Inside the psychology of productivity

Chicago Tribune: 

You wake up with it in the morning and go to bed thinking about it at night: an ever-crushing load of emails, meetings, conference calls, and tasks that needed to get done yesterday. Family time means reading sales reports in the room where your kids are playing video games. For entrepreneurs, there’s soooo much to get done — 85 percent of fast-growth-company CEOs work 10 or more hours a day, according to a recent survey of the Inc. 500. Under such circumstances, personal productivity isn’t just a metric. It’s also a mandate.

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Procrastination is a particular problem for entrepreneurs, who often must tackle work in which they have no experience and no familiar starting point. And of course, when you are responsible for everything, there’s always something else you could be doing. Many consider procrastination a moral failing, a weakness of will. But Timothy Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, calls procrastination an “emotion-centered coping strategy.” He suggests that if you understand what’s motivating (or — more accurately — demotivating) you, you can begin to address it. “Many of these emotions are not conscious,” says Pychyl. “So the first step is to have some awareness of how you are feeling. ‘Why do I keep not wanting to do this?’”

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