I recently read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is a fascinating book overall. His main theme is that humans are poor predictors of rare events (or even regular events) and that very little in this world falls within the bell curve, or “normal distribution”, especially events that involve human behavior.
In chapter 10: The Scandal of Prediction, he compares a natural event (death) and its predictability with various behavioral events. Where the expected remaining lifespan decreases with each passing year (bell curve), events based on human behavior tend to go the opposite direction. If a milestone or deadline is not met, the actual end date recedes farther into the future. Construction projects, work projects and wars are examples that Taleb uses. Incredibly, the longer these things last, the longer it will take until they end.
I thought of all of the areas in my life where that is true. Funnily, I had a deadline that I had missed, and was now risking perpetuating the delay. Allow me to explain.
When I train or consult, part of my contract is to provide a trip report after the training. I have a two week deadline from the end of the training period to finish the report. Most of the time, this is no problem. Sometimes, if I’m on the ball, I’ll work on it a little each night, so that the information is fresh. Also, this way it’s mostly finished by the time the training ends.
My first trip of 2020 was my problem. I wrote some notes each night. I planned to use time in the morning the next week, before my other training, to finish the report.
That first trip was the first of a 12 week series on the road. Each trip has its own preparation beforehand, work during that week, and post-trip report. By the time I was leaving the first week, preparation for weeks two through five were on top of me and the week one trip report was put on the back burner.
The farther away from that first trip I got, the worse the feeling of dread. Part of the dread was that I feared I’d forgotten what we talked about (it was more consulting than training), and would have difficulty recalling it. Another dread was that it was a school I’ve worked with several times before, and we’ve built a good relationship. We’ve even joked about the good quality of my trip reports and how helpful they are. I dreaded letting them down, or not reaching a high standard. Finally, an excuse to myself was that they’ve been waiting for over six months for a different consultant’s trip report, so a few weeks late would still seem timely in comparison.
On the day that I should have sent my finished trip report, I sent a message letting them know that my report would be a week late. That was embarrassing for me.
I worked on it a little during the week, but the combination of other things made it easy to continually delay working on it. It’s not that I wasn’t working, there was more than enough to do. It was just easy to put off this seemingly difficult task.
Let’s return to The Black Swan. I read the chapter mentioned above during the week the report was overdue. Seeing that as a real danger for this task, I resolved to have it submitted by the extended deadline no matter what it took.
I’m pleased to say that after working on it on the weekend (fortunately I had some time when everyone else in my household had other commitments), and also on my layover this morning as I head to week #5, I finished and submitted the report.
Taleb’s observations were accurate for my situation, and had I not read that chapter, I’d probably be the one that the school was upset with for not completing my responsibilities. Fortunately, and this is why events dependent on human behavior are inherently unpredictable, I was able to see where I was headed and disrupt the negative pattern.
This is an important lesson for me, especially as I’m only one third of the way through a long uninterrupted travel period. Getting behind is a real danger. If that happens, and I despairingly fall into a procrastination cycle, then I’ll be sunk. Many people will be upset with me.
Does this type of situation even happen to you? Leave a comment with any stories that you have and/or tips that you use to stay current on your tasks.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay
In my experience, procrastination cuts two ways: delaying the tasks I don’t care about and delaying those I do. I procrastinate for very different reasons depending on whether or not I care.
When I’m not sufficiently motivated, I can’t be bothered to break the inertia of lethargy. I hate doing laundry and up to a point it doesn’t matter if I get it done or not, and so… More consequentially, I had a problem during my university studies doing the reading or writing in classes taught by professors who failed to earn my respect, or in subjects that bored me. I couldn’t bring myself to care about an assessment given by someone whose opinion meant nothing to me. In the end, my apathy wasn’t practical. There were good reasons for me to care, but I failed to consider them because they were, at the time, too distant to anticipate.
Then there are times when I care deeply about an outcome. In these cases, I overload myself with pressure, to quickly and, indeed, perfectly accomplish what I have before me. When I put off this sort of task, it’s not because I don’t care but because I care so much that I find it difficult to face the standards I’ve set – I care too much. I’ve fallen into this kind of procrastination when I have important emails to write, when I’ve set myself business and financial goals, and even when I’ve intended to write something as simple (but meaningful to me) as a blog post.
On the surface and from the outside, my two reasons for procrastination appear identical. Some people get frustrated with me, thinking I’m flippant about the things I neglect, when in fact, it could very well be that I care so much that I can’t stop thinking about it, until I fall into that most contradictory and counterproductive coping mechanism, procrastination.
I wish I could say I have a tip or trick to beat procrastination. All I can say is, I think it’s like a computer virus, a program or neural routine that automatically runs under certain circumstances. My software needs reprogramming. I’ve heard that cognitive behavioral therapy is an effective reprogramming method. Most probably, anyone could learn to independently implement its methods.