THEY'VE BECOME MONSTERS!
On how the things we put off grow teeth, and the feeling when we finally do them. And a couple of research-backed actions worth testing.
How often does it happen to you, and to people you know?
We add an item to our to-do list, and the moment we write it down, we already know we probably will not do it today, which is exactly what to-do lists are for.
There is a whole variety of reasons why we delay: because we do not feel like it, because we expect it to be complex, because we are fairly sure it will take more time than we have. Somewhere underneath it all, there might even be the suspicion that we might not do it very well and we would rather not test the idea, or simply because it is annoying.
So it moves to next week. Next week it moves again.
By the third week, it has escalated: you see it every time you open the list, you are bored with it, and you have not even started; you think about it at inconvenient times, you promise yourself you will do it properly, and with the same determination you postpone it again. The task itself grows, adorned with feelings and judgements about yourself: you are apparently a person who leaves things undone, who is behind, who drags things along.
A subscription you stopped using months ago and still pay for. A message from someone you actually like, unanswered for three weeks, because it deserves a good reply rather than a reply. The conversation with the artist, or with the director, that you both need and dread. The application.
Then one day, for no particular reason, you do it.
And the first thing you think is that it was not that bad. The second is that you could have done this in April. You sit there with the strange, slightly embarrassed relief of someone who has been carrying a heavy bag for months and has just discovered that most of what was making it so heavy were the stones you had put in there yourself. And there is a brief but unmistakable and almost exhilarating feeling of freedom.
Psychologists call this the impact bias: we overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions to future events, and we are especially bad at anticipating how quickly we cope once they actually arrive. Everyone does it, apparently.
The items on our lists are not all simple, but they are almost invariably more manageable, less scary and less dreadful than the version we had built, and far less of a verdict on our value.
A few things worth testing, if your list is inhabited by unpleasant monsters, big or small.
For things like conversations, rather than thinking that you should have that conversation, write down what you would like to achieve with it and what you would like to say. Build something you can work on rather than something you fear. Masicampo and Baumeister found that an unfinished task keeps running in the background and interferes with everything else, producing intrusive thoughts during unrelated reading and worse performance on unrelated work, and that writing a specific plan for it switched that background process off, even though the task itself was still not done. [1] And you have something that is started, which is considerably easier than having nothing.
For other tasks, name when and where, rather than what. “I will update my CV” is quite ineffective. “On Sunday at ten, at the kitchen table, I will open the file” gives it a greater chance of happening because naming the moment makes you more likely to notice it when it arrives and ties it to the action, so starting stops being a decision you have to take all over again. Gollwitzer and Sheeran reviewed 94 studies and found that plans in this form consistently outperform plain intentions. [2]
And if one of the things that has survived several iterations of your to-do list, one of the OGs, is addressing the uneasy feelings about your job satisfaction, the direction of your career, your purpose and your sense of it, you could book a free call with me through the link below.
Maybe now, 😎.
Notes
[1] E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister, “Consider It Done! Plan Making Can Eliminate the Cognitive Effects of Unfulfilled Goals”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21688924/
[2] Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran, “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes”, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006. Free full text: https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/entities/publication/2e749bfb-8533-437c-8203-7e788c910c5f
