打破拖延癥的惡性循環！

by Derek Thompson Joyce 譯

打破拖延癥的惡性循環！

The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It

by Derek Thompson Joyce 譯

每天早上，你是否都在起床與賴床間苦苦掙扎；每天晚上，你是否都在看手機與睡覺中作自我斗爭。不到最后一刻都不開始動筆寫作業，衣服總是留到隔天洗，“明天開始我一定要×××”成了口頭禪。拖延癥是現代人的通病，雖然明知這不利于身心健康，但許多人還是明知不可為而為之。到底如何才能打破拖延癥的惡性循環呢？讓我們來聽聽專業人士的意見吧！

when I woke up this morning, I had one goal: Finish this article by 11 a.m.

So, predictably, by the time it was 10 a.m., I had made and consumed two cups of coffee, taken out the trash, cleaned my room while taking a deliberately slow approach to folding my shirts, gone on a walk outside to clear my head, had a thing of yogurt and fruit to reward the physical1)exertion, sent an email to my aunt and sister, read about 100 Tweets (favorited three; written and deleted one)... and written absolutely nothing.

我今天早上起床時有一個目標：在11點前完成這篇文章。

那么，可以預見地，10點前，我已經泡好并喝掉了兩杯咖啡，扔了垃圾，打掃了房間，還故意慢吞吞地疊衣服，到外面散了個步，清醒清醒頭腦，吃了一碗水果酸奶以犒勞自己做了運動，給我阿姨和姐姐發了一封電子郵件，看了100條推特微博（收藏了3條；寫了1條，刪了1條）……卻一個字也沒落筆。

1) exertion [?g'zз???n] n. 發揮，行使，運用

What’s the matter with me? Nothing, according to research that conveniently justifies this sort of behavior to my editors. Or, at least, nothing out of the ordinary for writers. I’m just a terrible procrastinator.

Productive people sometimes confuse the difference between reasonable delay and true procrastination. The former can be useful (“I’ll respond to this email when I have more time to write it”). The latter is, by definition,2)self-defeating (“I should respond to this email right now, and I have time, and my fngers are on the keys, and the Internet connection is perfectly strong, and nobody is asking me to do anything else, but I just…don’t…feel like it.”).

When scientists have studied procrastination, they’ve typically focused on how people are miserable at weighing costs and benefits across time. For example, everybody recognizes, in the abstract, that it’s important to go to the dentist every few months. The pain is upfront and obvious—dental work is3)torture—and the rewards of cleaner teeth are often remote, so we allow the appointment to slip through our minds and off our calendars. Across several categories including dieting, saving money, and sending important emails, we constantly choose short and small rewards (whose benefts are4)dubious, but immediate) over longer and larger payouts (whose benefts are obvious, but distant).

In the last few years, however, scientists have begun to think that procrastination might have less to do with time than emotion. Procrastination “really has nothing to do with timemanagement,” Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, told Psychological Science. “To tell the5)chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up.”

Instead, Ferrari and others think procrastination happens for two basic reasons: We delay action because we feel like we’re in the wrong mood to complete a task, and we assume that our mood will change in the near future.

See if you recognize any of these excuses...

· If I take a nap now, I’ll have more focus later.

· If I eat this cake now, that’ll be my cheat for the month,

and I’ll have more willpower.

· If I send a few Tweets now, my fingers will be used to

typing sentences, which will make this article easier to write.

· If I watch TV now, I’ll feel relaxed and more likely to call the doctor’s offce tomorrow morning.

我這是怎么了？沒什么，有研究可以向我的編輯證明，這種行為是合理的。至少，對作家來說，這是很正常的。我只不過是個嚴重的拖延癥患者。

工作量大的人有時候會混淆合理的延遲與真正的拖延。前者可能是有益的（“等有更充裕的時間我再回復這封電子郵件”），而后者，據其定義，則是具破壞性的（“我應該現在就回復這封郵件，我有時間，我的手指就放在鍵盤上，網絡連接完全沒有問題，也沒有人要我去做其他事，但我就是……不……想回?！保?。

科學家在研究拖延癥時，他們的關注點通常會集中在人們是多么不會衡量時間對成本與收益的影響。