Back in school, were you the “good” student who felt better when you hit the books right after you got home? Or were you the “lazy slacker” who didn’t start studying until the morning of the final?
If you’re still the diligent type who doesn’t like to put things off, you might be used to hearing praise for your excellent time management skills. But if you tend to procrastinate, you’ve become accustomed to people wondering if you’re unreliable, prone to miss deadlines or doomed to fail.
Bay Area psychologist and author Mary Lamia wants to take the judgment out of understanding what motivates people to get things done and to become successful in work and in life. Lamia, a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, is the author of a new book, “What Motivates Getting Things Done.”
In the book, Lamia says there is nothing morally or cognitively wrong with the person who’s not motivated to act until he or she feels the heart-pounding terror of an imminent deadline. In fact, Lamia says that both task-driven early birds and “deadline-driven” procrastinators can be highly successful, able to meet deadlines and turn in quality work.
Lamia’s premise is that people are motivated to act at different times and in different ways. Moreover, these triggers are the function of basic human emotions, notably fear of failure or the pleasure of success, mixed in with experiences people had growing up or going to school.
“Any emotion, positive or negative, can motivate you to complete a task,” says Lamia, who also is in private practice in Marin County. “We may not like feeling some of our negative emotions, but they serve an important purpose: Our avoidance of negative emotions or our wish for relief from how they make us feel not only motivates us but also keeps us in check both personally and socially.”
Lamia’s book is subtitled “Procrastination, emotions and success” and its purpose is to help people recognize their motivational triggers and learn to work with them — especially with negative and potentially paralyzing feelings like anxiety, disgust, anger and shame.
She believes that self-awareness can help people get things done more effectively and push themselves to new levels of success. This self-awareness also can help people work better with classmates and co-workers on group projects and improve personal relationships with roommates, relatives and even intimate partners whose motivational styles clash with their own. Here are some basic principles embedded in her book:
Motivational styles start young
People develop their patterns for responding to emotions as very young children, and those patterns solidify as they experience feeling bad if they don’t do what their parents tell them or pride if they complete their homework, Lamia says. Those “early response patterns” never go away, but “continue to influence how you get things done throughout your life,” she adds.
A compulsion to act
Task-driven people feel anxiety when something is undone, especially something major, Lamia says. They want to take action as soon as possible to get relief from that anxiety. They rely on to-do lists and savor a sense of accomplishment when they check things off that list, even something as routine as responding to an email. If they’re faced with a long-term project, they want to leave themselves plenty of time to finish it. They especially want time before the deadline to revise their work.
Lay off the procrastinators
Procrastinators, on the other hand, may not feel any urgency until a deadline is bearing down on them, Lamia says. In the meantime, they may fill their time with busy work or fun activities such as playing video games. It may seem like they’re afraid to get started or just oblivious to how important an assignment is. But ideas could be taking shape in their brains the whole time.
Once the deadline hits, the procrastinator might might fantasize about asking for an extension, but the successful ones rarely follow through. Meanwhile, the deadline pressure can bring the job into very clear mental and emotional focus — the “flow” as it is called — allowing the procrastinator to turn out high quality work in what may be a first and only draft.
Lamia notes that an estimated 70 to 95 percent of college students procrastinate in various ways; the fact that many are doing just fine means that procrastination isn’t the path to failure that it’s been made out to be.
Unfortunately, industries have risen up in K-12 education, academia and in the publishing of parenting, self-help and business manuals. They all tell kids, students, workers and everyone else that procrastination is wrong. But this kind of judgment can be counterproductive for people who aren’t emotionally wired to be task-driven, Lamia argues. It’s also not going to make them change if they’ve found that procrastination works for them, she says.
Make anxiety your friend
Emotions such as fear and anxiety have an evolutionary purpose, which is to protect us from threats, Lamia says. Fear actually is a response to an imminent threat, like the bear charging at you, while anxiety is a longer-lasting state of nervousness over some perceived threat in the future — as in how awful you will feel if you don’t do well on an important test or if you screw up a work assignment.
Yes, anxiety isn’t pleasant, but as long as it’s not paralyzing, it can force people to pay attention to that scary assignment as well as provide the physical and emotional energy to tackle it, Lamia says.
“You may dislike the way it makes you feel, but that’s the point: the primary way in which anxiety motivates you to take action involves your desire to rid yourself of the feeling,” she says.
Shame’s also a great motivator
People spend a lot of their waking lives trying to avoid shame — losing face or being embarrassed in front of classmates, a crowded room or intimate partners. At the core of shame is a fear of failure, of messing up, of being perceived as incompetent and even unlovable, Lamia explains.
“Shame permeates our existence and affects our personal identity in profound ways,” Lamia says.
She said this fear probably stems from when we’re children as young as 2 and we feel moments of emotional disconnect from our parents when their attention is diverted to something else or when they look at us with disapproval because we’ve done something we shouldn’t.
But, like anxiety, fear of shame can be “a powerful motivating force,” Lamia says. Sure, even successful people have times when they don’t want to go out on a limb for fear of messing up. But people who accept the possibility of shame are motivated to do what they can to avoid it, including putting in the time to make sure they perform well when needed.
Lamia adds that shame can be a good teacher. It helps us to learn from our mistakes. Enduring the loss of face and learning from that experience is “essential for success,” she says.
“What Motivates Getting Things Done: Procrastination, Emotions and Success”
By Mary Lamia, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 150 pages, $32.
