Sunday, February 17, 2013

Thoughts from The Antidote: anti-procrastination

As I blogged about yesterday, I recently read The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman.  I think his thoughts on anti-procrastination are interesting.  As usual, any typos are my own:
The problem with all these motivational tips and tricks is that they aren't really about 'how to get things done' at all. They're about how to feel in the mood for getting things done. [...] The most common response to procrastination is indeed to try to 'get the right emotion': to try to motivate yourself to feel like getting on the with the job.

The problem is that feeling like acting and actually acting are two different things.A person mired deep in procrastination might claim he is unable to work, but what he really means is that he is unable to make himself feel like working [...] This isn't meant to imply that procrastinators, or the severely depressed, should simply pull their socks up and get over it. Rather, it highlights the way that we tend to confuse acting with feeling like acting, and how most motivational techniques are really designed to change how you feel. They're built, in other words, on a form of attachment - on strengthening your investment in a specific kind of emotion.

Sometimes, that can help. But sometimes you simply can't make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you an act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work.

Taking a non-attached stance towards procrastination, by contrast, stats from a different question: who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated, or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings, and act anyway.
I'm not sure to what extent this is applicable to me (I'd describe my procrastinatory feelings as "I don't WANNA!", not "I don't feel like it" or "I'm not motivated") and I haven't yet figured out how (or whether) to actually apply this in my own life, but I think it's an interesting and refreshing perspective.

2 comments:

laura k said...

You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings, and act anyway.

I like this! It squares very well with my writing process as I've come to learn it. "This is the part where I panic, I note the panicky feelings, and continue to act..."

laura k said...

Ooo, I looked up the book and realized I know the author's work from the Guardian. He's a terrific writer, plus he's now a New Yorker.

Between being Brit and being NYC, his rejection of positive thinking has an excellent pedigree.