TGIM: The Procrastination Potion

Welcome back to Thank God It’s Monday!

tl;dr Parkinson’s Law refers to the phenomenon where work expands to fill the time allotted to it. Even though an email or a household project taking up extra time doesn’t seem like a big deal, one day we might realize we spent much too long procrastinating and not living life.

It’s Monday. You had big plans to wake up early, get a workout in, prep your lunch, go to work, and afterwards have time for an idyllic wind-down routine. Or maybe you just wanted to survive the day. How is it going so far?

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You know when you have an hour break before your next commitment, and you tell yourself all you need to really accomplish is write an email response? And then somehow it took you the entire hour to write the email response? Or the house project you’re working on, you said you needed to finish before winter comes, and somehow winter is here, and you’re scrambling to get it done?

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That is the result of Parkinson’s Law. Without urgency, we procrastinate. If we know a deadline is far off, we don’t have the motivation to act, and the same volume of work swells to take up far more time. From semester-long papers in undergrad to house remodeling later in life, we’ve all dilly-dallied until the sense of urgency overwhelms the tendency to procrastinate.

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Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative condition associated with people in their 60s and later who present with difficulty moving due to a dopamine imbalance. When working with Parkinson’s patients in physical therapy, they would have difficulty initiating movement. For example, they would have trouble starting to pedal the stationary bike or putting the first foot forward, navigating some low walking hurdles. But once they got moving, they were pretty proficient at continuing to move.

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Both Parkinson’s Law and Parkinson’s disease refer to a difficulty with initiating movement. But once movement is started, it is easier to keep going.

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Parkinson’s disease treatment is multimodal (including physical therapy and occupational therapy), but the medication used restores dopamine levels in the brain. This helps ease the shakiness, rigidity, and slowness of movement associated with the disease.

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Hopefully, you don’t ever need to familiarize yourself with Parkinson’s disease treatment (please do your resistance training and continue learning!), but I thought the “treatment” for Parkinson’s Law can be similarly modeled.

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It’s human nature to procrastinate (that might be why you’re not doing your resistance training or learning to prevent long-term neurodegenerative disease, because there isn’t any urgency). So here are some ideas to help fight the procrastination problem:

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​1. Create a sense of urgency: You or someone you know swears by the ability to work well under pressure. That’s because it helps us tune out the distractions when we know there is an upcoming deadline. Consider those overnights you pulled in college to get that paper done by morning. But now we have to be able to create our own sense of urgency to take action. You can do this by tying a strong emotion to a further-out deadline.
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One example is how I create that urgency around health. I so strongly believe in resistance training, eating well, and exercising the mind to fight neurodegenerative disease because I see it’s consequences at work regularly. I see those who can no longer take care of themselves and who succumb to a quality of life that others have to create for them (or is created by the machines they are dependent on) because they fell victim to Parkinson’s Law, thinking there was always a “later” when they could address their health. This is a frequent reminder to me of how important it is to prioritize wellness now. But others who don’t see this every day lose that sense of urgency.

2. Treat with dopamine: Just like the medications used to help Parkinson’s disease, we can use dopamine to help initiate movement. For me, going to a coffee shop provides the dopamine spike I need to get moving on work I don’t want to do. The dopamine of going to a new shop or trying a new coffee gets me excited to get out of the house and get cracking on otherwise intimidating projects.
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Similarly, if you can figure out how to get a small dopamine surge that pushes you in the right direction, it will help overcome that procrastination. It should be something that creates dopamine that lends to progress towards your goal (not dopamine from scrolling on social media that distracts you from your goal). But dopamine is a powerful drug (both endogenous and exogenous, ie, the dopamine our bodies make and the dopamine we create from external sources). Use it wisely!

3. Break it down: Fear is often disguised in procrastination, sometimes unbeknownst to us. We see a big project, or an undesirable one, and we put it off so that we don’t have to face the uncomfortable emotion. To make it more manageable to tackle, break it down into bite-sized pieces so small that it feels ridiculous not to do them.
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Breaking down a big project can help us get the ball rolling, which creates confidence and sustains momentum. All of these create breadcrumbs to lead us in the right direction. But the key is making the steps so small that it feels dumb not to do them. Because our animal-based brains really do love procrastinating.

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Working in healthcare has been one of the greatest motivating factors to remember to live life (and not delay it). We see people who no longer have the capacity to create the quality of life they want, and in the ICU, I deal with patients dying and families grieving more often than most professionals.

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You probably feel cringey reading that (if you’ve made it this far) and want to close the computer tab now, but I urge you to sit with that feeling for a minute. Why does it feel funny? Probably because you don’t deal with it often, and our culture doesn’t like to talk about it. But giving yourself a moment to consider what that feeling does for you can change how you live your life. Do you feel funny because you know you’re not living fully? If you knew how much time you have left, would you change how you were living? Then why don’t you?

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I am grateful to be able to think and talk about death because I truly believe it helps me live the life I want to live. I am still guilty of procrastinating, I am human after all. But being more comfortable with our finite nature helps me not fall victim to Parkinson’s Law as often as others. And this might help you light a fire under your own tush too. Life is short, don’t procrastinate it.

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If you found some value in this, please share it with a friend you think would enjoy it! And let me know if you’d like to be added to get TGIM.

This week, my podcast recommendation is new from Mark Manson’s Solved, “A Comprehensive Guide to Stoicism ft Ryan Holiday.”

With that, if you haven’t thought of a costume yet, procrastination might be the scariest monster of them all! Let me know how you can manifest it.

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Until next time,
Shannon