Itamar Shatz (Hughes Hall 2018), affiliated lecturer of quantitative and computational research methods at Cambridge, is dedicated to helping people become more effective. His forthcoming first book Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop grew out of his study and experience with this painful habit and his desire to help people get things done.
Itamar Shatz (Hughes Hall 2018), affiliated lecturer of quantitative and computational research methods at Cambridge, is dedicated to helping people become more effective. His forthcoming first book Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop grew out of his study and experience with this painful habit and his desire to help people get things done.
Dr Shatz spoke about his book and his approach to putting an end to procrastination.
What led you to study the science of procrastination?
I used to be a huge procrastinator in high school, so I knew how painful and how frustrating this was. I also knew that tons of other people struggle with it. I felt there had to be something that could help people. I set out to write one article, and then, as I started looking into it, I realized it was too big and serious of a problem, and there was too much that needed to be said about this. I decided to write the book in order to create something where I can tie everything together, to give people a deep dive in a way that can really drive their behavioral change.
In your book, you express a lot of compassion for people who deal with procrastination, acknowledging how painful it can be. That’s a different approach to how people tend to think about wasting time. What did you have in mind?
Most procrastinators are already well aware that this behavior hurts us and already want to change, even if we sometimes underplay procrastination’s consequences or miss the more subtle issues it causes. This means that shaming or judging people for procrastinating doesn’t help. What does help is encouraging them to face the problem head-on in a constructive way, while also showing them how to go about it in practice.
The book is designed to solve procrastination. Can you say more about your approach?
Even though there’s a shared underlying psychological mechanism behind our procrastination, the specific ways we procrastinate can differ, which means there isn’t a single solution that will work for everyone all the time. A student who's procrastinating because of distractions, for example, is very different from an executive who's procrastinating because of burnout, or an artist who's procrastinating because of perfectionism, and so on.
My approach takes this into account by offering a range of anti-procrastination strategies procrastinators can use, like unpacking tasks into microsteps, building self-efficacy through consistent wins, and scheduling tasks according to your productivity rhythms. It also offers tools for figuring out which strategies will likely work best in your particular situation, like questions that help you reflect on your situation and self-distancing techniques that help you see through the tricks your brain plays on you. There are also the procrastinator archetypes that I’ve identified—like the Perfectionist, Zigzagger, and Burnout—which capture common patterns of procrastination. The idea behind them is to have a very heuristic-based approach for saying, okay, this is me. This is what I need to do right now.
Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop comes out on August 25th with Penguin Random House.
For a deeper dive into procrastinator archetypes, check out this Cambridge article.