Just before taking a break for the New Year’s holiday last year, I was cleaning out my inbox. I was startled to see an urgent email from the chief compliance officer at my company. She indicated that I had not completed a mandatory online training required by all employees that year. The letter informed me (gently, but persuasively) there could be serious consequences for my dereliction. Plus, as a senior manager I was setting a poor example. I had seen several notices throughout the year on completing this training from the HR department. But I kept putting itself off, convincing myself that I would get to it as soon as I could free up time from other projects. Needless to say, the email from the compliance office had the desired effect. I quickly completed the required training in 30 minutes.
This experience drew my attention to a post I recently read from a psychology professor at Loyola in Chicago. The professor’s argument was that procrastination is the leading cause preventing us from the completion of certain tasks or achieving our goals. According to him, procrastination wasn’t about being lazy, but at its root were hidden barriers – from simply not knowing the steps to take to complete a task to a broad fear of failure to unrecognized personal challenges completely outside the assignment or goal.
Procrastination, the professor argued, is never a personal failure, but evidence of deeper issues in our every day psyche, either related or unrelated to the immediate objective.
I wouldn’t go that far. Sometimes avoiding a task is simply avoiding a task.
I had no fear of failure or deep personal challenges that made this online training painful or uncomfortable. I understood the steps to complete it; I’ve done it before. I had simply given priority to an endless stream of more immediate, more interesting (to me), and more rewarding tasks—until this email made it clear that I no longer had a choice.
Because I always think in ranges, the combination of the article and my unforgiving chief compliance officer made me think about a spectrum of behaviors that might underlie procrastination: at one end are the tasks that we simply do not enjoy and that bring us little personal gain. In the middle are the tasks which we’d like to accomplish but are unsure how. At the far end are the tasks for which we have skills, talent, and desire but know that the work we produce will be judged—and criticized.
While the global elite is off at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week addressing critical challenges and grand ambitions to solve pressing global problems, my aspiration this year is a bit humbler. As a manager (and a parent), my resolution this year is to look for the potential reasons underlying why personal and team activities or projects might be at risk of going undone or falling behind. Understanding the psychological barriers behind the scenes might better help me better set team strategy and goals at the onset.
I also realize that these same barriers are the kinds of things that make people commit to well-intentioned resolutions at the beginning of the New Year, only to drop them by mid-Feb (Fact: close to 80% of us do!)
Check in next year to see how I did.
