Page 220 - End Procrastination Now Get it Done with a Proven Psychological Approach

184 End Procrastination Now!
Follow-up and General Comments

The therapy session fleshes out issues that you may find helpful
when you are working with a client whose presenting problem is
procrastination. The transcript uniquely shows how to separate
and deal with both procrastination and coexisting conditions. But,
as you may suspect, Ted still had a great deal of work remaining
to get past his procrastination barrier.

Procrastination Complications

If Ted completed the performance reviews, what was next? For
some people, completing a delayed task means that there is one
less thing to do. In Ted’s case, finishing the reviews had an addi-
tional implication.
Ted experienced an evaluation anxiety. He feared that his staff
would have bad reactions to his reviews. Not wanting to make a
mistake, and having a strong need to be liked, Ted felt uncomfort-
able discussing performance problems with the members of his
staff. That contributed to his procrastination.
By avoiding the reviews, Ted avoided telling other people what
he thought they might not like to hear. He also feared that he
would not achieve his fantasy goal: to make the reviews so mean-
ingful that he’d be exalted. So Ted’s procrastination was partially
connected to anxious anticipations.
The dreaded performance discussions were on a time dimen-
sion. Ted had time to prepare. But his preparation was to avoid
rather than to cope. His preparation involved fantasies about per-
fection. Then he delayed seeking the level of perfection that he
suspected he could not attain. And if perfection was a contingency
for action, and perfection was impossible, then procrastination
was a predictable outcome.
The law of parsimony says that the simplest explanation is
preferable to a more complicated one. A simple explanation is that
Ted felt discomfort when he anticipated doing the performance