Talking about procrastination. We’re all guilty of it at times. Recently, Drew got in deep trouble because he “chose” to procrastinate in getting a report to his boss. Opps. Big mistake. See, from Drew’s point of view there were a bunch of activities more client centric and more likely to result in revenue generation than the reports, so he delayed. Boss didn’t see it that way. Boss was mad as hell and interpreted Drew’s delay as a sign of not caring or immaturity.
So what’s procrastination all about? I should know. it took me forever to start this blog. But I didn’t know everything about it, so I asked my friendly neighborhood shrink Dr. Bud Littlefield for a psycholocial primer on how it is that we come to procrastinate. It comes down to several things. One is that people are genuinely and temporarily overwhelmed. Another is that we love the adrenalyne rush of pushing the edge of the envelope. Ah, yes, I remember my days writing my column at the Dallas Morning News. I always felt like if I could wait just a minute longer, I could get something even better than I had for it…. Sometimes I was correct. I did have better stuff for my column many times. It also was harrowing at times. Although I never missed a column deadline, I did push the envelope occasionally.
The question is when do we go over the edge, so that we anger colleagues, clients, or miss out on business opportunities? And why in the world would we do such a thing?
Drew said to me, “I’m not intentionally sitting around trying to mess things up. I thought I was making the right decision.”
Maybe, maybe not as we’ll discuss later. There’s more to procrastination than meets the eye.