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Zhao Yixin never thought she was actually suffering from a disease. She hadn’t even come across the word—procrastination.
As a senior student at Beijing Union University, Zhao has been researching and writing her graduate essay for almost half a year but hasn’t succeeded in finishing even half of it.
“I know I always put off tasks so I started earlier than other students,” Zhao said. “But I still haven’t managed to finish it while most of my classmates already completed the essay.”
Zhao said that her habit of putting off tasks can be dated back to primary school years, when she didn’t want to do her homework and always put it off to late night. “I sat at the desk all the time but my mind couldn’t concentrate,” Zhao said. “I kept making promises to myself that I’ll do the homework in 10 minutes, but after many 10 minutes, I still couldn’t start. I don’t think I am the only one in my class acting like this. It seems that we are all like this when we chat about our homework.”
Zhao didn’t take this seriously until she joined a group called We Are All Suffering From Procrastination on Douban.com, a popular social networking website among young Chinese people. “One of my college classmates recommended this website to me and I was surprised to find it was actually a disease,” she said.
A common disease
According to a survey by 163.com, one of China’s leading Web portals, in 2011 more than 70 percent of Chinese people admitted that they have the symptoms of procrastination, such as always putting off tasks to the next day and surfing on the Internet or chatting online when they should be working.
“Everybody has such problems. For most people, it is just a bad habit,” said He Xiefeng, a psychologist in southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. “But if you always feel guilty and deny yourself due to this, it has developed into a disease that can strongly affect people’s life and work.”
The online group We Are All Suffering From Procrastination was set up in May 2007 by a netizen who calls herself Fisheer, a woman who works in the marketing department of a magazine and doesn’t want to reveal her real name.“I was so bored with the life we live every day. It seems we waste every day without really achieving anything,” said Fisheer, who learnt the word procrastination from a friend studying psychology. The group now has more than 7,500 members.
In January 2008, another group called I’ve Wasted Another Day was set up on Douban.com, which had 80,000 members as of February 2012. Members share details of how they wasted another day in their lives.
Mi Meng, the penname of a well-known female columnist for the Nanfang Daily newspaper published in Guangzhou, south China’s Guangdong Province, is a member of both groups. In an article, she said, “It is a normal situation for me to gather two or three articles until deadline and put them off from day time to night and even to midnight while I am still surfing on the Internet. I always drive the chief editor mad, but I feel no better myself, and actually I think I am even more miserable.”
Her words were echoed by many members of the online groups, who said the bad habit has made their lives worse. Some people lost their jobs because they couldn’t finish the assigned work. Some couldn’t graduate from university as they couldn’t complete papers on time. A netizen known as Flyingcloud said that he missed a precious interview just because he couldn’t get himself away from a computer game.
After the groups had been established for sometime, the members found that a large number of people who suffer from procrastination work in science or idea industries such as designers, writers and artists. This habit of putting off everything is partly the result of them believing that they are more inspired under the pressure of a deadline.
“I think it is just an excuse,” said Qiu Rui, a film editor in Beijing. “We can’t rely on this for inspirations.”
Qiu said that the habit of putting off everything to the last moment has had a negative impact on his health. “Often I have to sit in front of computers to do editing 24 hours a day. My eyes get blurred and every time I finish it feels like I’ve been beaten. It takes me days to recover,” he said.
Even so, Qiu hasn’t succeeded in changing the habit of putting off tasks till the deadline is imminent. “I tried many ways such as cutting off the Internet, or asking other people to lock me in the room,” Qiu said.“Such methods might work for a short time, but the function doesn’t last long.”
Tang Nana, a 26-year-old woman who is studying in England for a master’s degree in law, admits that she has been suffering from procrastination for years. “It must be a disease, I can feel it clearly,” said Tang, who was nicknamed Miss Deadline by her friends. “It is getting worse. One month ago, I once gathered five essays, which had the same deadline to the last day and got ready to work overtime to finish them. But even so, I spent a long time in cooking and cleaning the apartment. When I finally sat down to do them it was already 8 o’clock in the evening.”
The result was that three of the essays didn’t pass and Tang had to rewrite them. “My friends said it is a matter of attitude, but it is not exactly, I know something must be wrong but I can’t figure out why I can’t control myself at all,” Tang said.
Whom to blame?
“People always regard laziness as the main reason for procrastination. This is the biggest misunderstanding of procrastination,” said Harrison Yu, the founder of the group Fighting Against Procrastination on Douban.com. “To be lazy means you don’t want to do anything. But procrastinators want to achieve things, they just cannot manage their time.”
Yu, who is well-known in the group for his Web name Gaodi Qingfeng, compared the contradiction to driving by quoting a sentence written by another member of the group, “It is like we press one foot on accelerator and another foot on brake.”
As a doctoral student, Yu in November 2008 came across the word procrastination when he failed to hand in the materials required to apply to be an exchange student at another university.
“I felt very depressed as collecting the materials was not a difficult task at all. The reason I failed is just because I didn’t do it on time,” said Yu, who, from then on started to fight against procrastination.
Tang revealed that she didn’t have the motivation to work until the last day or even the last hour. “Most of the time I can meet my deadlines,” Tang said. “So I solidify my belief that all these tasks can be finished in a very short time and I don’t want to bother to work earlier.”
“But things cannot always work like this,”Qiu said. “When an antelope meets a lion for the first time, the antelope might escape by exhausting all its energy to run faster than the lion. But imagine if an antelope meets lions five times within one day. Can it still manage to escape?”
Tang admits that with a more intense study schedule she wouldn’t be able to meet all her deadlines by squeezing all tasks into the final day. “And I cannot relax with all those tasks unfinished. I always regret on the final day that I wasted all the time I had and promise myself that I will definitely start early next time. But the moment I finish these tasks, I fall into bad habits again.”
According to Zheng Yong, a psychological professor at the Chongqing-based Southwest University, there are various reasons for procrastination. “So far, we’ve found more than 10 causes,” he said.
Xiao Xia, a student at Fudan University in Shanghai, said, “If I start working earlier but cannot complete my work to a high standard, I won’t have any excuse.”
“These people are normally used to hearing only praise from their parents and teachers when they are young,” Zheng said. “They are so afraid to hear any negative comments. So they find excuses for themselves in this way.”
Mu Xiaochai, who works in an advertising firm in Beijing, discovered why she continuously put off tasks after consulting psychologists. “Since I was a kid, I was told repeatedly to spend every second on studying and wasting time was just like committing suicide,” Mu said. “The excessive pressure sometimes causes psychological inversion, so in the end I don’t care that much about time at all. But on the other hand, all these words about cherishing time are rooted deep in my mind. Therefore when I don’t want to work and keep putting things off, I feel guilty.
Smart solutions
Together with several other members in the group Fighting Against Procrastination, Yu translated the book End Procrastination Now!, written by American psychologist William Knaus, into Chinese in 2011.
“Normally we are always encouraged to put more efforts in the things we are doing or change our attitude, while this book is different,” Yu said. “It helps us to dig deep into our heart and find out how we’ve become what we are. In many cases, procrastination is not about attitude.”
According to Yu, there are actually many misunderstandings about procrastination.“Normally people think if we finish everything earlier, we will feel more relaxed in the following days, but actually it’s not like that,” Yu said. “Even if we finish tasks before the deadline, we just find new things to do and keep procrastinating.”
Yu listed a number of books on procrastination and encouraged members in the group Fighting Against Procrastination to read and keep writing reports. Meanwhile, Yu launched some activities to gather members together to help each other overcome their urge to procrastinate.
Yu has tried different ways to fight against procrastination himself. “A person may have different reasons to put off different tasks,” Yu said.“We need to use different methods to deal with each type of procrastination. It is relatively easy to solve procrastination on tasks that we are very proficient with, because if you are proficient with the task you just need to concentrate.”
For Yu, the most difficult case is putting off tasks that a person doesn’t want to do but is persuaded to do by others. “To deal with this, we should be honest to both the other people and ourselves and learn to refuse,” Yu said.
Meanwhile, some software has been developed to deal with procrastination. In June 2010, a program called Little Black Room was unveiled. It is designed for people who write essays or articles but cannot concentrate due to the distractions caused by surfing randomly on the Internet. As soon as people start to run the software, the screen will turn black and people cannot do anything but write until they reach the number of words they specified before they started.
“It works sometimes,” said Su Wen, an editor in a magazine in Shanghai. “But I need to check some information online when I am writing. It is more useful for writers who don’t need the Internet.”
Su attributes her procrastination to the fear of failure. “When I write an article, I always want it to be the best article among my coworkers. If I can’t start well, I’d rather not to start at all,” said Su.
After knowing this problem, Su’s supervisor asked her to relax and write “flawed” articles.“After his words, I started writing quickly and finished soon, and actually the articles turned out well,” Su said. “We are so demanding and put a lot of pressure on ourselves. But as long as you start doing something you tend to be able to finish it.”
“I think fighting is not the proper word to use when dealing with procrastination,”said Lan Jing, who studies in Beijing Normal University for her master’s degree in psychology. “It sounds more like procrastination is our enemy. It is not true. We should learn to communicate with it and deal with it in a much softer or more astute way.”
As a senior student at Beijing Union University, Zhao has been researching and writing her graduate essay for almost half a year but hasn’t succeeded in finishing even half of it.
“I know I always put off tasks so I started earlier than other students,” Zhao said. “But I still haven’t managed to finish it while most of my classmates already completed the essay.”
Zhao said that her habit of putting off tasks can be dated back to primary school years, when she didn’t want to do her homework and always put it off to late night. “I sat at the desk all the time but my mind couldn’t concentrate,” Zhao said. “I kept making promises to myself that I’ll do the homework in 10 minutes, but after many 10 minutes, I still couldn’t start. I don’t think I am the only one in my class acting like this. It seems that we are all like this when we chat about our homework.”
Zhao didn’t take this seriously until she joined a group called We Are All Suffering From Procrastination on Douban.com, a popular social networking website among young Chinese people. “One of my college classmates recommended this website to me and I was surprised to find it was actually a disease,” she said.
A common disease
According to a survey by 163.com, one of China’s leading Web portals, in 2011 more than 70 percent of Chinese people admitted that they have the symptoms of procrastination, such as always putting off tasks to the next day and surfing on the Internet or chatting online when they should be working.
“Everybody has such problems. For most people, it is just a bad habit,” said He Xiefeng, a psychologist in southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. “But if you always feel guilty and deny yourself due to this, it has developed into a disease that can strongly affect people’s life and work.”
The online group We Are All Suffering From Procrastination was set up in May 2007 by a netizen who calls herself Fisheer, a woman who works in the marketing department of a magazine and doesn’t want to reveal her real name.“I was so bored with the life we live every day. It seems we waste every day without really achieving anything,” said Fisheer, who learnt the word procrastination from a friend studying psychology. The group now has more than 7,500 members.
In January 2008, another group called I’ve Wasted Another Day was set up on Douban.com, which had 80,000 members as of February 2012. Members share details of how they wasted another day in their lives.
Mi Meng, the penname of a well-known female columnist for the Nanfang Daily newspaper published in Guangzhou, south China’s Guangdong Province, is a member of both groups. In an article, she said, “It is a normal situation for me to gather two or three articles until deadline and put them off from day time to night and even to midnight while I am still surfing on the Internet. I always drive the chief editor mad, but I feel no better myself, and actually I think I am even more miserable.”
Her words were echoed by many members of the online groups, who said the bad habit has made their lives worse. Some people lost their jobs because they couldn’t finish the assigned work. Some couldn’t graduate from university as they couldn’t complete papers on time. A netizen known as Flyingcloud said that he missed a precious interview just because he couldn’t get himself away from a computer game.
After the groups had been established for sometime, the members found that a large number of people who suffer from procrastination work in science or idea industries such as designers, writers and artists. This habit of putting off everything is partly the result of them believing that they are more inspired under the pressure of a deadline.
“I think it is just an excuse,” said Qiu Rui, a film editor in Beijing. “We can’t rely on this for inspirations.”
Qiu said that the habit of putting off everything to the last moment has had a negative impact on his health. “Often I have to sit in front of computers to do editing 24 hours a day. My eyes get blurred and every time I finish it feels like I’ve been beaten. It takes me days to recover,” he said.
Even so, Qiu hasn’t succeeded in changing the habit of putting off tasks till the deadline is imminent. “I tried many ways such as cutting off the Internet, or asking other people to lock me in the room,” Qiu said.“Such methods might work for a short time, but the function doesn’t last long.”
Tang Nana, a 26-year-old woman who is studying in England for a master’s degree in law, admits that she has been suffering from procrastination for years. “It must be a disease, I can feel it clearly,” said Tang, who was nicknamed Miss Deadline by her friends. “It is getting worse. One month ago, I once gathered five essays, which had the same deadline to the last day and got ready to work overtime to finish them. But even so, I spent a long time in cooking and cleaning the apartment. When I finally sat down to do them it was already 8 o’clock in the evening.”
The result was that three of the essays didn’t pass and Tang had to rewrite them. “My friends said it is a matter of attitude, but it is not exactly, I know something must be wrong but I can’t figure out why I can’t control myself at all,” Tang said.
Whom to blame?
“People always regard laziness as the main reason for procrastination. This is the biggest misunderstanding of procrastination,” said Harrison Yu, the founder of the group Fighting Against Procrastination on Douban.com. “To be lazy means you don’t want to do anything. But procrastinators want to achieve things, they just cannot manage their time.”
Yu, who is well-known in the group for his Web name Gaodi Qingfeng, compared the contradiction to driving by quoting a sentence written by another member of the group, “It is like we press one foot on accelerator and another foot on brake.”
As a doctoral student, Yu in November 2008 came across the word procrastination when he failed to hand in the materials required to apply to be an exchange student at another university.
“I felt very depressed as collecting the materials was not a difficult task at all. The reason I failed is just because I didn’t do it on time,” said Yu, who, from then on started to fight against procrastination.
Tang revealed that she didn’t have the motivation to work until the last day or even the last hour. “Most of the time I can meet my deadlines,” Tang said. “So I solidify my belief that all these tasks can be finished in a very short time and I don’t want to bother to work earlier.”
“But things cannot always work like this,”Qiu said. “When an antelope meets a lion for the first time, the antelope might escape by exhausting all its energy to run faster than the lion. But imagine if an antelope meets lions five times within one day. Can it still manage to escape?”
Tang admits that with a more intense study schedule she wouldn’t be able to meet all her deadlines by squeezing all tasks into the final day. “And I cannot relax with all those tasks unfinished. I always regret on the final day that I wasted all the time I had and promise myself that I will definitely start early next time. But the moment I finish these tasks, I fall into bad habits again.”
According to Zheng Yong, a psychological professor at the Chongqing-based Southwest University, there are various reasons for procrastination. “So far, we’ve found more than 10 causes,” he said.
Xiao Xia, a student at Fudan University in Shanghai, said, “If I start working earlier but cannot complete my work to a high standard, I won’t have any excuse.”
“These people are normally used to hearing only praise from their parents and teachers when they are young,” Zheng said. “They are so afraid to hear any negative comments. So they find excuses for themselves in this way.”
Mu Xiaochai, who works in an advertising firm in Beijing, discovered why she continuously put off tasks after consulting psychologists. “Since I was a kid, I was told repeatedly to spend every second on studying and wasting time was just like committing suicide,” Mu said. “The excessive pressure sometimes causes psychological inversion, so in the end I don’t care that much about time at all. But on the other hand, all these words about cherishing time are rooted deep in my mind. Therefore when I don’t want to work and keep putting things off, I feel guilty.
Smart solutions
Together with several other members in the group Fighting Against Procrastination, Yu translated the book End Procrastination Now!, written by American psychologist William Knaus, into Chinese in 2011.
“Normally we are always encouraged to put more efforts in the things we are doing or change our attitude, while this book is different,” Yu said. “It helps us to dig deep into our heart and find out how we’ve become what we are. In many cases, procrastination is not about attitude.”
According to Yu, there are actually many misunderstandings about procrastination.“Normally people think if we finish everything earlier, we will feel more relaxed in the following days, but actually it’s not like that,” Yu said. “Even if we finish tasks before the deadline, we just find new things to do and keep procrastinating.”
Yu listed a number of books on procrastination and encouraged members in the group Fighting Against Procrastination to read and keep writing reports. Meanwhile, Yu launched some activities to gather members together to help each other overcome their urge to procrastinate.
Yu has tried different ways to fight against procrastination himself. “A person may have different reasons to put off different tasks,” Yu said.“We need to use different methods to deal with each type of procrastination. It is relatively easy to solve procrastination on tasks that we are very proficient with, because if you are proficient with the task you just need to concentrate.”
For Yu, the most difficult case is putting off tasks that a person doesn’t want to do but is persuaded to do by others. “To deal with this, we should be honest to both the other people and ourselves and learn to refuse,” Yu said.
Meanwhile, some software has been developed to deal with procrastination. In June 2010, a program called Little Black Room was unveiled. It is designed for people who write essays or articles but cannot concentrate due to the distractions caused by surfing randomly on the Internet. As soon as people start to run the software, the screen will turn black and people cannot do anything but write until they reach the number of words they specified before they started.
“It works sometimes,” said Su Wen, an editor in a magazine in Shanghai. “But I need to check some information online when I am writing. It is more useful for writers who don’t need the Internet.”
Su attributes her procrastination to the fear of failure. “When I write an article, I always want it to be the best article among my coworkers. If I can’t start well, I’d rather not to start at all,” said Su.
After knowing this problem, Su’s supervisor asked her to relax and write “flawed” articles.“After his words, I started writing quickly and finished soon, and actually the articles turned out well,” Su said. “We are so demanding and put a lot of pressure on ourselves. But as long as you start doing something you tend to be able to finish it.”
“I think fighting is not the proper word to use when dealing with procrastination,”said Lan Jing, who studies in Beijing Normal University for her master’s degree in psychology. “It sounds more like procrastination is our enemy. It is not true. We should learn to communicate with it and deal with it in a much softer or more astute way.”