I'm not even going to ask whether you procrastinate or not, because you definitely, definitely do. I know you do. We all procrastinate. Maybe you identify as being a procrastinator, someone who does this all the time. And maybe that's something that you really dislike about yourself. Or maybe you just find yourself procrastinating from time to time and it kind of annoys you.
Whichever, this is the episode you've been waiting for. I spoke to the students in my coaching program this week. And the biggest thing that they identified as a problem at the moment was that they were procrastinating.
They'd come up with all these amazing goals at the time of recording. It's like the 11th of January. So we're in that sort of new year's resolution period when reality hits and all those plans we actually have to do. And their biggest challenge was that they were happy with the plans they'd made, but they were procrastinating doing the actual task.
I helped them in my coaching program and I thought this was the perfect episode for all of you guys too.
Hello and welcome to episode 18 of series 2 of the PhD Life Coach. And today we are talking about how to manage your procrastination. Notice, this episode is not called How to Stop Procrastinating. If we tell ourselves this is the year we're not going to procrastinate, we are setting ourselves up for failure. We are going to procrastinate for the rest of our lives.
But, it doesn't have to be as painful as it feels right now, and it doesn't have to feel so out of control. So today, I am going to help you learn how to manage your procrastination from the perspective of someone who is still pretty good. at procrastinating.
You know, sometimes as coaches we wonder, how can I help somebody else stop procrastinating when I've been procrastinating this week. I've procrastinated this morning.
And sometimes it's easy to feel a little bit hypocritical. But then what I always remind myself is, actually, maybe, maybe that makes me the perfect person to talk about procrastination. Because if I was sat here going, Oh yes, I never do that. Oh yes, I used to procrastinate, but I stopped. I learned how to, and now I just don't procrastinate anymore.
Then, that feels like a really long way from where I suspect you are at the moment. And where Well, a really long way from where I am. I think if I was listening to a podcast with somebody going, Oh yes, I just don't have that problem anymore. I think I'd be a bit intimidated. I think I'd feel a bit like, well, okay, but I can't even imagine what that would feel like.
A day where I don't procrastinate is a pretty big day. I can't even imagine what that would be like. And so I think actually hearing from somebody who's in the midst of this management themselves, who is actively coping with these things at the moment can feel way more achievable. And hopefully you guys can also see that whilst I procrastinate, it doesn't stop me achieving the tasks that I want to achieve. It doesn't stop me getting this podcast to you. It doesn't stop me running the workshops that I run, running the individual coaching that I run. It doesn't stop me doing any of these things. As an academic, so many of you will know, I had a 20 something year academic career before this, finishing as full professor in the UK.
And I procrastinated through the whole of that. And it didn't stop me achieving any of the things I wanted to achieve. Now, along the way, I thought it was going to. I thought procrastination was going to scupper everything. I spent so much time beating myself up for it. And in reality, the beating myself up just made me procrastinate more.
The difference now isn't that I don't procrastinate. It's that I'm much less judgmental of myself when I do procrastinate, and I have much better tools to help myself move on from procrastination. And the reason I have those better tools is because I understand much more about why we procrastinate. And that's what we're going to focus on today.
We're going to focus on understanding why we procrastinate, and I'm going to introduce a toolkit to get yourself out of it. If that feels good, if that feels like what you think you need in your life, make sure you're also following me on Instagram because I've got a series of videos coming out over the next couple of weeks where I'll be giving specific tips that aren't covered in this podcast today about managing procrastination.
I am the PhD life coach over there, make sure you are following along.
But before I get into any of that, I have one tip for you. And this is a tip that applies to a lot of different things. But in this context, the tip is Stop calling yourself a procrastinator. Stop telling people that you are someone who procrastinates a lot. Because what that does is it reinforces that this is a fundamental part of who you are.
This is just like a bad habit that's so ingrained. Or maybe you see it as a personality flaw, or that you are, you know, badly disciplined, or unmotivated, or any of these things, and that they are somehow chronically so.
Everybody procrastinates, so it makes no sense to call ourselves a procrastinator. You are also a task doer. By virtue of the fact that you are doing a PhD or you're in your academic career, you have achieved a whole bunch of things in your life. You are also someone who completes tasks. But when we focus on telling ourselves that we are someone who procrastinates, then we just really reinforce that in our heads and make it so much harder to deal with.
Because if it's a personal flaw, then we're going to have to take massive action in order to change that. If it's a personality trait, we probably can't even change it at all. Where in reality it's just a series of behaviours, if anything it's a habit. And we can modify habits. We can shift things a bit. We can make it feel easier.
So, first tip. Stop telling yourself you are someone who procrastinates. You are someone who completes tasks. That is also true. You may be someone who sometimes procrastinates, but it is also true that you are someone who completes tasks. Let's keep telling ourselves that bit because that's so much more likely to move ourselves forward.
Now, I mentioned that lots of you will think that you procrastinate because you lack self discipline, you're lazy, or you lack motivation. Those are the most common reasons. When I talk to my clients, when I think back to how I justified it to myself, those are the most common reasons people come up with as to why they procrastinate.
I just can't get on with it. I'm too disorganized. All of these sorts of things. None of these things are true. These are lies that we're told by a capitalist society that wants us to produce as much as possible , from a higher education system that wants us to do as much work as we can for the good of the university.
And so we're told that if we procrastinate, if we put tasks off, it must mean there's something wrong with us, or perhaps that there's something wrong with the task. Maybe it means that we shouldn't be in academia. We're not good enough to be here. Or maybe I don't like it enough to be here and all of this.
Any of you who've ever procrastinated doing something that you like, know that that's not true. It's not about the task. I don't know you. I procrastinate having a bath. I sit on the sofa going, Oh, I'd quite fancy a bath, that'd be really nice, but I don't think I can be bothered to move. I procrastinate having a bath. Have you ever done that? Ridiculous.
But it illustrates that it's not about the task and the fact that I have achieved quite a lot of things in my life tells me that I'm also not unmotivated and I'm also not lacking self discipline and I'm not lazy. I'm definitely not lazy. So why do I procrastinate? Why do you procrastinate?
The reason is really simple.
The reason we procrastinate is we are avoiding emotions that we anticipate we will experience when we do that task. I'm going to say that again for you. Procrastination is avoidance of emotions. I want you to think about the last thing you procrastinated.
Let's pick something that's commonly procrastinated. Maybe you've got a piece of writing to do. That's a common academic thing that gets procrastinated. How are you feeling about that piece of writing?
Do you think it's going to be difficult? Are you not sure where you're going to start? Do you think you're bad at writing? Do you think you haven't got time to do it? If you're experiencing any of those thoughts, then you probably anticipate that when you do it, you're going to feel confused. You're going to feel unclear.
Maybe you're going to feel guilty because you should have done it before in your mind. Maybe you're going to feel anxious because you're worried that your supervisor or your reviewers aren't going to think that it's good enough.
If you are anticipating that when you're writing, you are going to be feeling those negative emotions, It's not a surprise that we put off doing it.
None of us like feeling confused, shame, guilt, all of these feelings. We don't like feeling those feelings. And so if we think a task is going to induce them, then we put off doing it. It's the same as exercise. We put off exercising if we think we're just going to be exhausted and hot and sweaty and uncomfortable.
Even neutral tasks, I've been putting off doing my expenses for ages. They're mostly under control now, yay me! But, I've been putting off doing them for ages. And it's because I anticipated that it was going to take a long time and it was going to be boring. Those were the two things that I was anticipating that I was going to be bored for a long time.
And I don't like being bored. I'm somebody who very much enjoys doing fun things, doing a variety of things, sort of jumping around, do do do, I don't like being bored. And so I procrastinated doing it. So you can procrastinate things because they're boring. Now, if it's a fun thing, so go back to my example. I procrastinated having a bath this week.
Um, I have bathed this week. So, this is like an extra one for fun in the evenings. , I procrastinated going. Well, why would I do that? Because I anticipate I'll feel lovely and warm and relaxed and luxurious when I'm in the bath. Bit I was procrastinating was the effort it would take to get there. So I anticipated it would be lovely when I was in it, but I also anticipated that it was going to be effort to get off the sofa, put my stuff away, take the dog for a wee, go upstairs, get in the bathroom, all of those things.
And that was the bit I procrastinated, was that effort I felt it was going to be. So when we procrastinate, we are avoiding feeling emotions. Now this changes everything. I've told people this in my, in my workshops and that sort of thing, that procrastination is emotion avoidance and almost every workshop, somebody puts the little mind blown emoji in the chat for me, even just understanding that this is why you're procrastinating can change everything because it changes that narrative. It's not a fatal flaw of us, it's nothing wrong with us as a person. We're not missing motivation, we're not missing self discipline, we're not lazy, we're just avoiding an emotion that we don't like even knowing that can change your relationship with procrastination.
Because we stop beating ourselves up about it quite so much, and instead focus on what we can do about it. There's a little model I made up called the NICE model. And I have a worksheet on this. So if you want the worksheet to actually use when you're procrastinating, make sure that you are part of my community . It's completely free. I'll put the link in the show notes, but you can also just go to my website, the phdlifecoach. com, click on work with me, and you'll see an option there to join my community. When you're part of my community, you will get emails from me somewhere between weekly and occasionally, depending on how it goes, with useful hints and tips insider stuff that doesn't appear anywhere else on my material. And you will also get access to my free group coaching. So this is for PhD students or academics all the way up through your career.
Once a month, I run free group coaching. You dial in, you can watch other people getting coached, or you can put your hand up and get coached yourself. You get one to one support with your specific problem. And you get to see how I help other people and learn how to apply that to your lives. It's an amazing group.
People dial in from all over the world. So make sure you're in that. And if you are in that, I will send you my how to stop procrastinating worksheet. And that explains to you the NICE model. It's called the NICE model because the N, the I, the C and the E stand for something. So it's a little acronym, but it's also called the NICE model because the whole way through this we're going to be compassionate to ourselves because too much of the time we beat ourselves up for procrastinating. We beat ourselves up for the fact that we still haven't done this thing we intended, and we make it mean loads of things about who we are as a person and our prospects in the future.
We're not doing any of that because when we beat ourselves up we make it harder to do it next time because we're reinforcing this idea that we're not a good person and we're not someone who gets things done and therefore it's really easy to sort of lower ourselves to our own expectations. So, it's the NICE model, because we're going to be nice.
Now, what do the four things stand for? Let's start at N. N stands for Notice. We have to notice that we're procrastinating. And I know that sounds really obvious because if you're meant to be writing and you're scrolling on Instagram, then you're probably procrastinating. But often in our heads We're telling ourselves a slightly different story. We're not telling ourselves we're procrastinating. We're telling ourselves we don't quite know what we need to write anyway.
We're telling ourselves I don't really feel like it today. We're telling ourselves I haven't got time to do it today. Sometimes you might actually be doing a task that feels productive, like organising your email, or making a planner. But maybe that's procrastination too, because you're not doing the thing you actually intended to do in this.
Maybe you're sorting out your references rather than writing the next section. That's also procrastination, because we're avoiding doing the difficult bit. So, the first job sounds dead simple. We just get to stop and say, I'm procrastinating. I've noticed that I'm procrastinating and we're going to do it with compassion.
So we are not going to be going, I've noticed I'm procrastinating. Oh my God. I always do this. I'm so useless. I'm never going to get this done. I'm going to have to do twice as much tomorrow. And all of that narrative that our brain loves to spin off into, we're not doing any of that. What we can do, we're just going to stay here.
Look at that. I've noticed I'm procrastinating. That's really interesting. And importantly, in that moment of notice, we're going to stop doing the thing that we're doing instead. We don't have to start doing the task yet. In fact, we're not going to start doing the other task yet. But we are going to stop doing the thing that's kind of covering up.
So for me, my worst thing is the scrolling on Instagram, scrolling on Twitter. You may have other things, we call it buffering, things that you do when you're procrastinating. Maybe you're someone who does busy work to procrastinate doing harder tasks. Maybe you're somebody that goes off and chatters to people or you go and eat or those sorts of things.
I'm a scroller. I know a lot of you will be too. I want you to say, okay, I've noticed. I'm procrastinating and we'll get really specific. I've noticed that I'm choosing to scroll on Instagram instead of writing the email to my group that I intended to write in this slot. So we're noticing that we are procrastinating.
We're noticing what we're procrastinating from, like specifically the task that we're procrastinating from and what we're doing instead, and we're doing all of that nicely, non judgmentally. Look at me, I'm choosing to scroll through reels rather than write that email. Okay, that is good to know. Because there's actually inherently nothing wrong with any of these things.
There's nothing wrong with scrolling on Instagram. You know, I have some of my career stuff on Instagram. Sometimes it's just nice to look at Instagram. There's nothing wrong with any of these things. The only time they become a problem is if we're doing them instead of the thing we intended to do. So no tasks are inherently bad.
It's just, if we're doing that instead of our writing, then we won't achieve the things that we set out to achieve. So we notice I'm choosing to do this instead of that.
The second step is I, is investigate. This is where we get to get curious. Now, those of you who have been with me since the beginning will remember in my very first podcast, I talked about how to be your own best supervisor.
If you haven't listened to that one, go back, it's one of my favorites. And one of the qualities that we suggested you, encourage in yourself is curiosity. This notion that we can go, Oh, that's really interesting. I wonder why I'm doing that. I wonder why I'm not doing that. And so the questions I want you to ask yourself here is how am I anticipating feeling when I do this task?
i. e. why am I procrastinating it? Now some of you might have found it difficult to pin down exactly what task you were procrastinating. So for me, one of my most common reasons for procrastinating is when I haven't picked specifically which task I'm doing right now. So maybe I've written a bit of a generic to do list for the day, but I hadn't decided exactly which one I'm meant to be doing now.
And so if you found yourself in that notice section saying I'm procrastinating working on things on my to do list, I want you to notice That that isn't a specific task. Working on your to do list isn't a specific task.
So maybe, in your investigation phase, one of the things that you will realize is that you're not clear on which task you're meant to be doing.
Maybe we know which task we're meant to be doing, we're not convinced we have all the information that we need, so we anticipate feeling a bit confused, a bit unsure. Maybe, and we all have tasks like this, tell me it's not just me, maybe it's a task that you should have done ages ago. I live in a new build. We're meant to have contacted the developers cause we've got a few snags and I've been procrastinating it for, I don't know how long, months, literally. And when I do this exercise with it, now thinking it through, the reason I'm procrastinating it is , I feel shame about the fact that I've procrastinated it.
There's literally nothing inherently wrong with doing the task. I don't anticipate feeling any emotion at all when I do the task as the task itself. But whenever I think about that task, I feel guilty that I haven't done it before. And that's the bit I'm avoiding. I'm avoiding the feeling of guilt.
Now, it's a little bit silly. I acknowledge that in a compassionate way, because the second it's done, I won't feel guilty about it anymore. But there's something about guilt that even a little bit of it just feels horrible. So notice, are you anticipating you're going to feel guilty because you're telling yourself you should have done it before?
Are you anticipating it being really boring? What are the emotions that you think you're going to experience when you do this task? And that's what this investigation phase is about. It's not about catching yourself out, it's not about beating yourself up, it's about just really understanding. Because then you can go, okay, yeah, fair enough, of course you're procrastinating, if you think this is going to be really hard, or if you're really unclear on what you're doing.
So we dig around, we investigate. And then C is for choose because any of you who have done any of my self-coaching stuff before knows that we get to choose our thoughts and feelings. We don't have to just accept the ones that just float to the surface naturally. We can choose which ones we spend more time thinking about.
If my thought is, I should have done this before, and that makes me feel guilty and so I'm procrastinating, well you can look at that and go, okay, is it true that you should have done this before? Because sometimes, actually, you've just been super busy. Maybe you shouldn't have done this before. Maybe it's perfectly understandable that you haven't done it already.
Maybe it's true that you should, in inverted commas, have done it before. Maybe, let's say, you could have done it before. But what else is true? That you'll feel better once it's gone, that it will only take a couple of minutes.
Maybe those things are also true. And when we choose to think this will only take a couple of minutes, maybe we feel purposeful. And when we feel purposeful, we're way more likely to do it than when we feel guilty. So, for those of you who haven't done the self coaching stuff before, do look back about three or four episodes ago, I had a whole episode about it.
But essentially the questions we can ask ourselves is this thought true? Are there other thoughts that are true that are more helpful? And then the final one relates to the E part of this model, which is what if it's true and that's okay? So the E part of this is embrace, which is maybe it's true that this is going to feel uncomfortable.
Maybe the thought is, this is difficult, and I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, and that makes you feel uncomfortable. E is embrace. Maybe it's okay that you're going to do something that's difficult and you're going to feel uncomfortable. Maybe it's true that this task is boring and maybe that's okay.
Because this is where you choose between the C or the E. You can choose to reframe it, you can choose, okay, you know what? I'm going to think of ways to make this less boring. I'm going to make it into a game. I'm going to have music on. I'm going to have hot drink with me. I'm going to do it somewhere nice. I'm going to go to a coffee shop or whatever. You can choose thoughts, feelings, and actions that will make it feel less difficult, that will make it feel less boring, for example. If you think it's going to be difficult, you can choose to make it simpler. Okay, how can I shrink it down? How can I make it clearer? How can I give myself the guidance that I need? So you can choose, through your thoughts, feelings, and actions, to make it feel less uncomfortable, to feel less boring, to feel less shame about it. And, or, you can choose to embrace it. Because I'm going to ask you a difficult question that I asked my students in my membership this week.
And that is, what made you think you can have an academic career without doing something difficult and without doing something boring? And to be honest, doing something difficult and boring, quite a lot. And I say that with love, you know I'm not being mean to you, you know I'm not beating you up, because I have to say it to myself too.
What made you think this was never going to be difficult or boring? This, think about the process of research, think about the process of going from a new PhD student to a full professor. You think nothing's going to be difficult and nothing's going to be boring. You think you've got to wait for the time when it feels easy and exciting.
Come on now, sometimes we just need to tell ourselves, you know what, it's going to be difficult, but I am capable of doing difficult things. I am willing to be bored for a while, and that's okay. Because do you know what's more difficult? And what's more boring? Listening to yourself still having not sent the damn email to the developers that I meant to have sent.
That's what's more boring. Listening to myself going, Yeah, I still need to do that. I still need to do that. That's more boring. That's more uncomfortable. Not doing the task is more boring and more difficult.
So that's my nice model. You notice, acknowledge, you're procrastinating. I'm procrastinating. I'm choosing to do this instead of that. Investigate. Why is that? I'm choosing to do this instead of that because I'm anticipating that is going to make me feel this. The reason I'm anticipating feeling that is because I'm having this thought. thought. Because remember, it's not writing the paper that's going to make you feel uncomfortable. It's the thought you're having about it. I should be better at this. I'm never going to be as good as other people. This is going to take forever.
It's those thoughts that are making you feel uncomfortable. So in that investigation, what thoughts am I having that are going to make me feel uncomfortable? What emotions am I trying to avoid feeling?
And then we choose. We choose to focus on a different thought. We choose to generate a different feeling. We choose to take actions that actually change the way we might feel about it. So we put ourselves in a circumstance where we're more likely to think, Oh, actually I can get on with this. This is quite clear.
Or, E, we choose to embrace it. We choose to tell ourselves, You know what? I've done difficult things before. I am someone who is capable of doing difficult things. This feels difficult, but I am able to figure things out. I am a researcher. That was a thought that one of my students came up with, that has really helped her. I'm a researcher and I can figure this out. Or we can embrace, you know, if it's boredom you're anticipating. That's okay. I am willing to be bored. I don't have to make the boredom go away. I'm just willing to be bored. I'm willing to do something boring for an hour in order for this to be off my task.
So that is the nice model. Let me know, make sure you sign up for my newsletter so you can get the interactive worksheet that you can use to work through that, and let me know how you get on.