Mills: So last question. And so we label our downtime as procrastination. I just want to ask if perfectionism and procrastination are linked and are perfectionists more or less likely to procrastinate? ALICE BOYES: So Im a huge fan of reverse engineering your system. And then also, cut yourself a little bit of slack about some of the creative procrastination, like recognizing that weve got this image of a productive person being this person who is never distracted, whos always focused, who never procrastinates, whos just hustling all the time. And they showed the data suggesting that their program worked and they showed the mean scores on this measure of chronic procrastination at the beginning of them coming to the clinic and at the end so they could say, Oh look, there's some improvement. And I remember standing there with a colleague of mine and we both were looking at the scores on this measure of procrastination at time one, and the level of procrastination that they found troubling was well below the average national mean for the procrastination in the U.S. and Canada, but this was troubling in Germany. So the researchers that have looked at what people do to procrastinate on their bedtimes, it's not just digitally oriented distractions, they engage in a whole bunch of things. Earlier in the morning, when your cortisol is high, when your brain is fresh, youll be able to take on the tasks youll need to be highly motivated for. If it was a country where the tolerance for procrastination was quite low, that might certainly have an impact, but I think it's about the acceptability as well. Sirois: That is a really good question. Emotions pretty much always come with thoughts and vice versa. We ask people about how often they procrastinate or if they're putting things off to tomorrow. And then yeah, what we see that as procrastination. Procrastination | Psychology Today Adding your daily task unlocks deep insights about your psychology. Sometimes its just people have more things that they want to do and theyre having trouble settling on one. This creates a problematic cycle, one that erodes our self-confidence. They called it a procrastination ambulance, which was I think their way of translating saying it was like a clinic for procrastination at a university, for students who were really troubled by their procrastination. Doer is the science -based guide to overcoming procrastination. So we think about having systems for tasks we do all the time, but we often dont think about having a system for novel tasks. And being able to help the person see ways of approaching tasks from the perspective of their strengths is something thats useful. Claudia explores the psychology of motivation and procrastination with an audience at the Cheltenham Science Festival. But what we actually know about people who are healthy, happy, and productive is that they dont go around spending a lot of time trying to reduce their emotions. And I remember there was one journalist I spoke to and he said, Yeah, I remember when I was a student at university and I hate cleaning, I hate housework, but whenever I had a big paper or exam coming, boy, was my house ever clean. And so instead of doing studying, he was running around getting the house perfectly clean.
