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Defeat Procrastination Thinking 29

“I’ll Do It Tomorrow” Thinking

The manaña trap is elaborate. However, you might take this thinking
to another level. Under the cloak of “I’ll do it tomorrow” thinking,
you make one task dependent on doing another first. Then you put
off the contingent activity. With this form of conditional thinking,
you can chain one contingency onto another and delay them all.
You want to get an MBA degree. You can see the benefits, and
you want them. You think the knowledge you will get from the
courses and the status you will get from the degree will open a
promising career track and you can get a significant pay raise.
However, you tell yourself that first you need to gather and digest
information about every possible MBA program to make sure that
you are getting the best program possible. Then you put off gath-
ering the material. When you get it, you put off reading it. That’s
the beauty of a contingency manaña plot. By finding new diver-
sions, you avoid the challenge.
In another form of contingency thinking, you make feeling
motivated and inspired the contingency. Feeling good is your green
light for action. So, unless your back is to the wall, you’ll be tempted
to put off doing anything unless you feel good about doing it.
As another emotional contingency, you wait for a moment of
inspiration to get started. But who expects to be inspired to file work
orders? It’s not that feeling good about what you do is a problem.
The problem is delaying action while passively awaiting an unpre-
dictable emotional state. From time to time, you’ll experience an
emotional state in which your problems are manageable, you are
unaffected by negative events, and you efficiently finish what you
would ordinarily put off. Thus, there is a basis for saying that you
do better when you are inspired. How often does that happen?

The Backward Ploy

In the backward ploy, you tell yourself that before you can defeat
procrastination, you need to know how you came to procrastinate.