LD_73_TimothyPychyl_Interview.mp3

Harry: I am now speaking with Tim Pitcher who is a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and he is a specialist in procrastination. So Tim, thank you very much for speaking to me.

Tim: I don’t procrastinate, I just studied it.

Harry: Right, exactly. So you are not a procrastination expert you are just a procrastination enthusiast maybe?

Tim: Of course I have procrastinate in my life, there were periods in my life when it was the bane of my existence like many people so I get it from the inside but there are some of colleagues who say how can you say this, you don’t procrastinate. Well that’s because I have studied enough now not to be able to do it

Harry: Well, that’s a very good point. You said something before we started recording that I wish I was reporting and you promised to say it again. So we were just talking about time and you said you had a thought about that.

Tim: Yes and just this morning. This isn’t the first time I had this thought but it hit me profoundly today because I was going to do three to four tasks this morning and one of them had to be removed and I thought to myself time is a true zero-sum game and the next essential thing is you don’t know how much of it you are going to get but you are only going to get so much and it’s not an available resource that way so it is always a matter of how you chose to use your time which is the bottom line for me.

Harry: Absolutely and that's a really good launching point for this because o differentiators that I try to make with people when I'm trying to help them be more efficient is that there's a difference between procrastinating and deferring no answer for me deferring. For me deferring is when you're putting something off to a time that you can actually deal with it more effectively, to me and I was hoping that you're going to correct me on this, Tim but procrastination is really about sort of about just putting it under rug because you just don't want to deal with now and you just sort of disassociate yourself with the task

Tim: Well, I don’t have to correct you. You hit the nail right on the head. In fact I’ve got a new graduate student who is going to be doing her research on this concept of active procrastination. There are some researchers who don’t agree with you, they found this active procrastinator who delay purposely and they call it active procrastination which of course is an acting ___(2:30 -unclear). You have defined it correctly that there is deferral, there is intention updates, while I am going to put this off its just better for me to do this later and then nothing and that’s a good thing you do it every day, you have to and then there is procrastination where you have the intention to do it and you should do it now but as you put so well you push it under the rug because you don’t want to really you don’t want to you want to feel good now it’s that instant gratification thing.

Harry: Yes, okay. So before we even get into the details of procrastination, what got you interested in procrastination is in the first place? Which is kind of a funny question, I think.

Tim: I didn’t study procrastination as a graduate student although at times I did it but I did study other graduate students when I did my doctorate research. I actually spent time studying doctor’s across many different departments and I would interview then and I would say things like what you are doing and they would say I am kind of sitting around the research room here and lack and complain about our work, well, what are you supposed to be doing. I am supposed to be working on my comprehensive exam. So why are you not working on your comprehensive exam? I don’t know what to do. Well, why don’t you talk to your advisor? I can’t let them know that I am not doing anything. Then I would thought to myself there is a _____( 3:39 - unclear) that’s really thick. These are really intelligent people saying really silly things. And so I was studying people’s goal pursuits and I was intent on having a goal pursuit predictable of what became painfully obvious to me was that we predicted unhappiness with the things we said we were going to do and didn’t do in a timely way. So I realized that I wanted to move away from studying goal pursuit to studying what goal pursuit breaks down, and it’s definitely procrastination.

Harry: Right, okay. So how did that research actually began though? What did you start to look at first? Like, how or what - I guess there is the how and the why to procrastination, so what do you start with?

Tim: I start with of a paradox. I had a lot of students interested in this and all my research is driven by my students but back in the ‘90s one of the first things we did we said you know what interesting people procrastinate because you are getting rid of something not interesting, I don’t want to do that I would rather have fun instead and yet when we look at the little bit of research literature out there procrastination seems to be crowded with negative emotions and we think that why’s is that if you are procrastination shouldn’t you be feeling food, so we actually did some examples sampling studies, we put pagers on people and try to catch them at the moment they are procrastination, not just as general, traits of their procrastination, do you procrastinate all the time, but if you are procrastinating right now, how do you feel because we want to understand how do you feel about it when you procrastinated and lo and behold the negative emotions were no longer called procrastination when you are actually procrastinating but then again they were not strong positive emotions either particularly because there was one emotion that was dominant and that was guilt so that is kind of some of the first studies we did with these experience sampling studies, we were trying to get what people were feeling and thinking when they were procrastinating but since then we have done lots of different studies and people who are listing that may be interesting they may go to procrastination.ca and you will find all the research that we do.

Harry: Okay, that’s an interesting theory to it, that guilt issue that is not always associated with procrastination. This is like with dieting or with you know how you act on your relationship. There is all that guilt but yet it doesn't seem to cause a change it seems like people who procrastinate it's almost clinical that it gets to this point where people they just can’t make themselves do things anymore because they get into this mode of

procrastination and also has does that tie in for you with this, it's not really a question but concept you know in an eight-hour day the average worker is really doing like two hours of work so is that active procrastination or is that something else?

Tim: That can just be procrastination, a lot of people like to call it laziness, irresponsibility I supposed but it cost huge amounts of money to businesses when people waste time like that when they are not on task. It’s a lot of agencies there. Let me go back to that guilt. Absolutely we are stewing out own juices with procrastination and the guilt is really like a phenomenon of what social psychology called all cognizance , that’s classic cognizance you know you have an intention and your behaviour is not matching that intention so the gap between your intention and action that defines procrastination needs cognizance. As you said we don’t do anything about it doesn’t seem to motivate things and it could that would be a very ideal thing to change your behaviour which means that you get going but instead we have lots of strategies to reduce cognizance like we dismiss it, it is not all that important, I’ll fell more like it tomorrow or I’ll work that under pressure and all these things are said so that we can feel better about ourselves so we are trying to reduce the guilt. Now we’ll never completely able to escape our self deception that way. We do a pretty good job of it and we might have use substances, we might have had a couple of beers or some other substance of choice. Anything to get away from that guilt but it is paradoxable to me why we become our own worst enemy and that’s what keeps me studying procrastination.

Harry: Okay, so you said you keep studying it because of that paradox so what can people do about it or what have you found to be most effective ways for people to overcome procrastination?

Tim: We can become very strategic and make little baby step even when we haven’t grasp the whole thing but I am going to start with what I think we ultimately have to do. I am going to start with some techniques you can use right away. Ultimately, you have to come down to what we said earlier, what you thought you wanted me to repeat which is time is zero-sum game and how are you choosing to do it because to me extension routes to procrastination is not getting on with life itself. It is a horrible thing. This is your life what are you going to do with it? To me when you wake up and open your eyes to that, to your own sense of agency then you start making choices and then you won’t stew in your own juices anymore, you either do the thing that is the next thing to do or you bath in it, you said I am taking it right off my list and it has a very zed like quality there, the emotions of the other masters with the students who seek enlightenment and the students who are novice, what am I doing he said and the master said do you finish eating his rice? And he said okay then wash your bowl. And it relates honestly or when it comes down to that it is profound that I think has to happen in order to deal with procrastination. Now, that’s a tall order in a sense because even by using that story it has some sense of wisdom or enlightenment attached to it but I do think there is some truth in it. Now, along the way you can do lots of trick and techniques and I think that’s what mindful meditation and practice of any sort brings to you, you act as if you have this enlightenment and one day you realize it is the practice but for me it always comes down to getting started so once I make the intention I have to recognize that I am not going to feel like it when the time comes so that’s a big lift, am I actually going to

feel like it. So first of all, okay I am just going to get started, I am not thinking about the whole task it’s just the knack of just doing it. It’s just getting started because we certainly found in our research that once we get started it changes our perception of the task.

Even our early research with the pagers, you know once students got down to the task of at hand they didn’t say things like, “I am glad I waited for the last minute because I work so much better under pressure”. They said things like, “This is not as bad as I thought, I wish I had started earlier, I could have done a much better job.” So we know that just getting started is essential and that’s an emotional thing and a bit of a behavioural strategy but the cognizance of strategy make the let’s get away from these vague, bold intentions like I’ll do that task on the weekend and the task is a bit poorly defined and the weekend is really poorly defined and get down to really precise intention implementations like when I finished my coffee on Saturday morning I’m going to do this part of that task and define it precisely, the situation acts and the behaviour why to achieve sub goals z so if you can add that in your life just moving from broad goal intentions to specific intentions you are going to have a whole heap forward even if you haven’t gotten to the point where you have kind of woken up and smell the coffee and said it is my life what am I going to do with it today?

Harry: Yes, okay and I'm very very much with what you are saying. So for something that is like a large project but it’s .... and I always make a joke of this, but actually it is very sad but it’s that I have seen this now seven times on a client's a to do list which was right book okay so ...

Tim: Of course. And you know with my students, if I ask one of my graduate students, what are your doing and they said working on my thesis, I know that they are doing nothing because it is just too big and broad, but if they say to me oh I am struggling with that section we were talking about the other day where I was trying to make the transition from so and so research to my ideas, I think okay you are doing something. So writing a book that’s good, it’s a very high meaningful goal but we have to always juggle in our lives, manageability and meaning. Meaningless things aren’t going to get done because they are meaningless, things that are not manageable aren’t going to get done even if they are even meaningful so you always going to have to keep this balance in mind. So writing a book is very meaningful, it’s connected to one of my core values, what is the next step? What am I actually going to do today or the next hour and that’s where you get into implementation intention.

Harry: Okay, right. Then the implementation intention is good in itself of course but on a systematic or I guess on a logistics level what do you tell people. Is it break it down so that you know what the next step is, sort of like a ...

Tim: Yes I do but I try not to, that’s been as a multiple statement around procrastination for years and you think they have a time management problem but they really don’t have time management problem, very few people have time management problems. Some of the research we have done continually show that procrastinators don’t broken somehow they don’t really estimate time badly but they don’t manage their emotions very well so I think that you can break down your tasks but when it comes to that first

part of your task where you have that strong emotion reaction is when you have a six year old beside you. I have a six year old almost seven run around my house and I know him very well and I’d say, “Alex it is time to make your bed,” and he would day, “I don’t feel like it, I don’t want to”, and I’d say, “Alex I didn’t ask you how you felt, I love you but that didn’t answer my question, it’s time to make your bed.” And so we have that six year old alive and well inside of us but we think saying that I don’t feel like it is an explanation for not doing something and if you stand back from that and realize how silly it is, it’s kind of enlightening in itself.

Harry: Okay this is great because what I've sort of hit on me a few times or several times actually is I'm a parent. I have three small boys. My wife stays at home, I work at home so we’re both here a lot with the kids and we have a two-and-a-half-year-old and twin 14 months old and they're all boys. And what I tell people a lot is, it doesn't matter if I'm tired, it doesn't matter if I'm sick, it doesn't matter if I'm throwing up in the toilet I still have to feed someone, somebody still has to be changed somebody, somebody has to be stopped from falling off the counter. You know like you just have to do it and that’s okay and that's great actually but it doesn't matter if you don't feel like it that's totally irrelevant.

Tim: Yes and if we can bring that to bear then most of our lives we would be much better off. In fact we see a lot of procrastination in students, we see it other places in life of course but those people there is not all that damage give the job to busy persons because they are already in motion, and a lot of that too is that they recognize that I don’t have a lot of time. Another view on this is something that some people call the unscheduled and it is a really interesting way to think about your life it is that when we think about next week, if I said to you, Harry could you do this with me today if you are not a little too busy and you said alright next moth we will do this. Most likely we are going to say yes and in fact there is a lot of interesting research about our present self and future self where our future self is like a stranger. You know I don’t care that’s future self, future self problem.

Harry: Future homework.

Tim: That’s it. You got it. Man I don’t envy that guy. Homework just labelled it so beautiful there because our brains act differently when you think about present self and future self. If I think about a stranger, I will treat future self more like a stranger. But on the other side the unscheduled is I take a blank calendar for next week and I fill in all of the things that I really have to do, I write down the nitty gritty like brushing my teeth and showering because that takes time. Like even today, I have to run to a vet appointment for a cat today and I thought to myself gee I am not going to make it for my shower before this because I have to leave as soon as we are done. So all that have to go in there and then you get a more realistic attitude of what you really have available for these other tasks and it kind of put you on edge space much like the busy kern who it doesn’t matter if I am throwing up or I am feeling sick I still have people to care for. If you actually look at all of the things that are going on in your life and then you got other tasks thrown in and you said I had better do that right now, right then because that’s it, that’s all the time I have, I can’t get into this wishful thinking so I think what happens as a parent, it happens to many of us and we realize we have to step up here. Now what I

want to see people do is to step up to is to ordering their lives even before they are taking care of somebody else.

Harry: Right, exactly and of course we can’t apply that to everything we do but in a way we can because if you are doing work that's meaningful to you, that you care about, then how is that not the most important thing, how is that not the essence of your being. I mean somebody could say like oh I'm just recording a podcast with you right now and it's just a podcast but to me this is what I do. The conversation that we're having right now is value is the value that I get and sharing with the .... you know it is integral to my life.

Tim: Yes, but probably somebody else will say, Harry he has found something meaningful, I don’t do meaningful work but that doesn’t matter either we could look at finding meaning and think that’s really important because I think a job and doing well kind of thing. But you can also look at it as that, okay, this is my task in front of me, I have finished eating my rice, I am going to wash my bowl and I am going to do it now so that I can get on to other things. Even Viktor Frankl he spent time in a nutty concentration camp and when he wrote his autobiography he wrote about procrastination and that blew me away because I thought he got other things to say here but what he gets like every major religion gets with the notion of smart is that wasting time is a sin against life itself because it is so precious because there is nothing more precious you are going get more than time and so if you are doing something then get it done and this is what Viktor Frankl wrote and I will go back to what he said, “I have learned to do the difficult job first because that’s when I have the energy. I learn to get things done so that I have time for the important things in life.” Let’s go back to the example of being a parent, not only you realize you have to care for your kids whether you head is in the toilet or not but you don’t want to put off your stuff in the day and then look at your children later and say I don’t have time to play I have to work, because that’s the important thing in life, right. So even if the task at hand isn’t intrinsically meaningful, like washing your bowl after eating your rice, getting it done so that you can get on with the other things that do reflect your values and your agency, that’s why you do it quickly, that’s why you do it right and that’s why you don’t stew in your own juices

Harry: So that's right and that's the thing. If something is an obstacle in your way like washing the bowl (we are going to keep that as an example) is an obstacle for five seconds of your life or it's just something that it will pile up in the dishes and you have to deal with it later, that later is going to piss you off and you're not going to sleep well and actually it's a butterfly effect some ways

Tim: It is, yes it is, but it seems like a silly example because we have taken the same story but quite frankly I am sure there are listeners whose dishes are sitting on their counter and they are saying I don’t feel like it, just what you described and what happen the next day they are going to pile up and then they are going to be very hard to wash because everything is really stuck on, its dried on and what was a 2-second job becomes a much longer job. And so if I go back to my story with my son when he told me I don’t feel lime making my bed, I’d said to him, “Hey Alex you know what I will give you a dollar if you can count to 10 before I got your bed made but you have to count one thousand one one thousand two.” He said, “All right.” He is motivated externally by the thought of a dollar, and he starts to count and I made the bed, he doesn’t get to 6, the bed is made,

he learned something deeply important. You spend more time moaning and groaning and thinking about a task than what a lot of them take to get done and if you can get them done in that timely way, they don’t go that chaos, that butterfly effect that we have when that happened when we let these little things piled up in our heads.

Harry: Oh, yes. Are you familiar with motivational interviewing at all?

Tim: No.

Harry: This is like another concept. I have recently learnt about this. They are making a bad example as a good example for and I have heard this and loved it. So with the child example who wouldn’t make their bed, what motivational interviewing would have to do is ask two questions and the first question is: (Well my son’s name is Ben, my oldest son is Ben) Ben, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being totally not ready, doesn’t want to do it at all and 10 being you are really excited into doing it right now, how would you rate yourself as far as your willingness to make your bed? And you know a flipping child or you know would say well I am a two then. And so then the second question is: Okay, so why didn't you say that you were a one? Which basically forces them to justify and put it into their own thoughts on their own terms like well you know basically sort of give them some different perspective on that and apparently it's very rare for someone to say they're one in that situation because that's just being ridiculous. So I really like that and I think that that in a way brings you back to your present self, it's like well it's not a matter of then or now, it’s really like why am I not ready or am I actually really am read, I might as well just do it. But I have another example for you, which the washing the dishes is a great one but this is a personal one that I find happens a lot is every time I go into the bathroom, you know one of the guest bathroom or the main bathroom at our house and maybe I'm going to wash my hands, maybe I'm going to use the bathroom but if there is little or no toilet paper left it's very very easy to just walk away and say man I don't want to go get another roll of toilet paper from downstairs and change that, but of course then your future self has to do with that time that you go to the bathroom and you're sitting there and then there's no toilet paper so ...

Tim: I never do that. I can get impatient with my own partner who makes sure she is like that, the dish soap is almost done, not completely done but not to refill it then when you actually have a minute, you don’t know what future sense is going to be facing, present self really does have a moment to do that but present self said I want to do something else, I don’t want o do that and that visita reaction that I don’t want to do that is worth exploring because what does it mean, what are you going to do instead, are you really having so much fun doing whatever else it is, if you can just get into the habit of doing things right away, what happens is that you are allowed to be spontaneous later because you are without guilt because you’ve got everything, all your docks are in a row, but most to the time people come back to and say I wouldn’t want to be as uptight as that like they are always doing things on time, you know what my procrastination is, my spontaneity and I said hey it’s actually just the opposite. Procrastination weighs on like it’s the world and it’s like a monkey on your back and when real freedom offers itself to you can’t because you put yourself behind deeper. So I love your example, it’s a mundane one but I think it worth explanation of why is it when you look at a simple

task like I can go get another roll of toilet paper we have that vista I don’t feel like it. I think it is hard wired into us somehow

Harry: And then again so as to not over trivialize this because it is not to me but in that situation where I don't want to.... because we keep our toilet paper in the basement so it's not really no big deal ....but I don't I don't want to go get that roll, but when I do I actually feel, as little as that is, I feel like I accomplished something in a way.

Tim: The progress, with all this from research, that a little progress on our goal fuels our well being and actual this is one of the few places we see upward spiral well being because that little tiny success as trivial as it may seems spans the next thing, there is no panacea here but it is the opposite of the downward spiral of procrastination and guilt. It’s jut making the right choice.

Harry: Absolutely. So the last question I would like to ask is what are your top three personal tips for being more effective, not necessarily overcoming procrastination, maybe, but just what are your top three things for being more effective in your day?

Tim: That’s a good question, not many people ask me that question. I am a plan-full person, so one of my first is that I usually use a Day Timer, actually it’s on the computering on my iPhone and iPod and I actually colour code all the different parts of my life, like within my work life I’ve got research, teaching and administration those are different colours. I’ve got personal things, recreation, kids related things and consulting and book related things and all those are different colours. I can do a forensic audit of my week. I can look at them and I can look at that week and see how much recreation did I did, was there a lot of time with the kids, what’s the balance between research and administration. So, one of my practices is to be plan-full and also do a forensic audit constantly. Am I living the life I want to live? Am I getting the time for recreation that I want? Am I making time for the balance between teaching and research that I might want. All of those things and it’s a very good tool for me so that’s one of them.

The next one is the planning cognitive level. The most important part for me is the affective part about feeling like it. I am a big one for building good habitual theme so that things become nice so that they don’t take mental energy but it takes me a lot of energy to get there, everything from flossing your teeth, a habit that I can never miss to doing regular sit ups and push ups and strength exercise for my core, so even if I don’t take aerobic exercise I always have that core strength and honestly even though I do my push ups and sit ups, back exercises every day before I shower that’s my implementation intention. In situation act before I can step down into the show I step down and do those core exercises. So I have got that implementation intention and my vista reaction is I don’t feel like it, not today. So I always battle that with Tim just get started and a really mundane example of that is that I was doing push ups and back exercises really effectively but I was skipping my sit ups and so to break that ice all I had to do was go from being on my knees which is the way I do my back exercises and all I did was roll over on my back, I didn’t think about doing the sit ups, I just said when you finish this in situation x when your back exercise is done roll over on your back and now I am in a position where I might as well do the sit ups. You see how I am very strategic because you have to find the fin age of the wedges for you to be able to really build

habits you want. So for me, that’s super important that...you know some people look at and say I really admire your self-discipline. You know it’s not so much self-discipline, it’s just really building really good habits. It may be take a little discipline to build those habits but once you do life become so easy.

So the first one is the plan-fullness, the next one is creating those habits but always, I guess the bottom line to all of it for me is to just get started. You know I will face anything and then I would go I don’t feel like it, I don’t want to. I know different than any other person that I know I am not the most super-motivated man in the world but I do know what my goals are and so when I get to that point where I made an intention and I go I have this reaction I don’t want to do it, I hate this and I don’t even know what I am talking about really I’m just feeling it, I said let’s just get started and that has changed my world

Harry: That's awesome, that's really awesome. Okay, so we are going to have links to yourself and the show, but where's the best place for people to find out more about you.

Tim: As I mentioned earlier www.procrastination.ca . I mentioned that when you asked me about my research and there is so much in there. But if you got there you won’t just find my research you will find a link to my blog on psychology today, so if you want to read available procrastination research, I just been writing about that for years. I just read research and summarize it and try to find the main take away points. Unlike you I like to podcast I started back in 2005 and an on off again podcast but there is a lot there.

Harry: I know. I love your podcasts.

Tim: Thanks very much. And they range from interviews to personal stuff, so if you go to www.procrastination.ca you will find all of that.

Harry: Wonderful Tim. Thank you so much. This has been a really wonderful conversation for me and I really appreciate your time.

Tim: And for me too. Most of the time I have been staring at your handsome face here and you have such a warm, it’s a nice picture of you even though it’s one of those snapshot from my computer camera but it felt like I match it and that’s a nice thing Harry.

Harry: Thank you very much.

Tim: Alright take care.