Work Daze: Racing ahead in your career? Better learn to drag your feet

Bob Goldman 

What do you do when a new assignment comes around? 

If you immediately raise your hand, you’re making a big mistake. What you should do is duck your head. And if that new assignment does land in your lap, you certainly shouldn’t put your nose to the grindstone and start working. What you should do is hold your nose, and start dragging your feet.

Alas, in today’s dog-eat-dog, AI-eat-AI business world, being a procrastinator gets a bad rap. This is not justified. The less work you do, the fewer career-ending blunders you make. Plus, with a project you haven’t finished, you’re far less likely to be included in the next round of layoffs. How can you be fired? You have work to do.

Duke University professor Dorie Clark doesn’t agree. In her recent Harvard Business Review article, “Five Ways to Actually Move Forward on That Task You’ve Been Avoiding,” we learn that procrastination is “actually a subconscious strategy to avoid negative emotions,” in which we “fill our time with what we recognize as comparatively trivial matters.”

The fact that you are wasting your time reading this extremely trivial column shows that you have the making of a great foot-dragger. All you have to do is take each of Professor Clark’s five steps, and do the exact opposite.

No. 1: Get clear on the vision.

Ambiguities surrounding an assignment can result in a “freeze response,” as you try to determine “what they’re actually looking for.” Of course, at your company, you can easily answer this question: What “they’re” looking for are reasons to throw you under the bus. Though you may want to jump in and save the day, it’s far better to procrastinate and save your job.

No. 2: Identify concrete steps.

If an assignment looks doable, it’s probably because you don’t understand what will be required to do it. To help you understand what steps are needed to finish a project, you are advised to hire a consultant. Unless you want to pay someone $500 an hour to schmooze your boss, throw shade on your abilities and steal your job, I don’t agree. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Lie down with fleas and wake up with consultants.”

No. 3: Take (small) action.

“Taking even a tiny action creates positive momentum,” says Stanford professor BJ Fogg. This is why you must be careful when starting an assignment, lest you are swept away by a wave of momentum madness and wake up one afternoon to find that you’ve finished the project. Displays of competence like this must be avoided, since they could result in you being given more projects, and more, and more, until you no longer have time for important activities, like mastering “Street Fighter 6” and discussing the latest episode of “90 Day Fiance” with the hot new hire in Accounting.

No. 4: Create forcing functions.

Tempted to start or complete a project? Build in “accountability mechanisms” for yourself. This could be a regular “check-in with a trusted colleague,” assuming you can find one in the pack of jackals with whom you work. By constantly sharing your problems, a volunteer may take on the project just to shut you up. You’re not only off the hook, but when your boss sees how good you are at avoiding work by delegating it to others, they’ll recognize you as management material.

No. 5: Limit competing distractions.

Rather than tackling a major project, humans are wired to “choose the quick dopamine hit of crossing off a minor to-do item, like checking email or ordering your sandwich for a lunch meeting.”

If you think any work assignment is as important as ordering the right sandwich — “Just say no to chicken salad,” as Benjamin Franklin famously said — you may be a hopeless case. The advice Clark provides to avoid high-dopamine distractions is to hide your phone or use a computer that’s not connected to the Internet.

To develop quality distractions, I recommend you stop paying your phone bill and use a computer that’s not turned on. This will provide a bottomless time suck as you spend hours waiting on line for customer service at the phone company and complaining to IT about your company’s Internet provider.

With distractions like these, it will be impossible to work on your project, which is one more reason we say, “Procrastinators of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your jobs.”

And if you doubt it, ask Ben Franklin.

Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.

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