How To Overcome Procrastination with a Culture of Accountability
Teams are always having trouble figuring out how to make sure that deadlines are taken seriously, and how to stop individuals from spending too much time procrastinating.
A Lot of Team Stress Comes from Procrastination
Procrastination is one of the most insidious habits on teams, as it leaves individual and team performance crippled by inaction. That is why CommandHound has compiled the latest research on procrastination and how to stop it from derailing projects.
Why Do We Procrastinate?
But how do we stop this seemingly uncontrollable impulse? First, understand what is making your brain avoid the task. Tim Pychyl, author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, argues that there are seven qualities about a task that make your brain viscerally avoid it. These include:
- The task is too boring, meaning that you are not interested in it.
- It is frustrating to work on because progress is slow or your team is not helpful
- It is too difficult if you have not been given the resources to finish the task well
- You have not been given sufficient information, so the task is too ambiguous
- Similarly, the task can be too unstructured, so you do not know what you need to accomplish or when it needs to be done
- If you are not engaged in the outcome or the process of completing a task, it is not intrinsically rewarding enough for your interest
- A lack of investment in the task could mean that it is also lacking in personal meaning
When the emotional core of your brain, the limbic system, finds itself faced with a task that aligns with one of these seven triggers, it overcomes your rational brain and forces you to avoid a task even if your rational brain knows how important it is.
How To Use Logic Over Emotion
Therefore, avoiding procrastination can sometimes come down to one simple trick: when you notice your emotional brain taking over, consciously engage your rational brain and resist the impulse to procrastinate.
Beyond simply noticing what you are doing, there are a few other ways to improve work performance that you can train yourself to do in order to avoid unhealthy procrastination. The first involves trying to trick your brain by reversing those emotional triggers.
If you are finding a task to be too unstructured, come up with a plan and parameters before even trying to tackle it. If a task is too boring to spend much time on, try breaking it down into smaller segments of time so that your brain is less resistant to it.
Software Aids
If you think that just trying to trick your brain will not work, use a software that that keeps track of your tasks while also monitoring and tracking your accountability. CommandHound is a software solution that was designed and built from the ground up to drive accountability.
It is also the only tool that allows you to define escalation paths with different levels of urgency, and the only tool that keeps track of completion performance by individual and by process.
CommandHound Uses A Culture of Accountability to Stop Procrastination
A software solution like CommandHound will allow you, your team, and your manager to define tasks that need to be completed by each person. The individual tracking and escalation features allow users to truly delegate tasks and only worry about tasks that are falling behind. This saves management and oversight time across the board, letting you spend your time on the tasks that matter and not worry about being derailed by procrastination.
By using CommandHound to improve your accountability and your team’s accountability, your procrastination woes will be a thing of the past. Learn more about how to solve your procrastiantion problems today:
