Procrastination: How to Lose a Head in Advertising

Get this: I'm just now working on my 09 New Year's resolutions. Not really, but I am putting off an entry on elevator pitches to do an entry on procrastination. Well you know what they say:

U=EV/ID.

Let's come back to that.

Back in school my first writing partner was a procrastination-fiend who modified a WWII gasmask into a feedbag for vaporized marijuana. We all know procrastinators are lazy people who can't nut up and knuckle through their work, so today, he's homeless, right? Wrong. He recently assumed creative control of a large west coast advertising agency. You can see where I'm going with this. Why didn't his procrastination destroy him? He figured out a simple trick I'll come to in time.

Little trivia to start. If I told you procrastinators were actually perfectionists so worried about producing less than primo work, they lose momentum, you'd tell me to go wait for a train, on the tracks. Guess what? That's what psychologists believe. Weirder still, what would you say if I told you a scientist got paid to determine that U=EV/ID, where U (utility) = E (expectation of success) times V (the value of completion) divided by the product of I (deadline) and D (personal sensitivity to delay).

All it means is a hamster in a lab will ignore long term goals and just keep hitting the button that gives them an immediate food pellet. Admittedly, we didn't all go to school to be army snowboarders, so we're not overly stimulated by our work, but when tasks with longer timelines fall by the wayside in favour of tasks with more immediate rewards, you're setting yourself up.

Seth Godin said it's amazing that people have so much time to worry about today's emergencies but no time for tomorrow's. His point spent years talking to people about using the time you have now to prepare yourself for professional challenges in the future. No one listened. Then came the Economopocalypse.

He was talking about training and skill-building during times of unemployment. I'm talking about straight-up bullet catching. Workplaces are becoming more self-structured, letting employees complete tasks at their own pace. This is Dateline-style entrapment for procrastinators. Even the most together people I've ever worked for had time management issues, so how does Johnny Punchclock stand a chance? It doesn't take too many extended or extended deadlines to paint yourself as the next potential cost-cutting measure.

So how did my friend with this disabling condition end up taking a diamond encrusted Escalade to Cannes? Simple time management.

He learned to visualize his tasks in more specific terms.

You have to say a job is important for you to believe it's important.

Do it right away. Now. Shock the programming of your subconscious mind and force yourself to do the opposite of your impulse.

Break up the task into smaller pieces and rifle through them. A lot of the time we worry about the scope or scale of a jog, so break it down into a series of smaller, more manageable tasks and work through them one by one.

Set a timeline. Write it down. The simplest trick in the world is to make a physical list of everything you have to do. Every time you run that pen through a completed item, it psychologically energizes you to barrel through the next. It's always worked for me.

No one will care about you as much as you do, so be careful out there.