I’m going to run a different experiment every single day to try to change my behavior. Then, I’m going to give myself another week or two to actually implement this plan.” We go through this in the book very explicitly. That’s very, very powerful. That gives people a lot of opportunity to change. Now, it might feel frustrating to say, “If you have ten habits you want to change, that means it’s going to take eight months or nine months.” The truth of the matter is if this is a behavior that’s really important, changing it will have this huge impact on your life. It’s worth spending a month to change one behavior permanently. You’re going to be reaping the benefits of that for the next decade. The way to think about this is, “I’ve got a plan. I’m on a journey. It’s going to take a little bit of time but when the change happens, it’s actually going to be permanent and real.”

Continued research into procrastination should not be delayed…