Chapter 6
Procrastination: The Easy Road to a Stressful Life

I never put off until tomorrow what I can possibly put off until the day after tomorrow.
-- OSCAR WILDE (1856-1900)

Betty was a delicate-featured, raven-haired woman in her mid-thirties. She came to see me because of recurring bouts of depression; it was easy to observe that her conversation readily turned to her own inadequacies. For example, although she was slender, elegantly proportioned, and decidedly above average in general physical appearance, she frequently and casually referred to herself as “fat” and “disgusting.” It was difficult for me to avoid the impression that I was being preached to by a dedicated and fanatical missionary. Betty’s gospel was that she was a washout and a miserable failure in everything she did.

Betty was married with three children. Two years before she saw me, she had given up a well-paid professional job to become a full-time homemaker, home-schooling the children, and recovering some of the lost income from employment by saving on baby-sitters’ fees. As many people have discovered before and since, Betty found that looking after young children is much more, not less, demanding than a full-time office job. Not only had she made little progress with various artistic and musical endeavors she had believed she would be able to pursue, she had been unable to supplement the family income with freelance work, and she even found herself falling behind with routine tasks like paying the bills.

Betty was convinced that her failure to get things done conclusively demonstrated her trashiness as a human being. She berated herself guiltily for her procrastination. At the same time her guilt reinforced her procrastination, because she constantly reaffirmed her incompetence. Every time she failed to perform some task as promptly as she had intended, she found further “evidence” that she was doomed to procrastinate for the rest of her life.

I helped Betty fight her self-loathing, self-downing thinking with a Three Minute Exercise designed to help her realize that just because she often procrastinated unreasonably, this did not turn her into a worthless person. In this context, her habit of procrastinating was a Practical Problem, while her Emotional Problem was the self-loathing she inflicted upon herself.

Next, we turned to Betty’s procrastination habit, a behavioral problem with “musty” roots. At first Betty maintained that she was simply overwhelmed with too many things to do in the limited time available. As I questioned her, it emerged that there were times in the day when she could tackle the overdue bills, when the kids were napping or comparatively quiet, but on those occasions she would find reasons not to pick up the pile of bills.

“So, when you have an opportunity to go through that pile of bills, why don’t you? What reason do you give yourself for doing something else?”

“That I am too exhausted and will do a better job of paying the bills when I’m wide awake. So I choose to do something that requires no concentration, like watching TV, or I try to wake myself up by doing something physically active like sorting out the laundry.”

“But you eventually do pay those old bills?”

“Yes. I usually get into a panic at two in the morning, and spend the next couple of hours getting all the bills straight.”

“And that makes you feel more exhausted the following day?”

“Yes,” she replied miserably. “And I have to pay late fees.”

Further questioning revealed that at the very moment when she put off going through the bills during the day, Betty was telling herself: “The bills MUST be paid when I’m alert, and now I’m too exhausted.” Betty had a case of Low Frustration Tolerance. Because of this “must,” she rebelled against doing something inherently tedious, and invented rationalizations for putting it off. Like many unreasonable procrastinators, Betty told herself: “I’ll get to it when the conditions are just right.” And that meant: “I’ll get to it when I feel good about it.”

Betty’s Three Minute Exercise

Betty addressed her unreasonable procrastination with the following Three Minute Exercise:

  1. (Activating event): Two of the children are napping and the other is fairly quiet. Here’s an opportunity to catch up on the bills, but I feel exhausted.

  2. (irrational Belief): It SHOULD be easy to get myself to pay the bills.

  3. (behavioral Consequence): Switch on the TV.

  4. (Disputing): Why SHOULD it be easy to get myself to pay the bills?

  5. (Effective new thinking): There’s no reason it SHOULD be easy to get myself to pay the bills. There’s no reason I SHOULD always be in a position to do just the things I feel like doing and only under perfect conditions. No good fairy is going to arrange my life so that I, alone of all people in the history of the world, am in this fortunate position. I’ll feel better in an hour if I do the bills now. If I persist at these bills, I may soon feel less tired, but even when dog tired, I am intellectually capable of sorting out these bills.

    Taking care of those bills now is a small investment with big returns: for the occasional twenty minutes doing something I don’t like, I can avoid a future crisis when I might spend more time at a more undesirable time of day. And I will also avoid late charges.

  6. (new Feeling and behavior): Face the bills, even though I’m exhausted, rather than watch TV.

Procrastination Isn’t All Bad

Unreasonable procrastination is one of the most widespread and crippling of personal problems, but very few people come to see me because they are concerned about their procrastination. When people suffer from an emotional condition, such as anxiety or depression, they may think of seeing a psychotherapist, but when people suffer from a behavioral problem, such as drinking or overeating, they rarely consider a psychotherapist. They may think of Alcoholics Anonymous, or Weight Watchers, or some other self-help group. There is, however, no Procrastinators Anonymous, although unreasonable procrastination is even more widespread than overdrinking or overeating, and often helps to cause these other problems.

Betty’s case was very typical, in that she felt impelled to see a therapist because of an emotional state—depression—but it then emerged that she was bothering herself about failing to complete tasks she believed she ought to perform, and was lashing herself cruelly because of her behavioral disorder—unreasonable procrastination.

“Procrastination” comes from two Latin words meaning “for tomorrow.” Procrastination simply means deferring until a later date; it is not necessarily self-defeating. To procrastinate—to delay some action—can often be a reasonable thing to do.

In isolation, an individual decision to procrastinate may be hard to classify as reasonable or unreasonable. If Richard puts off a visit to the dentist, pleading pressure of work, this may be rational. But if Richard has been using the same excuse for the past five years so that he now faces the prospect of costly gum surgery, which he could have avoided by keeping his dental appointments, we may suspect that Richard’s procrastination is unreasonable.

Even the most unreasonable procrastinators can often find a plausible-sounding reason for procrastinating on each occasion. If you are in doubt about whether your decision to defer some action is reasonable or unreasonable, a good test is the No Future Regrets method: ask yourself how you will feel about your current decision when you look back on it a day or two later. When tomorrow comes, will you think today’s decision was wise, or will you regret it? In most cases, it’s only necessary to pose this question clearly to know the answer immediately. Then you act accordingly: you behave now in the way that you think you will look back upon with most satisfaction at a later date.

Colin’s Procrastination Problem

Colin was a good-looking young African-American with a friendly manner, a springy step, an impressive physique, and the musical lilt in his voice that indicated a childhood in the West Indies. He was, however, suffering from bouts of anxiety, which had grown more severe over recent months. For the first time in his life he was being troubled by insomnia, feelings of insecurity, and worries about his sexual potency.

Colin had determined some time before to make a career in business administration and had chosen the route of first studying for the CPA exam by taking a course in accounting. When he started, his natural quick-wittedness plus the novelty of the material, which held his interest, resulted in outstanding grades. However Colin had soon come to view the course as a dull chore. The less he liked the course, the more he avoided the hours of reading and study required each week to keep up with the lectures and to follow what was going on. The more he fell behind, the more he found parts of the course difficult to follow, and so the less he liked the course.

Like much unreasonable procrastination, Colin’s behavior seemed at first glance inexplicable. He declared himself fully committed to the goal of mastering the course, and he understood that this required hours of intense study each week. Yet the weeks were going by, and he was not putting in those hours. He worried about this situation and wished that he would study and once again achieve outstanding grades. Colin worked during the day as a delivery driver for a computer retail chain, and most evenings, he practiced martial arts at a local tae kwon do academy. He was a black belt and had won several trophies in competitive martial arts.

Colin admitted that there were days when he thought of spending the entire evening working on his accounting studies, but he usually abandoned this idea, most often to practice martial arts. Colin accepted the popular Freudian notion that his tendency to duck out of studying must have some unconscious explanation linked with his childhood, and this wrong-headed Freudian theory made him feel helpless in the face of his procrastination.

I focused on the most recent occasion where he had put off studying:

“What did you feel at the point where you decided to forget the accounting books and go down to the gym?”

“Anxiety, fear. I dread giving up an evening to pore over books, but I really enjoy practicing martial arts and meeting my friends at the gym.”

“This,” I explained, “is called discomfort anxiety. You make yourself anxious about the boring work, and then you procrastinate to avoid it. You’re intolerant of the discomfort of sitting down to read about straight-line depreciation. But surely you didn’t start this accounting course because you thought studying would be sheer fun?”

Although Colin readily agreed that it was unreasonable to expect studying accounting to be effortless or delightful, when he actually sat down and opened the books, he began telling himself that study OUGHT NOT to be so dull, so time-consuming, and so demanding. Colin loathed his studies partly because he had fallen behind and felt guilty about this. But mainly, he feared them because he believed that studying SHOULD be fun, SHOULD be easy, and SHOULD not compete for large chunks of his time with really enjoyable activities.

I appealed to Colin’s awareness of a principle he already followed in building muscles for his martial arts: No Pain, No Gain! Colin was quickly able to see that this principle applied to career goals as much as it applied to bodily strength and agility.

Colin’s Three Minute Exercise

Here is one of Colin’s most effective Three Minute Exercises:

  1. (Activating event): I sit down and begin to read about straight-line depreciation.

  2. (irrational Belief): Studying accounting SHOULD not take up hours of my time and SHOULD not be so unexciting.

  3. (emotional and behavioral Consequences): Intense loathing for accounting theory. Leave the books and go to the gym.

  4. (Disputing): Why SHOULD studying accounting not take up hours of my time and not be so unexciting?

  5. (Effective new thinking): There’s simply no reason why accounting SHOULD not be time-consuming and tedious. If it were easy and fun, then everyone would have the CPA qualification and that certificate wouldn’t be such a career advantage. Spending several hours a night concentrating on accounting is an investment, like building muscles or practicing martial arts techniques. No pain, no gain!

    It’s not the dullness of accounting that compels me to skip studying. It’s what I tell myself about it. But I am capable of making myself study, and it’s worth it. In fact, if I give the books fifteen minutes, I’ll probably then start to feel more interested in what I’m reading, and it won’t be so unappetizing for the following hour or so. And by the end of the evening I’ll feel gratified at having made some progress.

  6. (new Feeling and behavior): Reduced distaste for studying. Several hours of study accomplished each evening. Pleasure from contemplating the progress being made toward an important goal.

No Pain, No Gain

Nothing of great value is ever achieved simply by doing what comes most easily. You will be effective in pursuing any important long-term goal, whether it’s writing a novel or preserving your marriage, only if you work at it when you don’t feel like working at it. In his martial arts, Colin was familiar with periods when he seemed to be making slow progress and when the practice seemed less enjoyable than usual. He already understood, in his purely physical pursuits, that it was most satisfying to stick to the long-term project, ignoring his day-to-day fluctuations in interest and enjoyment.

It proved helpful for Colin to extend this understanding to his progress in accounting. After a hard struggle, with some relapses, he convinced himself that he could indeed tolerate the discomfort of doing what he didn’t feel like doing. When I last saw him, Colin had caught up with the rest of the class, was earning good grades again, and eagerly looked forward to gaining his CPA diploma.

Paul’s Procrastination

Paul was referred to me by his older sister. Now happily married and living in Canada, she had seen me three years ago for help with her marriage. Paul had the same large bone structure, dark wavy hair, dark eyes, dark complexion, and warm manner as she. After updating me on her progress, Paul turned to his own concerns.

Divorced and the father of a teenage son and teenage daughter who lived with their mother, Paul excelled in sales at a large computer software firm. He had recently returned from a trip to Paris, which he had won for making 200 percent of quota. Paul was very busy, and by measures of position and salary, was considered successful.

Paul saw his life slowly strangulating in backlogs of mail, and he desperately sought therapy. This was Paul’s first attempt to get help for his difficulty. Clearly, he had a procrastination problem (unlike his sister who had good time-management skills and was well-organized).

Paul was behind in returning phone calls, messages given to him by his secretary, e-mail, snail mail, voice mail, and doing items on his “To Do” list. “There’s just not enough hours in the day,” he wailed. “It’s all piling up, I’m totally out of control.” His sister urged him to consider seeing me when his problem led him to ignore her phone messages and mail.

Paul’s Problem Solved

“I keep promising myself: ‘I’ll catch up today, or maybe tomorrow—or at least over the weekend.” But these promises had turned out to be as solid as any New Year’s resolution. Paul was well aware of his own procrastination tricks.

“Has this always proved a problem?” I wondered.

“Well, yes,” Paul admitted. “I’ve always had some amount of a procrastination problem. It seems to be growing recently, like a cancer. Surprisingly, as my procrastination gets worse, I seem to get more successful at work.”

“Perhaps due to your success,” I ventured, “You’re getting more accounts, in addition to the extra accounts you now have to monitor. This, in turn, leads to more responsibilities and, consequently, to more communications. So the repercussions of your usual procrastination tendencies are multiplied by all the extra work generated by the additional accounts you’re handling.”

Paul agreed this made sense. Then we identified what he was telling himself about the mail that led to his procrastination. Some of his strongest demands were:

  • Chores SHOULD take care of themselves and not plague me

  • This involves focused concentration and close attention to boring detail. I SHOULDN'T have to call forth such effort

  • It SHOULD be easy to stop what I’m absorbed in and face my mail

  • There may be bills in the mail. I couldn’t bear to face this and bring myself down from my level of current enjoyment. Mail SHOULDN’T bring unpleasant tidings

  • I SHOULD not have negative repercussions as a result of not doing the mail

  • I MUST do it perfectly and not handle anything incorrectly

  • I MUST complete it all right now

Paul’s misguided thinking was largely responsible for his self-destructive pattern. Contrary to the misconception that unhealthy emotions, such as anxiety, generate behavior, such as procrastination, it's irrational thinking that does. Feelings are generated by thinking, and so are actions. If you change your views, you will thereby modify emotions and behaviors.

Consequently, I taught Paul to apply these steps to target his thinking:

  1. Identify the irrational beliefs that lie at the heart of your procrastination.

  2. Use Three Minute Exercises daily to reinforce more rational thinking. This will affect your actions and thereby help you to overcome your destructive procrastination.

  3. Regularly practice the behavioral exercises in this chapter to help solidify and maintain your improvements.

Paul’s Three Minute Exercise

One of Paul’s Three Minute Exercises looked like this:

  1. (Activating event): I’m behind on making phone calls and on returning voice mail, e-mail, snail mail, phone messages given to me by my secretary, and on my “To Do” list.

  2. (irrational Belief): These chores SHOULD take care of themselves and not plague me.

  3. (emotional and behavioral Consequences): Anxiety and procrastination.

  4. (Disputing): Why SHOULD these chores take care of themselves and not plague me?

  5. (Effective new thinking): No reason exists that chores SHOULD take care of themselves and not plague me. Everyone has unpleasant tasks in his life. Since I’m not above the human condition, I can expect that I will too. This is uncomfortable, but never awful or terrible.

    It’s not the disagreeable nature of the chores that forces me to procrastinate, but rather it’s my self-induced horror about this discomfort which creates my problem. If I ruthlessly push myself to face the messages, I’ll feel uncomfortable briefly, but then I’ll get it over with. However, if I continue to put it off, it will multiply and hang over my head forever. I have faced discomfort before and I’ve survived; I can face discomfort again and survive.

  6. (new Feeling and behavior): Less anxiety. Pushing myself to attend to the messages and calls that have been accumulating.

Three Minute Judo: Make Inertia Work For You

Like most emotional problems, unreasonable procrastination is best tackled by identifying your “musts” and disputing them, but there are also special techniques that have been found to be effective. A person who unreasonably procrastinates is usually aware that she is acting against her better judgment. There are useful stratagems to shift the balance in favor of the more rationally preferred course of action. It may take a little experimentation to find the techniques that work best for you.

If your problem is just one or a few important tasks that you keep putting off, try setting specific times each day or each week to devote to these tasks. Suppose, for example, that you’ve enrolled in a taped course in Italian and plan to possess a fair familiarity with spoken and written Italian by next year, when you visit your Uncle Giordano in Milan. Put exact times in your day book to listen to the tapes, refuse invitations that clash with those times, and in general, treat these appointments as you would the most serious appointments in your life.

The time you allocate to these sessions with the Italian tapes can be surprisingly brief, and can still be effective. Suppose that you listen to the Italian tapes and follow the script for fifteen minutes at a fixed time each day. No one has decreed that you have to stop when the fifteen minutes are up! You can then elect to keep going for another three minutes, or even another fifteen minutes. Who knows? You may occasionally become engrossed and keep going for a couple of hours!

This illustrates the basic rationale of most anti-procrastination techniques: make inertia work FOR you. We all, in varying degrees, have a tendency to inertia; we all find it easier to continue what we’re doing than to change gears and start doing something different. But once we have started doing that different thing, inertia begins to work in favor of sticking to it. The rationale is similar to that of judo (jujitsu) where the fighter learns ways to use his opponent’s own weight to the opponent’s disadvantage.

This principle can be taken to its ultimate in the Three Minute Procrastination Buster. In this technique, you simply decide that you will spend three minutes working on something, even though three minutes seems not worth doing. Suppose that you have been putting off an unpleasant chore for some time. Then you decide to give it three minutes.

“But,” as some of my clients have protested, “I can’t accomplish anything worthwhile in three minutes. What’s the point?”

The point is to get started, and thereby get the force of inertia on your side. Even if it takes you four minutes to assemble the relevant file folders, so that you don’t feel you can even begin the real job until you’ve spent four minutes preparing for it, just spend the three minutes all the same. But act the part convincingly: do everything just as if you were going to work at it for, let’s say, the six hours you estimate the whole job will take.

“But what’s the point of my spending only three minutes when I can’t really begin until I’m four minutes into it? Isn’t that irrational and purposeless behavior?”

No! In the first place, no one said you’re rigidly locked into spending only three minutes. You just might choose to spend a fourth minute, or a fifth. (You don’t have to, but you just might.) Secondly, that first three minutes of the four minutes’ “preparation” is really beginning the job. If it sets up the job, it’s part of the job. Thirdly, the appeal of the three minutes is that it’s so little time that you may find it hard to begrudge. After all, you wouldn’t begrudge spending three minutes helping a blind man you don’t even know to get safely across the street. So why would you begrudge three minutes to help yourself, temporarily blinded by unreasonable procrastination, across the street to where you really want to go? Fourthly, the more you resist making yourself start on the distasteful task, the more you may intimidate yourself by thinking of the size of the entire task. In order to break that pattern of thinking, you chop that mammoth task into bite-sized pieces. You convince yourself in practice of the truth of the ancient Chinese proverb, “Every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Getting Organized

Some people are conspicuously organized: they meet deadlines while appearing unruffled, they cope with many difficult tasks, their desks or file cabinets look tidy. Other people are equally conspicuously poorly organized.

What is the connection between poor organization and unreasonable procrastination? It is not simple: well-organized people sometimes do practice unreasonable procrastination. Unreasonable procrastination afflicts the overwhelming majority of people (in varying degrees, of course). I have had as clients some dynamic sharpshooters who, it has turned out, were bothered by their unreasonable procrastination.

In some cases organizational skills are a matter of luck—a person just happened to learn useful skills from someone they worked with, for example. Norma was an administrator who had a lot of correspondence about many different matters to keep track of. For various reasons, a simple alphabetical or chronological system for all documents was not appropriate in this job. Norma was usually behind with filing, and frequently could not find a document within a reasonable time period.

Norma was very reluctant to start a new subject file. Because of her experience in a previous job, she thought this was a “big deal,” which should not be entered on lightly. Then, for a week she helped out a colleague who had a similar job in a different department. Norma was surprised to find that this colleague, rather than spending time deliberating where a new document might be filed, would instantly start a new file. It so happened that in this particular job this was a better approach. Norma immediately applied this new technique in her own job and quickly eliminated most of her filing difficulties.

In other cases, however, unreasonable procrastination lies at the root of the failure to adopt good organizational methods. Lawrence was an office worker with numerous small and highly varied tasks. He was constantly in trouble because he did not complete some tasks soon enough, and when asked by his supervisor why not, he would explain that he had been working on some other task, which the supervisor usually judged to be of lower priority. Lawrence also found that he would not “get to” some tasks because they would “slip his mind.”

Lawrence was provided with a “planner,” a big day book with room to list all the tasks for each day. But Lawrence would stubbornly refuse to use the planner in the intended way. Instead of writing down all the tasks he hoped to get done on a particular day ahead of time, checking off those tasks as they were completed, he would write down the tasks for the first time after he had done them, and even then he would sometimes forget to write them down. So he never had a list he could look at of all the things competing for his time for the next few days. He could never confidently go to his supervisor and say: “I have completed x, y, and z. I plan to spend this afternoon on u and v, which seem to be most urgent. This means I will be a day late with w, which you told me you wanted by the end of today. I will be able to finish w tomorrow if nothing unexpected comes up. Is that okay?” Lawrence was resistant to changing his work habits because of his “musty” thinking.

As Lawrence saw it, writing out the tasks in advance took time away from performing the actual tasks. Like many people, he begrudged time spent “preparing” even though this would improve the efficiency of the “actual” work. He told himself that work MUST organize itself without planning, and that he MUST be able to choose at any time which of his tasks he would work on next, rather than following some predetermined schedule. In Lawrence’s case, unreasonable procrastination was the major cause of his poor organization.

Prioritizing can be torpedoed by procrastination. Calvin made a list of six things he was behind with at work. He decided to give up a Sunday to spend ten hours in the office catching up on those six things. He went to the office, made himself a cup of coffee, and phoned a friend to chat for a few minutes. He noticed a few bits of minor correspondence from the previous Friday, and decided to spend “just a minute or two” getting them out of the way. When he had done that he noticed that an hour and a half had gone by. He made himself another cup of coffee and picked out one of the six tasks, the one which had some entertainment value for him. After staring at it for a while, he felt he couldn’t really get going unless he first went to the bathroom. On his way back from the bathroom he noticed something that looked very interesting coming out of the fax machine, and he sat down to read it. Eleven hours after entering the office, it hit him that three of the six tasks were not touched, and only now did he clearly see that two of these three were the most urgent of the whole six, as judged by the seriousness of the consequences if they were not completed by 8:30 A.M. the following day.

Calvin’s predicament resulted from three sources: underestimating the time required for tasks, being distracted by other less important things, and failing to do tasks in their true order of urgency. To combat tendencies like this, a variant of the No Future Regrets method can be useful. At the beginning of that Sunday, Calvin could have asked himself this question: “Suppose that two hours from now I am taken violently ill with food poisoning, or that the office is struck by lightning, all the computers crash, and I can do no more work for twenty-four hours. What will I think, looking back twenty-six hours from now, was the best possible use of these next two hours?” Having arrived at the answer, Calvin can work on that task first, even though he may believe that he will get to it eventually within the ten hours.

When poor organization arises from lack of organizational skills, it’s a practical problem that can be tackled in various ways. There are books, tapes, and workshops on becoming more organized by planning one’s time more effectively. But much can be learned simply by watching carefully those people who seem to be above-average in organizational skills, and copying the methods and procedures you observe them using.

Sara’s School Story

Sara, 19, was on the verge of getting expelled from college. She sat in my office mercilessly criticizing herself. As a consequence of months of delay, she was up late last night writing a paper to meet today’s deadline. She finally completed it before dropping off for some scant hours of early morning sleep. Now she was wishing that she had started the paper months ago, far in advance of the due date, researching and writing a few pages each day.

Sara procrastinated on her studying, viewing it as too unpleasant to face. Ill-prepared for exams and term papers, she was doing poorly in her classes. This made school seem even more distasteful, leading to more procrastination. First, I taught her a Three Minute Exercise (similar to Paul’s, above). Then we discussed a variety of behavioral tasks to combat procrastination.

I reminded Sara that what’s done is done and can’t be undone. Rather than thinking about what she SHOULD have done in the past, it was better to devise strategies for the future. I recommended that she start now, working on her next project, due in two months. The plan we devised comprised the following steps:

  1. Select a project. Sara focused on writing her next paper.

  2. Set a specific time each day to devote to it. 7:30 P.M. on weekdays, and 4:00 P.M. on weekends, seemed best. Sara gave herself Fridays off.

  3. Spend a minimum of three minutes each day on it (the Three Minute Procrastination Buster). Sara found that this modest goal made it easier to sit down and get started.

  4. After working for three minutes, evaluate if you wish to continue. Sara elected to continue working 80 to 90 percent of the time. On occasion, she devoted as much as forty-five minutes.

Give Yourself Rewards and Penalties

As the end of the semester neared, so did Sara’s final exam. She felt that she would not be adequately prepared unless she studied a minimum of two hours every day. However, she was skeptical about accomplishing this formidable task. Three Minute Penalties would provide immediate motivation, so I recommended this approach for Sara:

  1. Select a project. For Sara, this consisted of studying for the final exam.

  2. Decide on the specific days that you wish to set aside for your task, the duration of each work period, and the starting time. Sara resolved to devote five days each week, with only Fridays and Saturdays off, work for two hours on each of these days, and begin after dinner at 7:30.

  3. Select a penalty and a recipient and/or a reward. Sara chose to penalize herself one dollar for every minute not completed out of the 120 minutes, which she assigned herself to do. She would also levy a one dollar penalty for every minute after 7:30 that she did not begin to work. She opted to send the money to her least favorite cause: the campaign fund of a politician she loathed. Her reward for full compliance that day would be a bubble bath before bed.

  4. Immediately levy the penalty for noncompliance. If this evening Sara began studying at 7:35, for example, her penalty would be five dollars. If, in addition, she studied for only 90—rather than 120––minutes, she would owe an additional $30. She consequently would send a total of $35 to her most hated politician’s campaign fund, immediately after ending the evening’s studying.

Sara understood the procedure, and it made sense to her. However, she had one objection:

“I would hate to send that slimy crook any money. In fact, I don’t know if I could get myself to do it,” she confessed.

“To make sure that you do,” I suggested, “when you arrive home tonight, immediately address and stamp an envelope to that slimy crook’s campaign. Then write a check, leaving only the amount blank, and put it in the envelope. Now, if the time comes to pay a penalty, all it will take is filling out the amount on the check and then putting it in the mail,” I explained.

“I guess that would increase the likelihood of my sending it.”

“If this still seems like an impossible task, bring the stamped, addressed envelope and check to me. Should you slip up on the studying, tell me how much you owe the slimy crook. I’ll fill in that amount and mail it for you.”

“Hmm, I see. Thanks.” Sara’s momentary frown relaxed into a smile.

“But since you find the penalty so odious, don’t forget the simple trick which will ensure that you never send the slimy crook one red cent.”

“And that is?”

“That is: Simply study for two hours beginning at 7:30 every night, without fail!”

Sara grinned.

Premack’s Principle

Sara would sometimes lull herself into procrastinating—a moment at a time—until the entire day would slip by. She would think: “I’ll just have a cup of coffee, then I’ll buckle down.” After the coffee, she might say: “Now’s a good time to phone my friend Jennie, before she leaves for class. I’ll just chat with her for a minute.” After the sixty-minute chat, it was “time to check the mail,” and so on. This chain of rationalizations might continue until she finally decided that it was time to go to bed, and therefore it was too late, and she was too tired to do any work. I recognized this as an opportunity to apply Premack’s Principle, formulated by psychologist David Premack, which states: A higher frequency behavior can reinforce a lower frequency behavior.

Suppose brewing yourself a cup of coffee is something you do often and easily (a higher frequency behavior). Suppose further, that vacuuming your living room rug is something you do rarely and with difficulty (a lower frequency behavior).

To implement Premack’s Principle, don’t allow yourself to do the higher frequency behavior (making yourself a cup of coffee) until you’ve done the lower frequency behavior (vacuuming the rug). Sara committed herself to two hours of school work five days each week. She would allow herself a cup of coffee after she put in thirty minutes of studying, and not allow herself to phone a friend (another high frequency behavior) until after she completed the entire two hours.

Three Minute Wake-up Imagery

It’s 7:00 A.M. on Monday. Sara’s clock radio automatically goes on, blaring the morning news. She stirs from under the warm covers. Dazed and only partially emerging from a deep sleep, she hits the clock’s “off” button. She then promptly falls back to sleep. Two hours later, Sara awakes unassisted, glances at the time and frantically makes a beeline for the shower. This was a common pattern for her, especially on Monday mornings.

I gave Sara two suggestions: 1) retire earlier, and 2) use Three Minute Wake-up Imagery. These are the instructions for the latter: Every night, before getting into bed, vividly picture the following:

The clock strikes 7:00 A.M. You spring out of bed and plunge into the shower. While imagining this, strongly repeat to yourself: “No excuses and no debates—as soon as the clock strikes 7:00 A.M. I will spring out of bed and rush into the shower, come hell or high water.” Do this for three minutes, repeating the imagery in your head, and restating the motivational statement.

Sara discovered that when she practiced this wake-up imagery, it worked. Sometimes when she neglected to practice the imagery, she succeeded nevertheless in getting up on time. However, after failing to practice it for several consecutive nights, she would sometimes oversleep, and this reminded her to return to the exercise.

Tell a friend: PASS IT ON
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Dr. Michael R. Edelstein
Clinical Psychologist, San Francisco
415-673-2848 (24 hours)
DrEdelstein@ThreeMinuteTherapy.com
www.ThreeMinuteTherapy.com