The clock is ticking, your presentation is due tomorrow, and YouTube beckons. From doing your laundry to calling your mom, why is it that everything and anything sounds better than starting your deck? Here’s why it occurs, and why you need to get started now.
Why It Happens
Procrastination is all about instant gratification. The culprit is the limbic system in our brain, which controls our automatic responses to stimuli. When an evil clown pops out of a haunted house wall, we jump without thinking. In the same way, the limbic system prioritizes abandoning tasks that are challenging or unpleasant. In other words, our brain wants us to enjoy ourselves by marathoning a show on Netflix rather than working on that important presentation.
How it Affects Presentations
For Writing – People have built a career on catching mistakes, re-reading text, and “sleeping on” content. Your inner copy-editor will not be activated if you rush through a hasty first draft and call it quits at the last minute. Procrastination can also leave you without any time to have someone else check for errors or overall mistakes in flow.
For Design - Hasty design is poor design, which is why it should never be pushed to the last minute. Spreading out the time you work on design ensures that you can double check for visual consistency as well as any other errors you might be able to find.
For Delivery - Cram sessions won’t help you deliver an impactful presentation; consistent practice over time does. Putting off your practice can have serious effects on your memory of the content, since repetition of information is scientifically proven to help you remember important data when it matters most.
How to End it — Right Now
Since the brain is unwilling to work at a difficult task for a long period of time, there are a few “limbic system hacks” that you can do to get the task done. For instance:
Breaking up the task into smaller chunks – This can entail grouping work sessions into 15-minute intervals, with plenty of break time in between to enjoy a procrastination reward. With breaks, the brain won’t have time to switch into “this is too unpleasant for me to do right now” mode.
Get the hard stuff out of the way – According to a psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect, unfinished tasks stick in our memory and stress us out. How can you fight this feeling of dread? All you have to do is start working on the project, even if it’s as simple as writing a rough outline. Also consider knocking out the task you dread first: In the words of Mark Twain, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”
Enlist an accountability friend - Sharing your goal with someone else may be the extra push you need to complete the task on time. If the deadline is short, ask them to check up on you at intervals before the event. Creating limits for yourself and having someone else enforce them is the difference between the inefficient “I have to get this done” and “I have to get this much done by this time on this date.”
What are you waiting for? That presentation needs to be completed, and you need to have enough time to make sure you can review, edit, and rehearse it. Refine your productivity and get started right now!
READ MORE: The Quickest Way to Create a Presentation — Without Losing Quality
About the Author
Scott Schwertly is the author of How to Be a Presentation God and CEO of Ethos3, a Nashville, TN-based presentation boutique providing professional presentation design and training for national and international clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to branded individuals like Guy Kawasaki.
If Scott is not working with his team building presentations, you will find him in the pool, on the bike, or on a long run. Scott lives in Nashville, TN with his wife and three dogs. He has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Harding University. For more tips from Scott, follow Ethos3 on Twitter.