After a few days off, the time has come to plan your many resolutions. Objectives versus achievements. Like every year, the first column will last several pages when the second will stop at the beginning of February with a desperate start in June. Impossible to stick to it, one day we will have to resolve it, but the guilt often wins. Too ambitious? Not brave enough? Badly organized ? Too dilettante? Refusal to be evaluated? Tired of being in competition? Simply overloaded? Between the secret boots of organization manuals, the unrealistic advice of above-ground coaches and the example of hyperactive superheroes who are world champions in all areas, 2024 promises to be even worse. Most managers despair of finding the solution. Falling asleep with “you must never put off until tomorrow what you can do that same day”, and waking up with “help yourself, Heaven will help you”… These clichés, very useful for those who are in form, accelerate the mental load of others.
According to a 2019 Odoxa study, “85% of us are chronic procrastinators. 85%… I think the remaining 15% simply did not respond to the survey. Because, with rare exceptions, we are all potential procrastinators”, indicates Mathilde Ramadier, author ofTame your procrastination. The art of doing things differently (Eyrolles, 2023).
Agitation of neurons
“However, procrastination is not synonymous with carelessness or laziness. It is rather a sign that you are active, continues this trained psychoanalyst. Nothing happens in the head of a person who procrastinates . There is activity, a lot of activity even.” The neurons are agitated, information circulates, is processed, collides with others and the amygdala plays a major role. According to Professor Richard Lévy, neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, “we constantly evaluate the value of an action according to a benefit-effort or reward-effort balance and depending on the context. is evaluated not so much the effort as the representation that we have of this effort to be made” (comments collected by Stéphane Desmichelle: “Why do procrastinators procrastinate?”), Science and Future, July 4, 2017). Caught between the hedonistic pleasure principle, in search of immediate rewards, and the reality principle, the procrastinator must constantly make choices. These are sometimes unconscious protections, alerts which forever postpone what we have committed to doing, in order to remain in agreement with ourselves. How to know? The very moment we give up on climbing that mountain (or obeying a pressing and obsessive injunction), we finally feel relieved.
Doing otherwise
Based on Descartes’ third maxim (“Always strive rather to conquer myself than fortune and to change my desires than the order of the world”), Discourse on Method), Mathilde Ramadier invites us not to desire the impossible but rather to transform habits of thought and projections into something concrete (first step). Second step: honestly ask yourself why we are stuck on this impossible project. Make free associations and note “without preconceived intention or critical spirit the incidental ideas which result from [votre] observation of [vous]-even” (Sigmund Freud, On the dream). Be honest: “What does this project make me think about, like that, without thinking? What will it bring me, in the end?”
Third step: decompose, isolate. Establish correlations between our behavior, the situation and our ideas that result from this situation. Procrastination is the cousin of failure to act. “Your procrastination can therefore help you satisfy an underlying desire, or resolve a long-buried conflict,” says Mathilde Ramadier. You can also discover the Flinders Decision Making Questionnaire (DMQ, Mann, 1982), designed to measure the models of adaptation to decision-making, identified by Irving Janis and Leon Mann (1977), which makes it possible to evaluate one’s decisional procrastination, that is to say one’s tendency to postpone not actions but decisions. Final advice: “Never put off until tomorrow what you could do the day after tomorrow” (Mark Twain). In other words, first resolution for the new year: what we are not required to do in 2024, postpone it to 2025!