Does procrastination cause disorganization?

Studies show that 20% of people chronically avoid difficult tasks and deliberately look for distractions—which, are incredibly and increasingly available.  Studies also show that procrastination can be linked with disorganization.  But is it the story of the chicken and the egg?  In my line of work, I can anecdotally report that more than 20% of the population can be considered “disorganized” in one area of their life or another and some are disorganized up one side of their life and down the other.

I do believe there is a correlation between procrastination and disorganization and I can say that about 50% of the time procrastination is the cause but I also believe that disorganization can cause procrastination just about as often.  What do I mean?  Let me give you an example of each.

A simple example that applies to most of us in our daily lives is the mail.  Whether at the office or at home, we all get stacks of mail each day.  This is easily where procrastination can get the better of us and cause disorganization.  We retrieve our mail from the mailbox and then what?  We open what looks interesting…anything hand written?  Anything look like a check?  Something other than a bill? Maybe we even dive into the bills and pay them right away but then there’s this category that fits into, “not trash but not urgent” and it gets tucked away somewhere.  Maybe is a schedule for a yoga class you have been meaning to attend or a sale flyer for one of your favorite stores.  Let’s put that in our stack.  Soon enough the stack gets out of control and adds to just one element of our lives that is disorganized.

Another scenario would be when you have just come back from a training session where you learned some incredible skills that are really going to help you bust through the plateau in your performance at work and you can’t wait to put these notes in a great place to refer back to them.  You walk into your office and see the stacks and stacks everywhere and your notes get placed in another one of those stacks because your supervisor really needs your attention on this topic and can you weigh in on this right now?  The skills you just learned and were so excited to implement get forgotten because there wasn’t a system in place to help you implement it when it was fresh on your mind.  In this case, the disorganization actually causing the procrastination.

So what’s the solution?  It takes effort.  Just like in anything in life, our disorganization didn’t happen over night and the fix usually takes some new habits on our part to institute.  Some of us just don’t have a system in place for what to do with our “important but not urgent mail” or where to put notes from an important meeting or training so that we can implement them in our daily lives.  Other times we have systems we just don’t implement them.  I wish I had a magic wand to waive that would miraculously create a system and then make it so all of the working parts fall into place to implement it. Voila!

But unfortunately that wand is still being invented like the wand for instant weight loss.  Until then, we will eat right, work out and sort the mail right when it comes out of the mailbox. Or ask for a little help from a Stress Reliever.