Why lawyers procrastinate and 2 key tips which aren’t more ‘motivation’ and more ‘discipline’….
Procrastination can be difficult to overcome in any job, but my sense is that it can be particularly hard in law.
The reason for this is that there is often a significant difference in the quality of focus and attention that is required between small and large tasks for a lawyer. While replying to emails, attending calls and meetings and managing ongoing workstreams may occupy much of a typical day, inevitably there will be periods of time when lawyers need to turn their attention to a substantive legal task which requires significantly more cognitive effort.
This could be drafting a piece of legal advice, preparing a witness statement, reviewing complex technical documents or working out a legal strategy.
The point is that this type of work often requires real intellectual engagement which is demanding. The discipline to switch gears to engage in this fully in the context of a busy working day can be hard to do.
Particularly in litigation when deadlines for work product are often weeks and months away it can be tempting to keep deferring the long form ‘hard’ tasks because they are hard to start and hard to keep working on: hence, we procrastinate.
Ali Abdaal in his book ‘Feel Good Productivity’ has two clear principles to tackle the issue of procrastination, which are useful tools to remember next time you can’t bring yourself to start and finish a task.
Unblock Uncertainty
Get Started
Motivation and discipline don’t really work…
Abdaal notes that most advice for how to avoid procrastination and to do something we don’t want to do is usually based on more motivation or more discipline.
Motivation is when we don’t want to do something but we say to ourselves ‘you should be motivated to do this because if you do it a good thing will happen’ (e.g. money/ success etc. will follow) and the discipline method is ‘I really don’t want to do this but I will do it anyway because if I don’t I am not hard working enough/ good enough/ worthy of my place etc.’.
The problem with both of these methods is they are both just simply telling ourselves (often quite self-critically and harshly) that we should want to do something that we obviously don’t want to do.
Both approaches don’t actually address the problem directly of why you don’t want to undertake the task in question.
The main reason why we procrastinate is not an absence of motivation or discipline, it is: uncertainty.
The ‘Unblock Uncertainty’ method encourages us to understand why we are feeling bad about the work in the first place and tackle the issue head on.
Unblock Uncertainty
The main reason why we procrastinate from doing a task is because human beings naturally don’t like uncertainty.
A task which you don’t know how difficult it is going to be, how long its going to take, whether there is going to be a good outcome at the end is one which the human brain naturally recoils from (the classic example of this is a child is starting to revise for an exam).
‘Uncertainty paralysis’ is a well-known psychological phenomenon which we are all prone to to varying degrees.
Sending a short email to a colleague asking a quick question usually provokes no emotional response in us, but starting a long complex task where you have no clarity on how it will play out is often daunting and not pleasurable precisely because our brain doesn’t like grappling with all the unknown elements at play.
The ‘Unblock Uncertainty’ method addresses this uncertainty head on by forcing us to ask three questions of the task at hand:
· Why?
· What?
· When?
The most practical way to address the task you are procrastinating on would be open up a Word document and answer these three questions in short bullet points.
Why?
If we don’t have a clear grasp of why we are embarking on a particular task and the specific purpose behind it, it is near impossible to get on with actually doing it.
Having a clear sense of the purpose behind a task at the start is important because it sets clear expectations for what you are trying to accomplish. In focusing on the purpose of the task you should be able to create a clear ‘to do’ list for the project which only lists the absolute essential elements to get you to your end goal.
If you don’t have that clarity on why, the task can just appear sprawling and undirected.
For example, drafting a witness statement – ask yourself why is this statement necessary? i.e. what are the five key things this witness needs to communicate and focus tightly on those points.
Writing an answer to the question ‘why’ should give you a clear outline for the end goal of the task.
What?
One of the obvious areas of uncertainty for a task you are procrastinating over is what exactly the work is going to look like. What in practice are you supposed to be doing to complete this task?
One of the easiest ways to break down a large and complex task in to clear small objectives is to set NICE goals. NICE is:
Near-term: make the initial goal daily or weekly rather than trying to plan for the whole project. i.e. ‘write the first 500 words by tomorrow’.
Input based: rather than focusing on the final outcome focus on the process; e.g. an input based goal would be: work on the memo for 3 x 30 minute sessions today as opposed to ‘finish project by end of month’;.
Controllable: set goals which are controllable. So 3 x 30 minute sessions is probably achievable rather than ‘spend 8 hours working on memo today’ which is bound to be disrupted.
Energising: think of how you can work in an engaged and focused way in bursts rather than letting the project drift.
When?
The easiest way to avoid procrastination is to actually block time out in your calendar for a task.
So in the same way you would not miss a call with a client that had been diarised, put slots in your diary for working on a particular project.
That way you will avoid the temptation to keep ‘bumping’ the large complex task down your to do list when a quicker and easier task arises and encourages you to procrastinate further.
When the diary entry for that task arises just work on it for 30 minutes or an hour without distraction.
Get started
One of the biggest reasons we procrastinate over large tasks is because the energy and motivation it requires to start a task is much bigger than the energy needed to keep working on it once commenced. I.e. when you are doing nothing it is easier to carry on doing nothing and starting feels very difficult.
Here are some simple ways to reduce the friction of getting started:
1) Reduce the practical impediments to starting: this might be printing all the materials off so they are neatly in one place or organising the documents in an easy to read chronology first.
2) Break down the next action step into very small chunks: ask yourself what the next step in the task is in the smallest possible segments of work. So this might be the next task is ‘Read introduction to materials email from client’. Making the next step tiny means that you take your eye off the intimidating long term goal and just focus on the achievable next step. Tick off just the next small action, one at a time.
3) Practice the ‘five minute rule’: if you really don’t want to start the task, tell yourself you will do the task for only 5 minutes, and if you still don’t want to do it after you have tried it for 5 minutes, then give yourself permission to give up and leave it for the day.
This rule is weirdly effective; most of the time you just keep going after 5 minutes. Usually because imagining yourself doing the task you don’t want to do is worse than the reality of actually doing it and the 5 minutes of actually experiencing the task proves that.
In order for this rule to work you actually need to give yourself permission to stop after 5 minutes on the days you really don’t feel like it though. If you are lying to yourself about being able to give up it wouldn’t be effective.
4) Use the Pomodoro method: a well known hack for working in short bursts is the Pomodoro method which is a 25 minute work timer followed by a 5 minute break which allows you to just work to a clock and then stop after 25 minutes (the Pomodoro Youtube videos are easy to use).
5) Track your progress: record how many hours you have spent on the task, or how many words you have written or documents reviewed etc. Keeping a tally of your progress (separate to your billable hours) gives you tangible evidence that you are moving towards the goal and provides a sense of momentum (rather than feeling vaguely like you haven’t made much progress). If you celebrate small wins you will be more likely to keep going and feel good about the project. An example might be every time you review 50 documents, tick it off on a chart.
6) Forgive yourself: this last one is interesting. A 2010 study by a psychologist at Carleton University reviewed undergraduate students and their procrastination habits and how it affected studying for their exams. The study found that the main problem wasn’t procrastination (which everyone does to some extent) it was the self-flagellation that followed.
Those students who perpetually beat themselves up for failing to study and told themselves they were bad students were less able to get back to productive habits and were more likely to wallow in their inability to work than those students who brushed off a missed study session and moved on. The study entitled ‘I forgive myself, now I can study’ proved that the quicker we are able to stop focusing on the work we haven’t done and blaming ourselves, the more likely we are able to break the pattern of procrastination and start work in a good frame of mind.