Procrastination

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about procrastination in projects, ie the act of delaying something in the project. He explains the reasons why people take this attitude also called of "student syndrome".

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Episode transcript

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Speaker 1 (4s): Hello everybody welcome to the five Minutes PM podcast today, or Monday to 20 5:00 AM. And why I'm saying this, it's not usual for me to say when I'm recording, but why I'm doing this because the topic of this week is Procrastination and this Podcast was supposed to be life. Four people download and listen at at midnight. So I'm to hours and 20 minutes, plenty, five minutes behind schedule and why I'm recording this and why I'm doing this as late as possible.

And so I'm trying to postpone everything and this will be the top that will be covering today. And Procrastination what is that? It's a very, a quite strange word, but we are very used it to that. Its the act of delay and a specific action or set of action. So its to delay a decision to delay a communication delay, a plan, delay, a meeting layer, phone call and try to postpone everything as much as we can.

So this is the act of Procrastination and this is so important in the prose that the environment, because this boot our project in a very high risk and the people that does that, this kind of act that works always a lap as late as possible, trying to postpone everything. And usually we have quite a misperception of this kind of people we say, Oh, he's quite a bit lazy.

He's trying to avoid responsibilities, but each not always. This kind of reason for Procrastination most of the reason is regarding first lack of self esteem, lack of self esteem. Why I need to do this. Now, if I do this now, the people are, the people will see myself bring in this different news or making this call.

So I don't have too much confidence in what I'm doing because of that. I decided to postpone this at remember a child when a child does something wrong, he or she tried to postpone this as much as they can because they don't know how the parent's will react on this second thing. Perfectionism. It's the way that you look up. I need to build things perfectly perfectly.

Its not only good, its not only very good. It must be perfect. And then postpone you postpone a new, try to recover. I can do this better, better, better. And you never finished and you never close the gap. You never move forward. And the third one is the perception of failure. It's very hard. Sometimes when you need to make a decision that it's not good or you need to address a communication that it's not good.

You need to lay off someone, you need to replace a contractor. You need to show that a risk, a very big trap and you need to do something. And sometimes you try, Oh please that we delayed this for tomorrow. Let's try to do that. So I tried to make time and to gain time. And this is good in a very short term, but this bring their restraint full environment for me as the procrastinator and also for those who are around because in the moment this message or this communication or this decision must happen.

And when this happens, you may not have too much time to decide and may be too late to make a final decision because of that, that there is a huge stress in all this environment. Let me give you an a, a very easy, the example for you to understand. Let's suppose that I have one week to do a job in my project. So I have five working days to do this. And I ask her to my sponsor, to my client or to my boss for more time.

Then the reason and that I'm asking is that I want to spend more time to do a better job. And then let's suppose that your boss say, OK, I will give you two weeks instead of one. It's like you have a balloon with air inside with a high pressure. And then you open the valve in, listen to something like that. Okay? The pressure goes down, goes down in say, now I have two weeks relax.

I have two weeks. And then you start spending time doing order things in You and the decision that you sad to your boss, that you will not do because you, you said that you will spend more time to do a better job, but do you, in fact, you are not doing that. You are spending the first week only to solve other problems and also to relax around your pressure. And then when it's Friday, you raise and the, your arms and say, I need more time because it's a cycle.

And then you return it to the same problem. But now you spent one week and you did almost nothing. So this is what we call the student syndrome. I was a professor at the university, regardless of how much time do you give for the student? They will do the Hello in the last day. They will study for the exam and the last two or three days. Regardless if you, you sad to them all will have a clue.

The last in three months they will study one or two days before. And why does it is so important for the project? Because we need to learn how to plan in advance. We need to work as soon, soon as we can. And sometimes this is a cultural mindset is that as I sat in the beginning of this Podcast is a quarter of a mindset that we need to change in. We need to be, we need to look ourselves to be like a policeman of ourselves to make sure that we are not procrastinating.

We have a phone call to make tomorrow. Let's do it tomorrow. Let's not postpone it because to postpone it, we will only raise project risk will only give a margin to scope changes, increase tracks, delay projects, over running costs. It's a very bad for the project health. So next time for sure. And the next week, our will record this podcast in that vein.

Let stop the Procrastination see you next week. Bye bye.

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