Procrastination and Cognitive Dissonance

Juan (the name is invented to guarantee the protection of personal data), is a senior executive of an industrial firm that wants improve your personal productivity. The objective of our coaching (related to time management), and its tendency or habit that prevents and hinders the achievement of high performance at work, procrastination. 

Procrastination has an origin based on emotional and cognitive aspects associated with one or more of these main causes:

1. Little emotional commitment to the task (to do something you don't like or prefer to do other more pleasant tasks).

2. Perception of worthlessness of the task or mission entrusted.

3. General demotivation (caused by different personal, social or organizational causes).

4. Stress, Anxiety, Burnout, Depression or other psychological conditions of the affected.

5. Perception of the difficulty of the task or by the perception of scarce personal resources to execute it properly.

6. Cognitive dissonance between the circumstances of the person and the demands posed by the task to be performed.

There are people who, even being motivated and in full mental and emotional balance, tend to procrastinate. Why does this happen?

When the mind adapts to a speed of thought and execution and faces tasks and solves problems whose solution comes more or less immediately or with easy access.

Thus, it tends to generate ideas and execute actions with ease, accepting those whose resolution is relatively accessible and rejecting those tasks and actions whose decision requires greater care, either due to the need for quality of execution, or simply due to the need for more time to dedicate, regarding which is available at the moment.

This happens frequently, under the following possible conditions:

1. We are executing a series of very simple tasks and whose need for resources in time and effort is similar, so that any task that generates dissonance with that rhythm is set aside.

2. We are performing a main and priority task that requires prioritizing all the time available and or requires significant cognitive efforts, so the mind refuses to devote attention resources to non-priority aspects in order to achieve that goal.

3. Even without performing priority tasks, we are in anticipation of a planned task that we plan to start in a shorter period of time than the time we estimate the task we have just found needs to be completed.

Ultimately, if the mind comes across a task that requires more time for a satisfactory decision or to find an accessible solution, then it postpones it..

How can we solve this trend?

1. Point or record on our mobile the task to be done if we have no place to write it down.

2. Define the approximate time necessary for its realization.

3. Set a day and time in the agenda to carry it out, and block the following areas of the agenda that coincide with the time necessary for their resolution.

In any case, do not forget to propose and plan tasks does not necessarily mean forcing us to execute them at that time: perhaps when the time set for its completion arises, we will find ourselves with a task of greater importance to perform.

In that case we will postpone the pending task again, as long as it is a matter of having to perform a higher priority task (which does not mean a more pleasant task).

If the time comes to carry out this task, we see that we are repeatedly putting it off in favor of other tasks, simply for pleasure or greater affinity with other activities, then we will have before the proof that our procrastination is not due to cognitive issues (causes 5 and 6 from the previous list), but to emotional issues whose causes can be found among the remaining four mentioned.