[Just get started. ]
I DON'T HAVE TO LOOK very far for a story about this topic. My own life supplies many examples daily. When I face a task that I find aversive, a task I simply don't want to do, a task that I find boring or tedious, or even a task for which I have doubts about my competence, it is tempting to walk away. I want to procrastinate. I find myself saying things like this to myself:"I'll feel more like doing this later."This is a flag for me. It is a signal that I have learned to identify that I am just about to procrastinate. At that very moment, I use this signal to just get started. I will immediately start on anything related to the task at hand. Let's explore why this is so important.
Issue
Once we start a task, it is rarely as bad as we think. Our research showed us that getting started changes our perceptions of a task. It can also change our perception of ourselves in important ways.
In a series of studies, my students and I used electronic pagers to gather what is called experience-sampling data.
We paged research participants randomly throughout the day over a week or two. Each time we paged them, we asked things like:"What are you doing?""Is there something else you should be doing?""How are you feeling?""What are you thinking?"In addition, depending on the study, we asked the participants to rate what they were doing and what they were supposed to be doing on things like how stressful they perceived the task to be. A rating of 10 indicated extremely stressful, while a zero meant not stressful at all (and all points in between reflected the variability) .
This type of data allowed us to take a sort of snapshot through time of what the participants were doing.
Importantly, we also got a real-time glimpse of what they were thinking and feeling. Some of our findings were expected. Some surprised us. I have summarized these findings by simplifying the research as a Monday-to-Friday process and by focusing mainly on the task avoidance.
As expected
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