Procrastination

The fastest thinkers in the room are often the ones who can't get off the starting block.

I see this most in clients who process information quickly. They are the kinds of people who can read a room in seconds, hold several, seemingly contradictory, perspectives at once, and land on the answer before everyone else has finished asking the question. It looks like pure advantage, and it is, until the load gets too high. Working memory has a hard ceiling. You can hold a handful of items actively in mind, and once you push past that limit, it starts clawing at your energy, fast.

In session, I ask: what do you have in place to reduce your cognitive load?

I usually get a puzzled look in return.

Watching this pattern up close in session, I've come to believe that procrastination isn't the failure to act but a mitigation effort for an overloaded system. A system built for speed still requires immense resources to run. This isn't a discipline problem, or even an attunement one, it's that your reflex is always to add more until your cognitive bandwidth is at capacity. The mind is now an overloaded channel, so procrastination, as a lever, turns the volume down, delaying action and decisions. However, lowering the volume doesn't end the show. The television is still on in the next room, and the people on screen are still arguing, still demanding a fraction of your attention. Your awareness stays on it, just in a more diffuse way. None of this shuts off on command but you can change what it's running on.

I'd like to encourage you to try an experiment. Pick one of these strategies and pay attention to the procrastination, don't monitor the task:

• Get it out of your head. The moment something enters working memory, write it down in a place you're going to remember to check, a calendar, a to-do list, a wiki. It doesn't need to stay alive in you once it's documented somewhere else.
• Sequence it, don't stack it. You can hold several angles at once and remember many things, that doesn't mean it's the best strategy. Sequence, prioritize and take them one at a time.
• Decide it once. A fixed rule or routine removes the same micro-decision from resurfacing fifty times a week. For example: "I check e-mail at 9am and 4pm." or "I don't take calls before 10am."
• Get in your body. A short physical reset before the hard task, movement, breath, shifts you out of threat response and back into a state where your prefrontal cortex, not your alarm system, is running the show.

I'll ask again: what do you have in place to reduce your cognitive load?