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Reply to your emails? Tomorrow. Finish completing the Excel document for accounting? Before the weekend. Write the agenda for the next meeting? Next week. We tend to procrastinate at work, which can sometimes be detrimental to us. Fortunately, Japanese researchers have discovered how to combat this tendency to procrastinate.
The key to success lies in showing optimism in everyday life. Indeed, previous studies have shown that procrastinators put off everything until tomorrow because they live in the moment. They do everything they can to feel good in the present moment, which pushes them to postpone any task that seems unpleasant to them. The future appears harmless to them, because it is distant in time.
A research team affiliated with the University of Tokyo therefore wondered whether procrastinators would stop being procrastinators by having a more positive state of mind towards the future. The researchers tested this theory with 296 twenty-somethings. They asked them questions about the experiences they had over the past ten years, and asked them to project themselves ten years into the future. The academics based themselves on the volunteers’ responses to classify them into four groups, themselves subdivided into three categories of individuals (severe, moderate or weak procrastinators).
The benefits of a “positive attitude”
It has been found that people who have a generally positive attitude towards the future are less likely to be great procrastinators. “Our results showed that optimistic people, that is, those who believe that stress does not increase as we look into the future, are less likely to practice excessive procrastination.“, explains Saya Kashiwakura, doctoral student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo and co-author of the study, in a statement.
And that’s not all: Saya Kashiwakura and her colleagues noticed that optimism influenced not only the level of stress felt by volunteers, but also their behavior in terms of procrastination over a period of twenty years. In other words, people who aren’t stressed about their future are less likely to put off doing something they could do today.
Procrastination is not linked to discomfort
Surprisingly, the authors of this studypublished in the journal Scientific Reports, observed no direct link between procrastination and a negative perception of personal well-being, such as problems with self-esteem or a lack of purpose in life.
Procrastination would therefore be linked to a fear of the future, and not to a lack of organization, as we often hear. Cultivating your optimism would therefore allow you to no longer be afraid of tackling all these small professional tasks that seem boring or painful to us. You have to have confidence in your ability to succeed now and in the future, so as not to get overwhelmed at work. This is how we will finally be able to complete our to-do lists.
Slide: 12 good reasons to be optimistic