Moment 177: You're NOT Lazy! This Is The REAL Reason You Procrastinate: The Performance Doctor

Steven Bartlett (0:00)

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I get a lot of messages from people saying, Steve, I'm procrastinating so much. How do you not procrastinate? And I always look at that and say, I'm not the guy to tell you how to do that because procrastination in my mind is a bit of a tool. As you said, there's different types of procrastination that I notice myself doing. One of them is when I get stuck on something and I find myself picking up my phone as if I'm a man possessed. I literally, what I'll do is I'll be in the middle of work and then the next thing I'm on Instagram. I'm like, how did that happen? Oh yeah, because the part in this piece of work you got to is psychologically difficult for some reason. I don't feel prepared or whatever. Then the other thing I notice myself procrastinating on is just when I'm thinking through something, I'll end up just walking around the house, I'll end up cleaning, doing the dishes or whatever, and then coming back to the piece of work later. But I would say that I'm definitely a procrastinator.

Adam Grant (1:44)

That's so interesting.

Let's be clear, I'm not encouraging people to procrastinate more. That's not the goal here. The goal is just to normalize procrastination and say, it's a natural part of the creative process. Everybody does it sometimes. And even though you expect it to be counterproductive, in certain situations, it can actually lead you to better ideas. And I think there's maybe a myth worth busting here. Research led by Fuchsia Sirwa has shown that we don't procrastinate for the reasons we think we do. So a lot of people think I'm being lazy. I'm avoiding effort. What's wrong with me? Why don't I want to work hard? But it turns out it's not hard work that you're avoiding when you procrastinate. It's negative emotions, unpleasant feelings. You are avoiding a set of tasks that makes you feel frustrated, confused, bored, anxious. A lot of procrastination is driven by fear. I don't know if I can do this. I'm not sure if I'm up to the challenge. So I put it off and I think one of the best ways to manage that is to ask what are the tasks that you consistently procrastinate on? What negative emotions are they stirring up? Then how do you change those?

Steven Bartlett (2:51)

What do you procrastinate on?

Adam Grant (2:53)

I procrastinate a lot on editing actually and revising. I love rough drafting. It feels very creative for me. It's fun to figure out what is the best evidence say? How do I tell the story that brings the evidence to life? Then the process of tinkering to get each sentence just right, it bores me and so I put it off. I had to figure out how do I make that more interesting in order to stop procrastinating altogether on it.

Steven Bartlett (3:18)

How did you do that?

Adam Grant (3:20)

Well, one of the things I did was one of my goals in my recent writing was to try to get less abstract and more concrete. What I started doing was I started rewriting paragraphs in the voices of my favorite fiction authors, which was such a fun experiment. How would Stephen King write this paragraph? How would maggie Smith, an amazing poet, how would she write these sentences?

That made it a creative exercise again.

Steven Bartlett (3:48)

As I was doing my research ahead of this conversation, I was watching your TED Talk. And one of the things that really stood out to me in your TED Talk was where you start talking about Internet browsers.

I immediately checked which browser I was using and I was using Google Chrome. But you make the case that people who you can tell someone's, I guess, creativity, I'm paraphrasing, I'm putting words in your mouth here by which Internet browser they use. And there was a really important message in there for me. So can you tell me about that? Exactly what the findings can tell us.