Are You a Procrastinator?
I confess, there was a good chance I would put this post off. A bit ironic, a bit funny, but where does my need to bring up procrastination come from, anyway? Call it my research and realizations after the “Time Management” training for the Eczacıbaşı Monrol finance team, which I delivered last week as a trainer together with Nurşen Agathe Batkin and Salih Kayıhan.
Time is quite relative. When we’re asked to close our eyes and measure out a minute between our hands, some of us hold them wide apart, others almost together, and everyone has a different perception of time. To some, time slips by like water; in other situations it just won’t pass. What would change if a day had twenty-five hours?
Let me tell you something that will put you at ease. We all procrastinate. We say “start like a Turk, finish like a German,” but everyone is motivated at the start; for some reason we’ve put that down to our culture. Germans are just as motivated as anyone when they start a job, and want to know something? Germans procrastinate as much as Turks do! Experiments show that everyone starts tasks eagerly at the beginning but gets bored somewhere in the middle. When our goal becomes visible and we near the end, everyone can become more motivated again. This is why we put in more effort when we see the diploma we’re about to receive, a project we’re about to finish, or the finish line in a race. It’s only human…
So what might motivate a person to finish what they’ve started? To answer this question, it’s worth looking at an experiment by Ayelet Fishbach, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago, conducted among people waiting in line at an amusement park. People become more motivated to keep waiting when they see the people they have left behind in the line. So here is a method: to be motivated to keep moving forward, we can review our past achievements and efforts.
Another of Fishbach’s experiments is about our choices and the intrinsic motivation that follows. In this study, people are asked to choose their wake-up alarm sounds. They have only two options: one is a very annoying, loud alarm, and the other is a soothing Beatles song. Most participants choose the annoying loud alarm because there is a cash reward at the end; they are told they won’t get any money if they choose the Beatles song. After the experiment, everyone who chose the annoying sound despite the cash reward regrets it. This is true of all the choices we make: on what basis do we build our career choices, our goals, our wishes? When our goals are driven by earning more money, looking better or some other outside purpose, we lose our intrinsic motivation after a while. The lesson of the experiment is this: every goal we set should be an end in itself. For example, in the alarm experiment, our goal should be only the alarm sound we have to choose, not what we will gain afterward. This perspective is a key to preserving our intrinsic motivation.
If you no longer want to procrastinate and are curious about what other methods you could try, you can watch Fishbach’s other suggestions via this link.
As I finish this post, I sign off with the peace and happiness of having achieved what I set out to do. If you also have stories you’d like to share about living life more meaningfully, please reach out to us…
Would you like to talk about this topic as part of your own development journey?
AUTHOR
Azer Karabıyık
Career Transition Coach PCC, ACPC, ORSC
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