Is Your Mindset Working Against You & Not For You?

February 03, 2021
By: Audrey Clark of Audrey Clark Co.

You could be suffering from Akrasia! Not sure what Akrasia is or how it may be impacting your life? Curious? Ready to take a look?

So, do you find yourself putting things off, maybe a task that should have been completed last week? How about even completed this morning? And thinking about that task you put off, you might be fretting and maybe feeling front-of-mind pressure. But before you feel ready to tackle this task, you are wondering to yourself, do I have enough information yet, or thinking perhaps tomorrow would be a better day to start, right? Sounding familiar and hitting any nerves yet? Yep, me too.

Recently, in the course of a coffee chat with a very talented and successful professional, we found ourselves talking about business challenges we personally faced every day. Not the usual things like off-the-chart marketing plans or better systems, but about our business mindset and feeling a lot of anxiety when we put things off. We didn’t want to admit it, but it’s what we called the “P-word”....Procrastination...

For the most part, our tasks are not usually big, but whoa, the more we put these things off, and they grow bigger in our minds. What starts as a pebble quickly becomes a mountain boulder.

We stared at each other and said, why? Why is this? We put things off when we know we need to get them done? With that, I said, there has got to be something, a beneficial system or way that can I (we) can stop procrastinating and get pressure out of our lives!

So, I looked into this pervasive pattern of mine, maybe yours? I needed to know the behavior driving me. Why do I tend to do this over and over...that’s when I found it! Low and behold, there is a real scientific reason! It seems our brains are wired to do this! Hmmm. In fact, Greek philosophers Socrates and Aristotle, who recognized and then actually named this timeless act, referred to this behavior. They created the word Akrasia to describe how a person acts against their better judgment through weakness of will. Ouch! But no, there is a science that found the driver of this behavior.

Behavior science reveals our brains work from a phenomenon that is referred to as “time inconsistency.” Our brain literally pulls us away from what good intentions we have set. Literally, we have our Today-self brain overriding our Future-self brain. Our brain has been running in the Today-self for around 200,000 years when people had to provide for their daily survival needs and react immediately, for things like food, shelter, etc. (the need it now to survive brain). With the advances of civilization for the past 500 years, there has been a need for our Now-self to be working for our future self. We now live longer and find we need to delay the instant gratification(that-get-it-now-to-survive) to build something for our Future-self(things-that-are-due-in-tomorrow-or-later). The Today-self needs to shelve the Facebook and texts and focus on the high priority for the Future-you payout. The Today-self works from the space of you see that donut now(survival brain) and you enjoy it, but your Future-self may not benefit from your desire to eat a donut every time you see one (Future unhealthily self). Another example is don’t you want to buy those expensive $100 tennis shoes today vs. save $100for tomorrow’s Future-self’s ’retirement plan. See where this is going? Who is winning the battle? Checking emails or getting to the#1taskcompletedbefore it becomes a boulder?

If you haven’t read Atomic Habits by James Clean, do it now.

Here Are Three Ways to Break Our Akrasia Craving.

1. Set a firm Deadline: Without a set deadline, the project or task can meander along. A UCLA Study on the Impact of Deadlines shows the pm decision is midway when you get down to work. Just about halfway between the start of the project and the deadline and the unfinished task's pain.

John Maxwell, the Leadership expert, believes that timing is a critical part of the decisions we make, even if we need to wait to be wise for more information to help the affected people. But ultimately, we need to make a decision and complete our tasks.

Here are questions to ask yourself if you are running into procrastination problems.

-When missing deadlines becomes a regular occurrence.

-When you often ask, “When is the latest that I can do this?” instead of “When is the soonest that I can tackle it?”

-When you frequently come across old documents and to-do lists that you haven’t missed in weeks or months.

-When items on your to-do list continually roll over to the next day, week, or month.

-When items get crossed off your to-do list not because they’ve been completed, but because they’re too out of date to be done.

James Stovell says,“ Don’t wait for all the lights to turn green before you leave the house.” Set your deadline and get moving!

2. Work With A Proven System to be Successful: You’re ready to begin! But how to set up your tasks to create a method of completing tasks, making those tough business decisions, and removing barriers to stay focus-driven. Try implementing The Ivy Lee Method.

At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Please keep it to six tasks.
Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.
When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.
Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.
Repeat this process every working day.

3. Do The Most Important Thing First, Each Day. Let’s talk about procrastination and productivity and how they really work together. For most of us, getting things done each day is productivity... Wrong. Productivity is getting important things done consistently. If you do something important first each day, then you always get something important done. So here is where most of us are. We are implementing The Ivy Lee Method from Step 2, but we find we are completing tasks #4, #5, and # 6. We are skipping the most important things on our list!

Start your list in order, first thing in the morning when you have your best energy and efforts. Our human brain does not like unfinished tasks; it makes us feel stressed and tense. Ever tried not to get the house tidied up before you start working from home?

The likelihood of finishing a task after you start is higher, so do the most important thing as soon as possible. If you commit to nothing, you will be distracted by everything.

Now that we have identified Akrasia, aka procrastination, it’s time to make some changes. Set a deadline, make a list, and do first things first! By being aware of how we think and what drives us, we can make better daily decisions and get the important things done with less stressing. Better decisions can make a difference and improve our lives, our business, and those we serve every day.