Habits and Procrastination
Four parts of a habit
- The Cue: trigger that launches the habitual process
- The Routine: The zombie mode routine, the habitual process.
- The Reward: Pleasure received from the habitual process. In the case of procrastination, moving your mind to something less stressful. The fact that habits are pleasurable is key to their formation
- The Belief: Habits stick around because we believe in them. The change the habit, the underlying belief needs to change.
Using habits for good
Changing a bad habit only requires willpower at the reaction to the cue tipping point.
Procrastination as a habit
The parts of a habit as they relate to procrastination (the habit here being zombie-procrastination mode):
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The Cue: Usually falls into one of:
- Location
- Time
- How you feel (Too tired to focus)
- Reactions to other people (got a text message you need to reply to, then you’re mindlessly on your phone)
- Something that just happened (started googling something and then started web-surfing) Become aware of when you’ve started procrastinating. Develop new cues and routines.
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The Routine: Just before the routine gets started - the reaction to the cue is the point where willpower must be applied. A good routine can only start if you avoid reacting by falling into zombie-mode.
- Have a plan for developing new routines
- Put on music, turn off internet, go to a certain chair, have a snack at hand already, etc.
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The Reward: This one is tough re: procrastination. You need a reward for starting and sticking with a task without procrastinating.
- Consider using a reward at the stopping time for the task (lunch break, mini-deadline, etc.)
- Congratulate yourself on working. Learned Industriousness - enjoying the successful free-flow of working can be its own reward. Flow State.
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The Belief: For new anti-procrastination habits to form, you must believe the new systems will work.
- Try mental contrasting: Imagine where you want to be and then compare it to your current situation.
Focus on Process, not _Product
The Product is what triggers the procrastination-inducing pain.
Rather than focus on the work product output that you need to create, instead enlist the likes-to-blindly-march-along part of the brain that enjoys processes. Spending twenty minutes learning a new topic, doing some of the work of solving homework problems for the sake of practice (versus completing the entire assignment).
Through this, you’ll be building new processes-oriented habits that help you accomplish goals over time.
Keys are: short periods, easy-to-start familiar processes, immediate reward from the enjoyment of the path of process.