Moment 177: You're NOT Lazy! This Is The REAL Reason You Procrastinate: The Performance Doctor

According to Adam, procrastination is a natural part of the creative process, and rather than a method of avoiding hard work, it is a defence mechanism. Procrastination can be a method of protecting yourself against what you find to be psychologically challenging, or a way to avoid negative emotional feelings such as confusion, boredom, anxiety and fear. In order to beat procrastination, Adam says that you need to identify what negative emotions are stirred up by tasks that you consistently put off. Once you have identified these you can then change them by reframing them into a more interesting challenge. Listen to the full episode here: Spotify- https://g2ul0.app.link//vmPPQfk3rMb Apple - https://g2ul0.app.link//1rhbS0d3rMb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Adam: https://adamgrant.net/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  I get a lot of messages from people saying, Steve, I'm procrastinating so much. How do you not procrastinate? And I always look at that and say, I'm not the guy to tell you how to do that. Because procrastination, in my mind, is a bit of a tool. As you said, there's different types of procrastination that I notice myself doing. One of them is when I get stuck on something and I find myself picking up my phone as if I'm a man possessed. I literally, what I'll do is I'll be in the middle of work and then the next thing, I'm on Instagram. I'm like, how did that happen? Oh, yeah, because the part in this piece of work you got to is psychologically difficult for some reason. I don't feel prepared or whatever. And then the other thing I notice myself procrastinating on is just when I'm thinking through something,

• 0:45Steven Bartlett?

  I'll end up just walking around the house, I'll end up cleaning, doing the dishes or whatever, and then coming back to the piece of work later. But I would say that I'm definitely a procrastinator.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  That's so interesting. And I think, let's be clear, I'm not encouraging people to procrastinate more. That's not the goal here. The goal is just to normalize procrastination and say, it's a natural part of the creative process. Everybody does it sometimes. And even though you expect it to be counterproductive, in certain situations, it can actually lead you to better ideas. And I think there's maybe a myth worth busting here. Research led by Fuchsia Sarwa has shown that we don't procrastinate for the reasons we think we do. So a lot of people think, I'm being lazy, I'm avoiding effort, what's wrong with me? Why don't I want to work hard? But it turns out, it's not hard work that you're avoiding when you procrastinate. It's negative emotions, unpleasant feelings.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  You are avoiding a set of tasks that makes you feel frustrated, confused, bored, anxious. A lot of procrastination is driven by fear. I don't know if I can do this. I'm not sure if I'm up to the challenge. And so I put it off. And I think one of the best ways to manage that is to ask, what are the tasks that you consistently procrastinate on? What negative emotions are they stirring up? And then how do you change those?

• 2:01Steven Bartlett?

  What do you procrastinate on?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I procrastinate a lot on editing, actually, and revising. I love rough drafting. It's very, it feels very creative for me. It's fun to figure out, what does the best evidence say? How do I tell the story that brings the evidence to life? And then the process of tinkering to get each sentence just right, it bores me. And so I put it off. And I had to figure out, how do I make that more interesting in order to stop procrastinating altogether on it?

• 2:28Steven Bartlett?

  And how did you do that?

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Well, one of the, one of the things I did was, one of my goals in my recent writing was to, to try to get less abstract and more concrete. And so what I started doing was I started rewriting paragraphs in the voices of my favorite fiction authors, which was such a fun experiment. So how would Stephen King write this paragraph?

• 2:49Speaker 01

  How would Maggie Smith, an amazing poet, how would she write these sentences? And, and that, that made it a creative exercise again.

• 2:57Steven Bartlett?

  As I was doing my research ahead of this conversation, I was watching your TED Talk. And one of the things that really stood out to me in your TED Talk was where you start talking about internet browsers. I immediately checked which browser I was using, and I was using Google Chrome.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 3:11Steven Bartlett?

  But you make the case that people, you can tell someone's, I guess, creativity? I'm paraphrasing, I'm putting words in your mouth here, by which internet browser they use. And there was a really important message in there for me. So can you tell me about that? Exactly what the findings can tell us?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was sitting at a conference that helped to organize. And this researcher, Michael Hausman, is giving a presentation. He's got data from 50,000 people. And he, he knows, they're filling out a survey and then he's tracking their job performance, huge range of jobs. And he knows what web browser they're on. It's one of the automatically collected data points. And he's like, I wonder, I wonder if, if there's anything there. And he finds that he can predict your job performance and also your likelihood of staying in your job from which web browser you're using.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  This is so weird. And he stood up and he said, I don't know what's going on here. But it turns out that Chrome and Firefox users are, on average, better performers and they stick around longer than if you're using Safari or Internet Explorer.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  And immediately, I had a hunch. I'd been studying initiative and proactivity and being an original thinker. And what hit me was Internet Explorer and Safari are the defaults. They came pre-installed on your phone or your computer. In order to get Chrome or Firefox, you had to question the default and say, huh, I wonder if there's a better browser and take a little bit of initiative. And so I started proposing this and people are like, great. So if I download a better browser, I'm going to be better at my job. No, it's not about the browser. It's about the resourcefulness to say you want to be the kind of person who questions the default and asks if there's a better way. And I think what happens is in people's jobs, I've gone on to study this with some colleagues,

• 5:03Speaker 01

  the kind of person who upgrades their browser is also the kind of person who asks, is there a more creative way to do my job? Can I reinvent the way that we work together? And that ultimately not only makes you better at your job, it also helps you create a job that you want to stay in.

• 5:22Steven Bartlett?

  It makes sense. And so on an ongoing basis, I'm only going to hire people who have Mozilla Firefox or Chrome installed in their browser. It should be an interview question.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  I don't know if I would go that far.

• 5:34Steven Bartlett?

  No, you said it, so I'm going to do it.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  I think it's a fun question to say, okay, how did you? Like, let's not limit it to the browser, but talk to me about how you've challenged the status quo in the past.

• 5:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's a really good question.

• 5:51Steven Bartlett?

  When we think about originals, who are the sort of landmark originals of our time in your mind?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  What domain do we want to talk about? Are we talking tech and business?

• 6:00Steven Bartlett?

  Tech and business, let's go for that.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it's hard not to put Elon Musk on that list. You can love him or hate him, but when it comes to dreaming up the vision and also taking the initiative then to try to make us a multi-planetary species with SpaceX and build reusable rockets, which NASA had never really thought to do, moving us into an all-electric car future. I think there are a lot of things to complain about with Elon's leadership and decision-making and the way he communicates on the platform formerly known as Twitter. But I think he's an original, no doubt about it.

• 6:35Steven Bartlett?

  How does he fit your profile of an original?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  I think I think he fits first and foremost because he challenges the status quo would be the beginning. And then secondly, I think he's he's relentless in trying to make his vision a reality, which is, I think, I think something that's that's driving some of his former fans crazy right now.

• 6:57Steven Bartlett?

  Some people might say, well, he, you know, he was like a child prodigy, or he was a child genius. So that's why he's so so great. Do you agree with that statement? Or do you dispute it?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  I think it's hard to say in his case. I think, you know, my job as a social scientist is to ask, what does the evidence tell us about child prodigies? And it turns out we overestimate them in a lot of cases, because once you're, you know, once something comes naturally to you, you often have a hard time thinking about it in original ways. So, you know, you see kids, for example, who can play a Mozart Sonata at age four, and they they drill over and over again, and they're amazingly fast learners. And practice does make perfect, but it doesn't make new. They don't learn how to write their own original scores. They don't get experience with failure, with trial and error. And so they don't take enough risks to figure out, how do I invent something that's never existed before? That's,

• 7:50Speaker 01

  you know, that's not true in every case, but it is empirically true that most child prodigies do not become known as adult geniuses. And I think that's in part because they don't learn to stretch their creative muscles.

• 8:01Steven Bartlett?

  Because they're they're overwhelmingly talented, so they don't need to put in the hard graft that others do, and they don't need to fight for new information in the same way that others do?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  In some cases, they get rewarded over and over again for basically just mastering the way everyone else has always done it. And so they don't they don't learn to break free from the mold.

• 8:21Steven Bartlett?

  These adult geniuses, then, what is it that they have that child prodigies don't?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of it is is what I've come to think of as character skills, which is a set of capabilities to put your principles into practice. So they're often people with hidden potential. They they may not be naturals at first. They could be, you know, underdogs or late bloomers or slow learners. But they are obsessive about making themselves uncomfortable, saying, if I only play to my strengths, then I'm never stretching myself and I'm not taking on enough new challenges. There's a bunch of research to suggest they're like sponges. They're soaking up lots of information and then trying to filter what's helpful out in. And then you kind of rule out what's harmful.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  And they are they're what I've come to think of as imperfectionists, which is they're they're they're really careful and disciplined about saying, when is it important to aim for the best and when is it OK to look for good enough?

• 9:23Steven Bartlett?

  Perfectionism is a topic people talk about a lot. And I think everybody it seems to me that everybody wants to be considered a perfectionist, as if being a perfectionist is better because what does that say about my my values? It means that I really care about things being great. Therefore, means by way of that, that I think I'm I produce great things. And saying you're a perfectionist is almost like saying I make great work. But you're saying that being there were some there are often times where it's better to be an imperfectionist, that the judgment of knowing when something is good enough.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think you're on to something here. So, you know, when when you have to answer that annoying job interview question, what's your greatest weakness? It's everyone's favorite answer. I'm too much of a perfectionist. It's like Michael Scott from the American office, like, I have weaknesses as a leader. I work too hard and I care too much. And yeah, people do think that perfectionism is, you know, ultimately more of an asset than a liability. And that's why they they try to get away with that in the weakness question. But the evidence tells a really different story. Research led by Tom Curran here in the UK shows that perfectionism is not all it's cracked up to be. It's a risk factor for burnout.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  It also, if you look at the best evidence available, perfectionists do get better grades in school, but they don't actually perform any better in their jobs.

• 10:41Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  I think the jury's still out. But my hunch, based on the evidence that's been gathered so far, is that perfectionists are good at school because they know exactly what's going to be on the test. And so they can cram and memorize until they're prepared to ace the material. The real world is much more ambiguous. You don't know exactly what's going to show up in your performance review. It's not entirely clear what work is going to be valued. And perfectionists are terrified of failure. They don't want any flaws. They don't want any defects. They want to avoid every mistake. And so they don't take enough risks. They focus very narrowly on the things they know they can excel at. And they don't end up growing and evolving and improving enough.