06 January 2020
Licensed therapist and mental health writer Dr. Kathleen Smith offers a smart, practical antidote to our anxiety-ridden times. Everything Isn’t Terrible is an informative, and fun guide – featuring a healthy dose of humor – for people who want to become beacons of calmness in our anxious world.
In short chapters containing anecdotal examples alongside engaging, actionable exercises, Everything Isn’t Terrible will give anyone suffering from anxiety all the tools they need to finally be calm.
Buy your copy from Amazon, Waterstones or Hive.
Procrastination and Productivity
Martha’s New Year’s resolution was to start therapy, but she didn’t show up until April. In her defense, she came in to talk about her trouble with deadlines. Martha worked remotely as a pop culture reporter for a popular website. Five years into her career, she no longer felt that she was soaring toward a successful one. It felt more like flailing toward mediocrity.
Martha’s biggest challenge was procrastination. Her job had become uninteresting, and she would delay rewrites on an article or interview. She would wait too long, until she convinced herself that there wasn’t enough time left for an article to be great. This generated anxiety, which further fueled the procrastination. She asked for extensions often, and her once generous editors were growing frustrated.
Martha’s brain was like a car alarm. If she didn’t shut the worry off in time, it would kick up to the next level of frantic wailing. “Are you even a writer if you can’t write?” it would ask. Super helpful.
Why do we procrastinate on tasks that aren’t life-threatening? You would think that after a few five a.m. paper submissions in college, we’d learn that living on the edge isn’t that great. I don’t know about other countries, but the capacity for Americans to be simultaneously great at procrastinating and obsessed with productivity is comical.
It doesn’t help that humans are terrible at estimating how long a task will take us. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky call this the “planning fallacy.” We assume we won’t have any difficulties, we delay getting started, and this optimism gets us into trouble. Ask someone what’s the latest possible date they’ll complete a task, and the odds are they won’t be finished by that date.
But Martha’s problem wasn’t a matter of optimism. Like most human challenges, it originated in her relationships.
Procrastination Is a Relationship Problem
Unless you’re a doomsday prepper living off the grid, your job is relational. Therefore, procrastination is often a relationship problem. Assuming that a problem or symptom exists independent of a relationship system is to ignore what it means to be human. How you react to your colleagues, your family, and the larger world can tell you a lot about how you end up anxiously stalling on a project. Rather than observing how we function in relationship to others, we end up labeling our productivity problems as personality flaws. This leaves us feeling ashamed and stuck.
Martha certainly saw her procrastination as a character flaw. She had read many time-management books but always failed to apply the ideas in them. She believed that if she could teach herself to get up at five a.m. or abandon her reality show addiction, she would unlock the superhero power of mass production. But the transformation never seemed to happen.
Martha was so busy shaming herself that she failed to see the bigger picture. She needed to take the astronaut’s view, zoom high above herself, and observe that her procrastination was not a solo endeavor. There were other people editing, reading, and responding to her work. Because she worked at home, it was easy to forget that there were other humans in the game.
I encouraged Martha to think about her procrastination as a relationship problem. She started by listing all the people who inhabited her brain when she felt anxious about her work. She worried what her editors thought about giving her extensions, since she couldn’t gauge their reactions through email. She wanted to impress a new girl she was seeing. She didn’t want to disappoint her sweet grandmother, whose house was wallpapered with years of her bylines. If she was being honest, she also wanted to look good in front of Twitter followers she’d never even met.
By focusing on the reactions of others, Martha had invited an entire audience of people to watch her write a first draft. It was like sight-reading a cello piece at Carnegie Hall when you don’t even play the cello. No wonder her brain shut down and refused to work when she had an assignment.
There are so many ways that our relationships influence our level of productivity. Here are just a few:
Anxiety in relationships can lead to:
• worrying about how people will respond to your work
• slacking when someone else will do it for you
• distancing yourself from those who expect you to do well
• pretending that you’re more capable than you are • focusing on getting approval instead of developing ideas