[I won't feel more like doing it tomorrow. ]
TO INTRODUCE THIS CHAPTER, I want to share a story I received from a reader of my Psychology Today blog. It clearly illustrates the problem of tomorrow. This reader said that the issue of feeling more like it tomorrow was reminiscent of a sign in a butcher's shop window in his grandparents'village in Poland.
Translated into English, the sign read:"Today you pay and tomorrow you get it for free."
When the customers would come tomorrow for their free goods, the butcher would say"Read the sign: Today you pay, tomorrow it's free."As this reader noted, it is pretty much that way with procrastination. The tomorrow in which"I'll really feel like it"is always a day away. It never becomes today.
Issue
The story above captures the basic issue with procrastination: I'll do it tomorrow. In fact, the Latin roots of the word procrastination mean, "to put forward to tomorrow."Yet, as the butcher explained with his sign, that tomorrow never really comes.
As with the butcher's sign that implied that customers would get free goods tomorrow, our thinking plays a trick too. We think, "I'll feel more like it tomorrow."What we need to understand, so as not to be tricked like the butcher's customers, is why this is not true. We will not feel more like it tomorrow.
Research, particularly studies by Dan Gilbert (Harvard University) and Tim Wilson (University of Virginia) , indicates that we are not very good forecasters. No, I don't mean weather forecasters. Meteorologists seem to be better at forecasting the weather (at least in the short term) than we are at forecasting our own mood in the future. Forecasting our future mood is known as affective forecasting.
The main idea behind affective forecasting is that we have a bias when we predict future mood (afective) states in relation to positive or negative events. For example, a couple of years after winning a lottery, the winners were about as a happy as they were before their win, despite the g
更多内容加载中...请稍候...
若您看到此段落，代表章节内容加载失败，请关闭浏览器的阅读模式、畅读模式、小说模式，以及关闭广告屏蔽功能，或复制网址到其他浏览器阅读！