"Procrastinating because of weak willpower."
90% of people misunderstand this, and my past self also decided, "I am a person with weak willpower."
Work that needs to be done is pushed to "maybe tomorrow."
Emails that need a reply are left unread for a week.
Not spending time on a side hustle using "busy with the main job" as an excuse.
A common sight.
However, if you end this procrastination by saying "I have weak willpower," there will be no room for growth.
The True Nature of Procrastination is Not Willpower
To define "procrastination" in this article first, it is:
The phenomenon where the brain intentionally postpones an action that it understands should be done.
Procrastination is not your flaw. It's a problem with the brain's structure.
Professor Piers Steel of the University of Calgary "mathematized" procrastination in his book.
Action motivation is determined by the value of (Expectancy × Value) divided by (Impulsiveness × Delay).
To put it simply, what this person wants to say is:
"The further away the reward, the more the brain underestimates the action to get that reward!"
That's why, rather than results 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years from now, we choose:
- Beer and cigarettes after work
- The continuation of a drama on Netflix that hasn't been finished
- Loafing around for 3 hours because "I'm just tired"
Furthermore, the talk of emotions comes in.
Professor Timothy Pychyl of Carleton University explains procrastination as a "failure of emotional regulation."
In short, it's not that the task itself is disliked, but rather the "discomfort that occurs at the moment of starting the action" is disliked.
This is the important point.
The peak of discomfort is "before" the action, not "during the work."
In other words, what we were avoiding was not the work itself, but the discomfort when imagining the work.
Why do people keep paying membership fees for gyms they don't go to?
I found it troublesome to cancel Anytime Fitness and continued to pay 9,000 yen every month for about a year and a half. I probably paid about 160,000 yen in total.
However, thinking calmly, the work required for cancellation is one phone call and one document. Even though the required time is less than 15 minutes, I left it for 18 months.
It would have been better to pay someone 10,000 yen to ask them to make the cancellation call on my behalf.
Even so, I didn't do it—or rather, I couldn't.
To-do lists were made, and I have a faint memory of thinking, "I should cancel the gym soon."
To find the cause of this, it seems I have to understand it from the structure of the brain.
This article doesn't end with the boring conclusion of "Don't procrastinate! Just take action!" What needs to be solved is the structure itself where the brain "underestimates the value of distant rewards."
From now on, I will tell you the structure of the brain and three "ways to prevent procrastination" using that brain property.
The first one is...
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