Daily Social MediaTeasers Snag You?

Ever hit a formidable wall once you begin to write? If I’m writing with great inspiration, I’m highly motivated to stick with the topic and further insights seem to keep coming to mind. Writing flows easily.

On the other hand, if I’m writing because I need to, I often begin, but distractions fill my mind, which keep taking me elsewhere. In this highly charged social media era, many tempters like email, Twitter or Facebook tease me to take just a quick peek. Before I realized it I'm snagged for half an hour.  The time slips away!

Piers Steele, University of Calgary psychology professor in the Haskayne School of Business on procrastination explains this phenomenon in a recent interview for The Toronto Star:

We’ve always tended to go for the short-term pleasure instead of something more rewarding but longer term. So we do a lot of things like Facebook or video snacking at the cost of long-term and larger goals. What predicts procrastination is not just who you are, but also your environment — the amount of temptation around you. We now live in a world supersaturated with powerful short-term temptations. Our environment has become motivationally toxic.

Steel, author of The Procrastination Equation (2011), has analyzed why we habitually put things off...  They are:

1. Confidence in your ability to finish a task. The less confident you are, the harder it is to get motivated.
2. Rewards you get as you work on the task. If it’s boring, your mind slides off the task.
3. Rewards not experienced until task is complete.

But that's not all...  he’s researched ways we can train ourselves to choose today over mañana. Steel suggests strategies to help you overcome each temptation that may snare you. Intriguingly, all might overwhelm you at once...

1. Low confidence - "...Take cues for what is possible by watching what other people do. Inspiration and confidence tend to be contagious. If you hang out with people who are positive and doing things, it’s easier to be infected." 
2. If you hate the task - You can artificially pack some rewards for yourself at the end for completing the work. Or you can mentally reframe it. You don’t like cleaning your house, but you like socializing with friends. So you reframe it: I want an inviting place for my friends. You add extra motivational oomph from seeing the task from a better angle.

Put your mirror neurons to work since as you try using the same tactics as people who inspire you, the doing of rewires your brain as you sleep that night. When you try using the tactic again it becomes much easier for you.  Later you can add your own special touches to it.

Another method you might consider comes from Peter Gollwitzer's "If-Then planning" strategy. For those of us who always slide off course when we list a New Year's resolution, it's often because we make these fairly general. You might say, for instance, you want to exercise more to lose some pounds.

"For starters, it's not nearly specific enough," Heidi Grant Halvorson (Feb. 2011) points out. "You would need to say what exercise you plan to do and how often per week you plan to do it. "The if-then version of this plan spells out exactly what you will do in the critical situation."

Halvorson shows the formula in a way that's easily remembered:

If X happens, then I will do Y.

These plans work so well because they speak the language of your brain: the language of contingencies. Humans are very good at encoding information in "If X, then Y" terms and using this process (often unconsciously) to guide our behavior. Deciding exactly when and where you will act on your goal creates a link in your brain between the situation or cue (the if) and the behavior that should follow (the then).

I've already stayed on track when temptations hit, by saying the If-Then approach to important tasks I want to accomplish. If I picture myself at the end of a work day with a desk piled high with tasks undone and and incomplete To-Do list, I have to work later. Instead I picture myself reading a book I'm enjoying as I enjoy a cup of herbal tea.

Through mental contrasting, people can contrast a “desired future with the reality that impedes its realization…” (Oettingen, 2000). By thinking through these opposing realities, not only do people begin to problem solve what steps need to be taken to make the desired future happen, but also to avoid harsh realities in store when we're snagged by social media tempters.

Thoughts?