Devon Jones / Edge columnist]
Student reporter
Commentary
The four keys that could unlock procrastination – BBC Worklife
Procrastination is the worst thing that can happen to ruin your school or work life. It can impact efficiency, value, and your final works quality. But with this new theory your procrastination can be stopped.
It is one of the toughest things that stops people from positive change. Work habits are hard to maintain when there is a distraction in the room, usually it is an electronic device, like a phone or laptop. Procrastination is considered as postponing or delaying something, to most it is putting work aside to relive boredom. The words “Ill do it later” play a big part in this whole problem. Words like “I’ll do it later” do to, so when work starts again, boredom twice as powerful as before hits. Resulting in more breaks.
Sometimes work can be tough, that is why good schedules for relaxing and working with no distractions. Small breaks every know and then is a great way to maximize efficiency and refresh.
A man named Jason Wessel developed a method inspired by Temporal Motivation Theory, which proposes four interlinked causes of procrastination being: Expectancy, sensitivity to delay, value of task, and lastly, metacognition. These 4 ideas represent you being able to finish a task on time, how badly are the things around you are going to affect you, you not realizing the benefits of getting it done on time and taking to thought to prepare yourself for what you think you might do to procrastinate and trying to counter it.
These methods are for one person to help themselves; others giving a little help pointing out distractions, taking things away, or leaving the workplace. Chronic procrastinators have provided great evidence for the theorem but there have not been very many tests to prove that it is working other than posts online. “There just aren’t many studies yet,” says Wendelien van Eerde at the University of Amsterdam. “You try to recognize what you are doing wrong and adapt your behaviors to more functional ways of dealing with things”.
Van Earde thought about the process and how it took too long to get somebody to follow through, so after a lot of thought, she put together 4 points to help people consider how to finish their problems, “How would someone successful complete the goal? How would you feel if you do not do the required task? What is the next immediate step you need to do? If you could do one thing to achieve the goal on time, what would it be?” said Van Earde.
“The important thing is to regularly question what goals you value, and to check whether you’re prioritizing them enough. You should then work out ways to chunk your task into smaller parts, before acting on the first possible step. This can create a kind of momentum, he says, which will make procrastination less likely as you go along.” Said Wessel.
Overall procrastination will affect people in different ways, some people are more organized that others and like to get their work done at the start of a release, while others need to do little bits over a long period of time. Procrastination could occur on such things from a fitness plan, to feeding pets, and everything in between. But the main start of it all is it always starts with the words, “I’ll do it later”.