Fight Procrastination by Visualizing Yourself in the Future
I’m usually the queen of procrastination. If something doesn’t need to be done until next week, then I most likely won’t start it earlier than a day before it needs to be done, regardless of whether I have enough time to complete it before this moment. and then. As I got older, I got better at handling procrastination, but it’s still a problem. Researchers now think they have found a solution: visualize their successful future.
The idea is that everyone sucks thinking about the future, but if you think about how what you are doing now will affect you in the future, you are more likely to make intelligent decisions that will benefit you in the future.
For example, if I imagine myself giving an awesome presentation at work because I prepared in a week and had time to fine-tune what I was about to say, I might be inclined to do so instead of setting myself up for something to fumble about. a presentation I hadn’t prepared well for because I only started planning the night before after a few happy hour cocktails.
Hal Hershfield, professor of marketing at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and co-author of the idea, explores how our perception of time can shape how we make decisions. In his experiments, he forced people through virtual reality to interact with their future self. People who have interacted with themselves in the future are much more likely to invest in a retirement account (fake, experimental) and worry about the future version of themselves as well as the current one.
The BBC detailed his work this week , as well as the work of several other researchers doing similar research. The main takeaway of all is that looking ahead to your decisions, especially how your current decisions will affect your future life, can help fight procrastination and get you back to work faster.
Visualize what the task will look like completed and the tasks you need to complete to get to that finish line. If you’re still reluctant to start, consider which of these tasks is holding you back.
As for me, when I write longer case studies, I tend to put them off because I absolutely hate transcribing interviews. I love doing interviews and can write a great story very quickly as soon as I transcribed it, but having to record a 20 minute interview will make me put off writing the story for several weeks.
Once I discovered this, I found a few people who make a living by transcribing (and seem to enjoy it) and started hiring them to do it for me. I removed the speed bump that slowed me down a lot and became much more efficient in the process.
So, before you put off your next big task, think about your future. You will thank yourself later.