The present tense bias: one of the causes of procrastination

That's it: the project is finally over! 12 months of intensive work, during which you had the opportunity to supervise 3 juniors. A rewarding experience, which will only really end during the annual evaluations, during which the juniors will also be evaluated according to the feedback you have provided on their respective work.

You know the golden rule of feedback by heart: do it now, while it's still fresh in your head, in order to support each of your comments with concrete examples — and not in 6 months, when the deadline for the annual evaluations will have caught up with you.

But feedback is long and difficult: you will have to pay attention to each word, structure each sentence... Already, your mind is wandering towards the list of operational tasks that you must absolutely carry out. Respond to Charlotte, schedule the meeting with Maxime... Already, daily life has caught up with you — your feedback will wait 24 hours...

What's Going On In Your Head: The Present Tense Bias

We are all familiar with procrastination. We've heard about it dozens of times — and we've experienced it even more. Thousands of books and videos are dedicated to the fight of this strange companion.

But procrastination is just one symptom, and it has a variety of causes, too numerous to be fully detailed in this article. Here, We Will Look at One of Them: The Dreaded Syndrome of Bias of the present tense. Quite simply, this bias pushes us to choose the most pleasant option in the short term — which is, unfortunately, rarely in our interest in the long term. It is the bias of the present that makes your hand turn from the apple to the cake; it is also the bias that makes you choose the blockbuster on Netflix rather than this documentary on Arte, which you have wanted to see for 3 months.

But what is pleasant, you ask, about dealing with its operational tasks? And why does the bias of the present tense make us favor this option? Because it is a habit, which your brain will tend to favor over a new behavior.

Your life, including professional life, is full of habits. Habits all follow the same three-part loop, described in the book The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg: A cue, a routine, and a reward. The signal is the external or internal stimuli activating the routine: here it is when you arrive at the front of your computer. Routine is the action triggered in response to the signal: here, process your tasks. Finally, the reward is the feeling of satisfaction perceived as a result of the action: you will have advanced in your tasks, and crossed out the lines of your To Do.

Routines relieve your brain: once the loop is recorded, triggering the action will require less cognitive effort from your brain (which is a bit lazy). Sometimes you won't even need to be aware of the action. This is how it can happen that you go on “automatic pilot”: for example, you suddenly realize that you have taken the subway to work, and not at all to the restaurant where your friends are waiting for you. In the example described above, you wanted to go against your habit of getting ahead with your operational tasks first thing in the morning, and in addition to tackle a difficult task — a double cognitive effort for your brain.

Habits are powerful — but paradoxically, they are also fragile. You have no control over the signal (arriving in front of your computer every morning) or the reward you are looking for (the satisfaction of having advanced in your tasks). The key? Change the routine.

Les Nudges To the Rescue: The Implementation of Intent

In the previous article, we talked about Gabriele Oettingen — now meet her husband, Peter Gollwitzer (he is not a prince, but he is also a psychologist at New York University). Peter Gollwitzer invented the concept ofIntent implementation. This consists in drawing up an action plan, with as much detail as possible, in the form of:” Si The event is encountered, Then I am doing the behavior.” Here, the event is the trigger capable of triggering the behavior to occur. The simple fact of visualizing ourselves in action in a particular context will push our brain to make an association between Whether And Then, and thus to really respond specifically to a stimulus encountered.

To help your brain resist its habits, Detail the situation in which you want to work on your feedback.

Why ? The if-then visualization principle will greatly increase the probability of action once the situation is encountered. Thanks to this formulation, you are no longer in a motivational state of mind, looking for the reasons for your ambitions (I would have to do it to...): you have left the domain of intention to question yourself about where, when, how, and really get into action (When these conditions are met, I do it!)

How ? Intent implementation works when you imagine a situation as specific and realistic as possible: make your trigger a recurring and as accurate action as possible, and your behavior a simple action. For example, write, “When I sit at my computer in the morning, I spend 30 minutes giving feedback.”

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