How will you handle a co worker or a subordinate who is excellent in his work but leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to meeting deadlines?
Other than this strange paralysis when it comes to completing, nay starting and finishing, these guys are excellent in everything else and they add value to the organisations.
These guys are the procrastinators who cause unending tension at the work place.
To understand about the procrastinators, let us first find out something more about procrastination.
Procrastination is the subconscious attempt to delay the inevitable. It’s also the fine art of brinkmanship, where like Shakespeare’s Hamlet; we keep contemplating, ‘to be or not to be’. It is a vain attempt to wish away unpleasant tasks. As someone said if it wasn’t for the last minute nothing will get done.
“Strong and consistent predictors of procrastination were task aversiveness, task delay, self-efficacy, impulsiveness, as well as conscientiousness and its facets of self-control, distractibility, organisation and achievement motivation. (The Nature of Procrastination: Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Self-Regulatory Failure by Piers Steel, University of
Calgary)
To know how to handle procrastinators we should also know something about the way procrastinators think.
In a much quoted study by Ellis and Knaus (1977) and Burka and Yuen (1983) the process is superbly mapped.(1) You want to achieve some outcome, usually something you and others value and respect–"I've got to start." (2) You delay, briefly thinking of real and imagined advantages of starting to change later–"I'll do it tomorrow when I don't have much to do."(3) You delay more, becoming self-critical–"I should have started sooner"–and/or self-excusing–"I really couldn't have left the party early last night, my best friends were there." You may hide or pretend to be busy; you may even lie about having other obligations.(4) You delay still more, until finally the task has to be done, usually hastily–"Just get it done any old way"–or you just don't have time–"I can't do this!" (5) You berate yourself–"There is something wrong with me"–and swear never to procrastinate again and/or you discount the importance of the task–"It doesn't matter." (6) You repeat the process almost immediately on other important tasks, as if it were an addiction or compulsion.
Now that we have dismantled the process of procrastination, it is easier for us to understand and handle procrastinators.
A fairly simple method of handling procrastinators and getting them to confirm to deadlines is to break up the task or a project into smaller wholes and fix individual deadlines for each component.
For example, let’s assume that you have to make a presentation in a month, and the sales projections are vital for its success.
Paper work or even asking them to sit and work is something the sales men abhor. So you can be sure that they are going to be coming back with lot of justification for not completing it and leaving you to tear your hair out in frustration.
Instead of asking them to bring the completed forecast you can ask them to first bring in a draft in a week and then ask them to come back with more numbers or clarifications in another week and finally ask them to bring the final forecast in another.
This strategy of breaking a task into small pieces, will not only ensure that the task gets completed on time but it also ensures that you are also informed about the progress or lack of progress in advance and can take remedial action.
Procrastination is a common failing in all of us. All of us have procrastinated over some task or the other. But some of us have realized the cost of procrastinating in our working life and have learnt to overcome it and become successful.
In the work place our success or failure is also dependent on getting our co workers or subordinates to complete their tasks efficiently and effectively.
So it’s also our duty to train them in understanding the importance of completing a task on time.
