Counteract Your Own Bias to Beat Procrastination
Procrastination usually causes problems, but we find it difficult to deal with them. Our future “I ” understands much better why something is going wrong. This is partly because you are currently ignoring the consequences of procrastination.
As the business site Harvard Business Review points out, part of the reason our brains avoid procrastination has to do with something calledomissionbias . In particular, this is because it is easier for us to see the consequences of doing something bad than the consequences of inaction:
While we can weigh the pros and cons of doing something new, we are much less likely to consider the pros and cons of not doing it. This phenomenon, known as omission bias, often leads us to ignore some of the obvious benefits of getting the job done. Suppose you are constantly postponing preparing for an upcoming meeting. You are tempted by a more exciting task, so you tell yourself that you can do it tomorrow (or the day after tomorrow). But force yourself to think about the downside of procrastination, and you will realize that tomorrow will be too late to get what you really need from your colleagues. If you move now, you have half the chance of getting to them in time – so finally, your gears will squeak into action.
Inactivity seems to be less severe than active sabotage of our projects, because we really do not do anything wrong. Except that wasting time on a project means you are taking resources away from what you are working on, depleting them. If you want to beat procrastination, you must admit that postponing it is just as harmful as if you, say, burned your documents or canceled an important meeting. Once you understand the consequences of procrastination, you are more likely to start working.
How to beat procrastination | Harvard Business Review