“Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there”…Will Rogers
Procrastination is not a new problem. In the mid-1800’s, French author Victor Hugo (Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame) would tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he should stay inside to continue his writing.
However, it appears that procrastination may be on the rise. According to Piers Steel, author of The Procrastination Equation and a business professor at the University of Calgary who has made a career out of the study of procrastination, the percentage of people who admit to difficulties with procrastination has quadrupled over the past 20 years.
Research by Harvard behavioral economist David Laibson, revealed that American workers have foregone huge amounts of free money in matching 401(k) contributions…simply because they never got around to signing up!
According to Timothy Pychyl, professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa, there are a number of deliberate strategies that one can undertake to stay one step ahead of procrastination:
For financial advisors, many of the solutions to procrastination may amount to the re-framing of the task in front of you. In some ways, procrastination is influenced by the gap between effort (what is required now) and reward (what you harvest in the future). Narrowing this gap, by whatever means necessary, is the key to limiting procrastination. This is why it helps to focus on short-term projects with definite sections and deadlines, as opposed to open-ended tasks with distant time limits.
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