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BRIEFINGS MAGAZINE


‘I’M ALMOST DONE’

With workers distracted at home so much, procrastination may be quietly reaching
epic proportions. Should firms start to take the issue seriously?


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By: Arianne Cohen

A seasoned, successful real-estate agent in Chicago, Evan Smeenge admits to one
serious character flaw—he procrastinates. He’ll enthusiastically meet to discuss
a $1.5 million deal, but will put off tedious or menial tasks, like comparative
market analyses, which are only beneficial long term. This is not a new habit
for him, by the way: When he was finishing his master’s degree, he put off
writing his thesis for so long that he had to churn out all 50 pages in just two
weeks.

Then came the remote era, and with it a cornucopia of new procrastinatory habits
to help him avoid work altogether. “I nibble on food. I watch shows on my
computer,” says Smeenge. “I think, ‘I have an extra 45 to 60 minutes that I’m
not commuting in my car, so I have an extra hour today.’” He initially expected
clients and teammates to complain. Wouldn’t he receive ornery texts demanding to
know the whereabouts of market analyses? Or calls asking why he hadn’t yet set
up tomorrow’s meetings? Instead, the opposite happened: no one said anything. He
continued successfully selling homes, and his team, the Smeenge Group, more than
tripled its income and size as the housing market peaked. He suspects that this
is because both his colleagues and clients developed the same habits that he
did. “Procrastination has almost become more acceptable,” he says.



Multiply that times a billion workers, and you have the New Procrastination. For
a century, procrastination was largely an in-office affair, enacted in the form
of dawdling alongside colleagues’ desks at midday, or chatting for an extra 20
minutes after a meeting. It often looked like teammate bonding or enthusiastic
work talk. When strategically deployed, trips to other floors, internal
trainings, and external meetings could fill entire days. But over the last two
years of remote and hybrid work, the types and mechanisms of procrastination
have quietly morphed, creating a situation that managers and employees alike
find challenging to address in both form and function.


“MY TEAM COLLECTIVELY STARTED PROCRASTINATING ON ANY TASK THAT REQUIRED SOME
KIND OF HUMAN CONNECTION.”

But just how challenging—and how costly—is this new development? Studies have
repeatedly shown that procrastination picked up across every sector when the
pandemic hit and lockdowns began, which meant prying management eyes couldn’t
see what workers were doing. One 2020 survey of 2,000 workers in the UK, for
example, found that the average person spent more than two hours every day
putting things off, choosing among 10 different delaying tactics—from idling on
Facebook to daydreaming. Just last June, another study showed that a quarter of
low-quality outcomes are attributable to procrastination. What changed, experts
say, wasn’t just the amount we were wasting time, but how we were. Rather than
mostly avoiding the uninteresting or scary tasks that are the longstanding bread
and butter of procrastination, employees and managers say that they’re now
avoiding every task. On some days, they’re hours late sitting down to work.
Smeenge calls it “deciding to have a procrastination day.”

Executives are left fighting to find ways to fix a bad habit that nearly
everyone has adopted. And asking one question: Why isn’t anyone talking about
this?

Pre-pandemic, most employees never noticed that the workplace was a fine-tuned,
work-lab environment. The office functioned as a bubble that blocked out much of
the outside world, leaving its occupants impervious to geopolitical events and
home dramas. Sure, a stray piece of shocking news might float in here or there
and distract everyone for a few minutes (“Wait, Michael Jackson died?”), but the
hum of work kept nearly everyone adhering to the routines of the job. It wasn’t
uncommon for a knowledge worker to end their busy day by turning on the radio
during their evening commute and saying, for example, “The Dow Jones dropped 777
points today? Really?”

Studies show that roughly 1 in 5 people across cultures, countries, and
generations are procrastinators—people who put off anything that makes them
anxious, from airplane packing to folding laundry. The remaining 4 out of 5 are
periodic procrastinators who from time to time avoid the to-dos that make them
feel uneasy. This usually looks like someone simply not doing tasks that spur
boredom, anxiety, or fear—letting accounting and billing pile up, for instance,
or avoiding a conversation that will be emotionally trying. But in the old days,
in one of those office-cum-work-labs, not doing a task could often produce other
forms of discomfort, such as the sense of shame you felt if you were called out
in front of your staring coworkers for failing to meet a deadline or browsing
the web. Watchful bosses and colleagues provided motivation and peer pressure to
just do the task, a course of action that would also flood your brain with an
instant dopamine rush of success. Most worker bees just did the thing.


“PEOPLE STARTED SAYING, ‘I CAN JUST DO IT LATER WHEN THE KIDS ARE ASLEEP.”

In the pandemic, workers found themselves at home, a place devoid of the
immediate incentives a communal physical workspace offers—all of which turned
out to be critical, from a procrastinator’s point of view. While long-term
incentives remained, such as deadlines and paychecks, many of the immediate
inducements to start something right now receded. Would coworkers know if you
watched YouTube for three hours? Nope. Would the boss fire you if you asked for
an extension? Probably not, because he just asked for one himself. Would anyone
be the wiser if you didn’t start writing the memo until 9 pm? No. “People
started saying, ‘I can just do it later when the kids are asleep,’” says burnout
therapist Gabrielle Juliano-Villani, whose Sarasota, Florida, practice is filled
with procrastinators. The time and space in which to procrastinate have
expanded, and domestic tasks like  washing load of laundry or picking up the
kids provided equally compelling dopamine rushes, she says.

“Homes are environments with a lot of cues that trigger competing goals,” says
well-known procrastination researcher Fuschia Sirois, a psychology professor at
Durham University in the UK, who views home offices as “procrastinogenic
environments” laden with triggers. These triggers are particularly appealing
because they can feel like productive activities. The worker, she says, can fool
themselves into thinking they got something done, at least: “They say, ‘Yeah,
I’m not doing my report, but look at the house, it’s sparkling clean!’” says
Sirois. Workers tend to go for low-hanging fruit again and again, and homes are
ripe with it.



Even people who previously did not procrastinate found themselves in loops of
wandering away from their desks at home. Webzine editor Shane Paarman began
avoiding work because he felt trapped in a boring routine. “Time merged into one
long, endless year, despite it actually being several years,” he says. He
struggled to recreate the motivation and stimulation of his former bustling
office, and began leaning on tricks like switching up his routine regularly and
redesigning his home office for maximum physical and mental stimulation. Though
his business is successful, he says he still avoids work more than he did three
years ago.

For two years, this scenario has continued unabated. Scientists have not yet
collected data, because it’s hard to measure procrastination in remote work. But
one well-quoted 2006 study from Proudfoot Consulting is worrisome enough: It
estimates that poor productivity was costing the US more than $600 billion a
year. Procrastination could be stymieing revenues and innovation far more than,
say, a stalled supply chain, yet rare is the corporation with an HR task force
specifically created to help managers deal with it. Part of the issue is how
ingrained in human behavior procrastination is—how commonly we see it in
everything from late tax returns to late arrivals at social events. “My team
collectively started procrastinating on any task that required some kind of
human connection,” says Gordana Sretenovic, director of content operations and
cofounder of skills-assessment platform Workello. Among others, she cites tasks
like meetings, Zooms, and sending email recaps. “We’re still struggling to
return to being the social butterflies we were before.” How are leaders supposed
to address this endemic productivity drain?

Experts say that the first step to attacking a staff procrastination problem is
to ask whether it needs to be fixed at all. John Ricco, cofounder of Atlantic
Group, a recruiting company with offices in Chicago and London, is well aware
that his remote workers procrastinate extensively. Why? Because they tell him
so, he says—but he doesn’t mind, because the work gets done. Whenever the issue
comes up, he runs a calculation in his head to remind himself that workers of
the past never spent eight hours a day working. Study after study showed office
dwellers of the last decade accomplishing four to five hours of work over eight
hours. “Why should I expect anything different from remote colleagues?” he
asked.

Marydee Sklar, a productivity expert in Portland, Oregon, who has worked with
both chronic procrastinators and their employers, says that the easiest action a
manager can take is to give employees take-home whiteboards to keep their tasks
and deadlines visibly in front of them. Offices are plastered with whiteboards
and calendars and goal timelines; at home, many workers are just looking at
their kitchen tables or office decor. She says she tells people to put the board
in front of them, then write down each day’s big to-do item, broken into small
tasks done in 15-minute intervals. “Otherwise, your brain is going to
‘horriblize’ the task and tell you that you can’t do it,” she says. A reasonably
sized list, she indicates, should take a minute to create, no longer.



She suggests that managers help procrastinators by presenting the upcoming
quarter from 10,000 feet above—an eagle-eye perspective on projects and
deadlines that removes employees’ underlying emotional issues from the equation.
This approach frames tasks not as personal albatrosses with high stakes but as
team tasks consisting of exciting contributions. Then managers can drop down to
5,000-, 1,000-, and 500-foot levels, to help workers perceive future projects
and deadlines in bite-size chunks.

Ultimately, no one thinks there will ever be an end to procrastination, but
experts say it’s foolish for firms to continue ignoring what today’s working
environment may be doing to people. As procrastination researcher Sirois sees
it, reframing is crucial. Why is a task meaningful to the project? How will it
benefit both teammates and the individual doing it? Does it involve learning a
new skill or making someone happy? This input replaces the negative emotions
that can derail work with context and meaning. “Procrastination is all about
emotions, both negative and positive,” she says. “Your role is to dial up the
meaningful, positive feelings that make people want to dive into the job.”

(click image below to enlarge)



 

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