A common issue I hear amongst entrepreneurs affecting sales performance is procrastinating sales and business development. I don’t blame them. Facing rejection isn’t the most inspiring thing to do, is it?
Recently I read the mother of all productivity books, The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done by Dr. Piers Steel. With 350 pages, weighing in the same as a tin of chickpeas (ironic given the target audience and subject matter), it was a rewarding read with research based on motivation, economics, and neuroscience.
According to Piers Steel, the average person procrastinates for two hours a day, which is one quarter of our working day. This is equivalent to starting work in April each year, faffing around from January to March.
What difference would it make to your business and life if you could cut your time wasted procrastinating by half?
After reading Steel’s book, I’ve rescued at least an hour a day, allowing me to invest it on meaningful tasks, so I’m sharing what I learned in the hope it helps you, too.
Why do we procrastinate?
It’s not because we’re lazy. I’m usually most productive when I procrastinate: I wash up, post items to sell on eBay, clean my inbox. Very productive.
Steel says procrastination stems from two parts of the brain: the limbic system, which focuses on the now, and the prefrontal cortex which is rational and deals with longer term concerns. The example given in the book was, if you built a fire, the limbic system eyes the can of petrol while the prefrontal cortex says branches and logs would provide slow steady heat.
We are born with limbic systems and our prefrontal cortex is the last part of the brain to develop. It’s why kids want things now. Animals are also all limbic. Not until mid-teens do our pre-frontal fully develop, which explains why I was an asshole in my teens.
“Procrastination occurs when the limbic system vetoes the long-term plans of the prefrontal cortex in favour of the more immediately realisable; and the limbic system, aside from being the quicker of the two and in charge of our first impulse, is often stronger”.
Types of procrastinators: which one are you?
Understanding why I procrastinated helped me reduce procrastinating and get things done after three days into Steel’s book, and I hadn’t even gotten as far as reading the how to overcome it part, yet. So I’ll quickly share these in the hope it might ring some bells for you too.
According to Steel, there are three elements of motivation, that thing that helps us overcome procrastination: expectancy, value and time.
Expectancy
When you have low self-confidence and expect a negative outcome, you will procrastinate. It’s a popular reason to procrastinate selling, especially as a novice and you’re wading through rejection.
Value
How do you feel about what you’re putting off right now? Steel’s technical term for the measure of enjoyment is value, so when you don’t value a task, you procrastinate. The less value a task has for you, the harder it is for you to get started on it.
Time
The biggest factor in determining what you do is not the associated rewards or the certainty of receiving them, but their timing. We value rewards that can be realized soon far more than later. At least until long-term become short-term goals.
Steel says there’s a core connection between procrastination and impulsiveness. Choosing smaller but more immediate pleasures over the larger but more delayed is the root of impulsiveness.
Next, stay tuned for part two where we go into strategies for dealing with procrastination.