Tweet

Procrastination: Understanding the Root Causes to Bring About Productive Change

Guest post by: Barbara Garro

Article Overview: Ever wonder about the psychology behind procrastination in the workplace? Lots of studies have been done. Here are some things to think about when you notice that procrastination is dragging your productivity down along with your profits.

Procrastination: Understanding the Root Causes to Bring About Productive Change



Here’s an empowering question to ask yourself: What is failing to have a zero tolerance for procrastination costing your bottom line?



Say you can be sure you don’t have absolutely self-destructive employee procrastinators who have nothing getting done and everything needing to be done. Still, are you wondering how to begin to find out what your people are not doing? First, understand that master procrastinators often do not look lazy, but rather are artists at looking busy and generally fall into two categories:

1. Over-organized and Under-Productive—always getting ready to do something

2. Under-organized and Under-Productive—always moving things from here to there, thinking about what to do next, but actually doing little

Look for signs that you may be hidden employing procrastinators who are like fish hooked and left on the sand thrashing about, again falling into two basic types:

• · Authority-resistant employees who get in the habit of doing what they like and pushing off what they don’t like doing. Think about employees chronically late with periodic reports

• · Employees who get caught in freeze-frame thinking when faced with a large task and a long time line may be hiding several root causes of procrastination: deadline junkies, perfectionists, those with performance anxiety, and those who hit the wall that paralyzes their continued productivity.

Do you see a clear pattern here that all of these types of employees procrastinate because they can, need monitoring, and must be convinced they need to change?

I am betting you are beginning to see also that procrastinating behaviors cost your company in several ways in addition to profitability. Consider the impact on morale and job satisfaction of employees who are not procrastinators and can’t get what they need when they need it or are forced to take up procrastinators’ slack just to get their jobs done. How about allowing procrastinators to get away with their bad habits is just not fair to everyone who is working efficiently and some employees might be feeling angry and resentful?

Realize that procrastination is a hard-wired bad habit that needs to be broken and replaced by a hard-wired productive habit that needs to be formed. Keep uppermost in your mind that if you don’t confront procrastinating employees and see them through a hard-wired change, their bad habits will bounce back.

A change formula for procrastinating employees:



Step 1: Begin with a procrastination habit you want broken and an equally clear productivity habit you want formed

Step 2: Help each employee understand the negative payoff of the bad habit and the positive payoff of the good habit

Step 3: Require each employee to think through a step-by-step plan of action to stop the procrastination habit and start the new productivity habit and present it to you within a tight time frame for your agreement

Step 4: Hold each employee accountable to work the plan of action each day, every day until you are sure the new habit is formed, knowing that, at minimum, it takes 21 days to form a new habit. Remember, no sustain/no gain

Step 5: Talk up positive changes you notice, building support through friendly monitoring

Step 6: Chart each employee’s progress and applaud their success

Notice, I stopped short of celebrating the success of a change from procrastinating behavior to productivity behavior?

Why? The above change formula offers procrastinating employees your willingness to work with them to change unacceptable behaviors as your gift of allowing them to keep their jobs. What else you have done is given all employees the knowledge that you have a zero tolerance policy on procrastination.

Well done. Everybody wins.

Here’s a bonus for you: zero tolerance means you, too. What have you been putting off until…? Now remember, everybody isn’t guaranteed life ’til until comes. Carpe diem, seize the day!

So, look at those things that you intend to do. Ask yourself the advantages of doing each one now, instead of later. List the mental, emotional, physical, spiritual and financial costs of doing each one now. Is it worth the cost? If others are involved, share your thoughts about doing each one now. If the change does not dependently involve others, still be accountable about your intention, get some support, feedback and monitoring.

Related Articles
  Procrastination - How to End the Cycle
  Marketing strategies: Procrastination and the Fear of Failure
  Pushing Past Procrastination - The Revelation
  Structured Procrastination
  Put Your Procrastination COWS Out To Pasture!
  Defeat Procrastination and Make More Cash!
  Tips to Create a Productive Day - Marketing and Sales Trainer
  Break Free from the Chains of Procrastination with Rational Self-Talk
  Eradicate Procrastination - Be Action Oriented
  Successful People Beat Procrastination
  Leadership is about Taking Action
  7 Quick & Easy Ways to Avoid Procrastination
  4 Tips for Overcoming Procrastination
  How To Overcome Procrastination
  Self-Coaching Tip: Find the Guidance in Your Procrastination
  How to beat procrastination
  How to Deal: Difficult Employees
  8 Ways of Looking at Procrastination and How to Avoid it
  Say “Bye! Bye!” to Procrastination and Take Action Now!
  Are You a Procrastinator

Article Tags: performance anxiety, prefectionism, procrastination



Related Forum Posts
Congratulations, Evan! - Hope you have a wonderful honeymoon! Bring back some of that sunshine for us!
Re: What is your biggest challenge? Today? - My biggest challenge is focusing. There are so many things I want to do and ideas that I have. I can never decide what to do next and when I do decide it's hard to focus on it and get it done. Procrastination is the resulting outcome.
How to you re-fresh yourself? - Productive time improvement is about increasing the time that you, your staff or your organisation has available for front-line service delivery; and making sure that time is being used to best effect - "working smarter" by: - doing the right things - (eliminate unnecessary work) - the right way - (use standard, streamlined processes) - with the right people - (right skills, availability, location) - using the right tools and equipment. But we all will agree that somewhere we don't follow these and give ourselves a break. When I give myself a break, I a. play online games b. chat on Internet c. Listen to some soft music What you do when you are not "working smarter"?
Re: Spellcheck? - [quote="TheAnonymousMan":2f894q6j]When discussing the majority of people I would definitely say that most people hit the "Change" or "Ignore" button without thinking too much about the correct spelling of a word. All bosses are concerned about is getting the report to the Directors meeting on time.[/quote:2f894q6j] That probably depends on what the "majority" are trying to accomplish. I have word set to alert me about misspellings and grammatical problems, so I fix most as I go. But I also add names etc to the dictionary because I get tired of seeing the red and green squiggles when I know the info is right. If you're only going to click "Change" or "Ignore" then why bother to take the time to use spell check????? Business people that I work for want the info compiled in a timely manner and they want it right - which is fine because that's the way I strive to do any project. Sending out a memo, letter, report etc with obvious spelling and grammatical mistakes makes the person and the company look bad as far as I'm concerned. Shri
Re: Quote of the Day - "Don't be embarrassed about asking "stupi - 100% agree with this. It's also a great lesson towards getting people to stop worrying about what others think of them. I've also found that on forums the "sorry this may be a stupid question but..." type of questions often produce a lot of useful responses, which is good for the person asking the question, good for the forum users, and good for the forum owners. Bring on the "stupid questions"!


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Good News Travels Fast

How To Be A Management Legend

What Type of Business Should I Start?

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.