Several years ago, I began to notice a pattern, both in myself and in many of my clients. The person who described herself as a ‘perfectionist’ would also name procrastination as a typical problem. This puzzled me - weren’t perfectionists and procrastinators two different types of people? But I saw these tendencies in myself, too, so I couldn’t deny their co-existence. It made me want to learn more, and I ended up discovering some pretty interesting things about why some of us put off until tomorrow what could be done today.
Procrastination vs. Incubation
The first thing I discovered was a distinction between what psychologists call incubation and procrastination.
Here’s what my essay-writing habits have looked like for decades: I will choose a topic, think about it a lot, do intensive research, make notes, chat with people about it, and then just stop. In college, I would engage in what I thought was procrastination: go to the cafeteria, stop by a friend’s dorm room, do the dreaded reading for Economics, rent a movie, even do laundry. Just anything to not write that essay. I would procrastinate and procrastinate until the day before (or the night before,) and then “bash out” an essay. (Fortunately or unfortunately for me, this method worked, in that it consistently yielded decent grades, which meant that I didn’t change my habits.)
To this day, I will follow the same pattern: think, research, take notes, have conversations, and then, stop. Clean the house, scroll Notes, watch TV, read a novel, do laundry - anything but write. Then with the deadline looming, I will write in a big rush, all at once. (Only now, there are no all-nighters and I give myself a few days for edits before the deadline.)
It turns out, what I’ve described is more akin to incubation than procrastination.
Incubation is what it sounds like: giving something time and space to grow. Procrastination is just putting it off. “For incubation to work, you start early, get really familiar with the project and then take a break. That isn’t procrastination, which starts with the break and then does the work only towards the end.”1
Creative Projects vs. (Boring) Necessary Tasks
Studies are still being done, but it makes sense to me. Doing a lot of work upfront, then pausing that work to let it ‘simmer’ or ‘bake’ means that when I return to it, I find that much of the creative work has been happening ‘on the back burner’. And this is something I’ve noticed, too: incubation happens with creative projects that benefit from time to ‘bubble away.’
For me, incubation doesn’t happen with tasks that just need to get done, like housework or the dreaded ‘life admin’ of doing taxes, sorting out incorrect utility bills, and ordering new lightbulbs. I procrastinate those latter tasks, with no real incubation involved. Sure, I might open a spreadsheet, but one look at it has me curled up in a ball of anxiety. I don’t actually do anything to move the needle, nor does my not doing anything yield creative growth. When I return to it, it’s still the same stressful task it was when I abandoned it in the first place.
It turns out, there are a couple of things that exacerbate the tendency to procrastinate: (1) we don’t value the task, and (2) we don’t expect to succeed. (If those don’t describe my feelings towards doing taxes, I don’t know what does!) Think about it: if we don’t think something is important or worth doing, why do it? If we think we’re going to fail, why bother?
Perfectionism & Procrastination
This is where perfectionism comes in. Perfectionists want to do the best job at the most important things! It’s an all-or-nothing approach: perfection or bust. There is no middle ground, so if you can’t do a perfect job? Do no job.
This is where we find the perfectionist-procrastinator combo. It’s really, really difficult for a perfectionist to make allowances for doing anything they deem unimportant or that they won’t be able to do excellently, so the perfectionist just procrastinates and procrastinates and procrastinates any unimportant task which doesn’t inspire immediate confidence in their ability to produce excellent results. In this case, procrastination is just unhelpful.
But I’ve also noticed that procrastination plays another, more helpful, role when it comes to perfectionism. The perfectionist is often someone who has trouble declaring any project finished, because it could always be more perfect! The perfectionist shudders at the idea that “done is good enough.” This means that if there’s any time left before the deadline, the perfectionist is not going to just wrap up the project, put it in the folder and move on. No, she’s going to use up every last moment to perfect the project. The old adage that ‘work expands to fill the time it is given’ applies directly to this situation.
One way the perfectionist gets around it? Procrastination. Consciously, or more often, unconsciously, allowing the time to slip away means that the perfectionist is sabotaging her own tendency to ‘never let well enough alone.’ If you’ve only got 3 hours to get the essay finished, you’ll do a decent job in 3 hours. If you have 10 hours, you’re going to spend 10 hours agonizing over every syllable and piece of punctuation. (Which is, albeit, a worthy task sometimes!)
What’s a Procrastinator To Do? Helpful Questions To Ask
I’ve found that at least part of the solution is simply to identify what’s happening.
Am I dealing with a creative project or a thankless task?
Have I actually begun to tackle it in any meaningful way?
Is anything going to ‘simmer’ while I do other things?
Am I helping myself to avoid ‘tinkering’ too much?
Sometimes I feel that I can’t proceed on a task because I’m lacking something: it might be information, help navigating a computer program, or even just the energy or ‘brain power’ to deal with it. In these cases, I ask myself:
What, specifically, would enable me to move forward?
External Needs
If it is something external to me, I will hand-write a list of every specific thing I need. Hand-writing them so they are visible all on one page makes me feel like I have a bit more control than when all the things I don’t know are just floating around in a stormy cloud in my mind.
Then, I will try to obtain the things on the list. I will search my emails for that random order number, or ask my husband to help me navigate the computer program. I make a point of both adding any new things and checking off all the ‘done’ things on my list as I go along. It’s strangely motivational!
Internal Needs
Now, if what I’m lacking is something internal to me, like energy, that gets a bit more complicated. One helpful question I try to ask is:
What do I think is going to change between now and completing the project?
Sometimes I really don’t have the energy to face a difficult conversation with customer service or a sink full of dishes, and sometimes I really will be able to tackle it better in the morning.
In this case, what I think will change is that ‘future me’ will have energy that ‘present me’ lacks.
Sometimes, I’m right about that. But sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I never have the energy to deal with the nebulous world of tax codes and I’m kidding myself if I think otherwise.
So how do I know if I’m being honest with myself? I try to ‘let the historical record show’ - do I usually have more energy to tackle annoying tasks in the morning, and do I usually actually do so? Or am I prone to just ignore the thing forever until the deadline is imminent? I’ve reached a point in life where I know I am likely to do the dishes, and not likely to deal with the spreadsheet. I know that the only thing motivating me to deal with life admin is the threat of a looming deadline.
What then? Well, I can’t say I’ve mastered overcoming procrastination, but I’ve found that being honest about what actually motivates me, vs. what I think should motivate me, helps a lot.
Next time, I’ll share more about how to figure out what motivates you!
Tell me: have you ever considered the difference between procrastination and incubation? Is it a helpful distinction? Do you have any secrets to overcoming procrastination?
In Case You Missed It:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-procrastination-equation/201604/the-original-myth
I have never heard someone describe my writing process so accurately 😅. I think I finished every essay from junior year of high school through college at 4-5 AM. I never edited, and shamefully got away with that strategy. I couldn’t make myself do it at night, which was usually a combination of wanting it to be good, not caring about the subject matter, and being exhausted. So I’d wake up early instead and somehow the extra pressure would force me to get it done. It got sketchy a few times when the library printer was acting up… I cannot recommend this process, but it was made even more stressful by how bad I felt about it! The “Why can’t I just be responsible and start assignments on time?” internal criticism didn’t make anything more enjoyable.
This is also a very helpful delineation between things that just need to happen, vs. times where the pre-work, simmer, full speed crank out works well.