Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management Archives - Decision Coaching – Ursina Teuscher, PhD

Blog Archives

Executive Functioning: How I Think About It as a Coach

The rider, the elephant, and the path – an executive function coaching framework

Do you know what you should be doing, but find yourself not doing it anyway? Do you make plans that feel solid on Sunday night, but unravel by Tuesday? Do you wonder why some days flow easily while others feel like you’re pushing a boulder uphill?

If so, you’re not dealing with a character flaw. You may be dealing with an executive functioning challenge. That’s where executive function coaching can help.

What is executive functioning?

Executive functioning refers to a set of mental skills that allow us to control our thoughts, emotions, and actions in the service of our goals. Think of it as the brain’s management system — the part that helps you plan, prioritize, get started, stay on track,

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Attention Span & Productivity – Book Recommendation

My main take-aways from Gloria Mark’s book: “Attention Span”
A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity

Two goldfish in a bowl, one of them reading a thick book.

In her book “Attention Span“, Gloria Mark explores the impacts of today’s fast-paced technology on our attention spans, productivity, and happiness. She presents a lot of research done both by her own and other teams. Based on that, she offers advice, not only on how to gain more control over our attention, but also on finding balance between productivity and happiness.

Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity by Gloria Mark (2023). [1]

Here are just a few of the findings and insights I found helpful.

Fun facts about attention and productivity
Have our attention spans really decreased?

Maybe you are feeling it yourself? Or maybe you’ve heard humans’

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ADHD Tools – Part 3: Don’t Do It Alone

Tools and Tricks to Improve Your Executive Functioning
Part 3: Involving Others And Asking for Help

In my last two posts, I have written about practical tools that can improve your executive functioning (here are Part 1 and Part 2). In this third part, I want to emphasize one more strategy: involving other people for help.

This third strategy could also be seen as a part of the other two. Other people can be our external memories, as well as hold us accountable for our choices, make life less boring, and help us make better long-term decisions.

However, I figured the aspect of asking others for help deserved to be addressed on its own, if only because this point might be the hardest for many.

Why is asking for help particularly hard for people with ADHD?…

ADHD Tools – Part 2: Future Time Blindness

Tools and Tricks to Improve Your Executive Functioning
Part 2: Time Blindness and Impulsive Choices

Take care of future self, as Part 2 of ADHD Tools: Future Time Blindness.
In my last post, I wrote about the practice of externalizing memory as an essential part of managing ADHD. Here, I will tackle a different common challenge of ADHD: “time blindness” and impulsive choices.

How Does ADHD Affect Choices About the Future?

ADHD is often associated with difficulties in planning and time management. For example, if you have ADHD, you might find it difficult to estimate time, and to notice how much time passes while you’re doing a task [1, 10, 13].

These practical problems seem to go together with systematic biases in time perspective [8]. For example, one study found adults with ADHD to be more present oriented, and their view of the past as well as the future to be more negative and less positive than that of control participants [2].

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ADHD Executive Functioning Tools – Part 1

Tools and Tricks to Improve Your Executive Functioning
Part 1: External Memory

Would you like to get better at managing your attention and daily choices?

Tools and Tricks to Improve Your Executive Functioning - Bionic Brain

In this and my next post, I will describe practical tools and tricks that can help you manage your time and tasks better, especially if you have ADHD. I’ll explain why these practices are particularly essential for people who struggle with ADHD symptoms. However, many of these self-regulation tools are also good practice for everyone else.

Some Misunderstandings About ADHD

In order to understand how people with ADHD might benefit from specific tricks and tools, let me first address some common misunderstandings about ADHD.

1. The Scope of ADHD – a Deficit in Executive Functioning

The label “Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD) has long been criticized for being misleading and insufficient at best [47]. It highlights two specific symptoms,

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Time Management for Mortals – Book Recommendation

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman (2023).

Four thousand weeks – Burkeman reminds us – is about all we get in life, if we live to be eighty. In the big picture of the universe, this is an “absurdly, insultingly brief” span. Clearly, it is not enough to do everything we want, even if we maximized our productivity with every trick ever invented.

That is the backdrop of this book, which offers guidance on constructing a meaningful life by acknowledging our limits.

I’ve enjoyed reading it, but am having difficulties passing on its advice. I feel a similar ambivalence toward its wisdom as towards the wisdom we sometimes hear from survivors of near-death experiences. Seemingly only having acquired this insight after almost dying, the survivors tell us that life is short and can end even sooner than we think,

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Temporal Construal Levels: Seeing the Big Picture in Daily Choices

An interesting but not widely known framework for dealing with self-control and daily decisions is the theory of temporal construal levels.

How does knowing about temporal construal levels help us make better choices?

The theory and many subsequent research studies (here’s just one example by Fujita, Trope, Liberman, and Levin-Sagi) suggest that we think quite differently about events depending on how far in the future they are. When we think about a distant event, we represent it in a more abstract and coherent way, and we connect those future events with our goals. This would be a high-level construal. As the event gets closer, we become more concerned about the concrete and incidental details of the events and about the experience itself.

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Multitasking: How Bad is it Really?

You’ve probably already been warned to stay away from multitasking. In recent years, there have been many articles, blog posts etc. dissuading us from it. Why?

Multitasking doesn’t exist. Instead, when we do try to pay attention to two tasks at once, what we end up doing is switching our focus rapidly between different tasks.
This kind of switching makes us less productive than if we focused on one task only, and then moved on to the other task later.
People who are most likely to attempt multitasking – and who think they are good at it – have the lowest actual multi-tasking abilities.

This is all relatively uncontroversial and based on many experiments measuring task effectiveness and brain activity, and I believe it is important knowledge.

However,

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Effects of sleep deprivation on decision making

How does a lack of sleep affect our judgment? Does it really lead to poorer choices?

"Drowsy drivers use next exit": warning sign on Interstate 15 in Utah Unfortunately, the answer is many times yes. In my research into the topic, I’ve found at least eight ways how a lack of sleep affects different aspects of our judgment and decision making.

Sleep deprivation affects us both physically and mentally, and decision-making is a complex process that requires the orchestration of multiple neural systems, such as emotion, memory, and logical reasoning. It is therefore not too surprising that sleep deprivation would take a toll on many fronts.

Here are eight effects of sleep deprivation on decision making:

1) What’s perhaps best known is that it impairs attention and working memory, leading to slower reaction times, reduced vigilance, and more mistakes.

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Does Positive Thinking Help You Reach Your Goals?

Can positive thinking help you reach your goals? Picture from: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/539763 (Attribution not required)

Can “positive thinking” really help you change your life for the better and reach your goals? Many motivational speakers and writers seem to believe so, but empirical studies reveal a more complicated picture.

If you want to reach your goals, positive thinking seems to come with some pitfalls.

In particular, in her research spanning decades, Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues have discovered a powerful link between positive thinking and poor performance [e.g., 1 – 5]. Oettingen’s book “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation” [6], and her website detail many of these findings. For example, in one study [2] they asked college students who had a crush on someone to engage in future fantasies about them and a person of their romantic interest.

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How to Monitor Goal Progress

Best Ways to Monitor Goal Progress If you want to achieve goals, one of the most effective things you can do is to measure and track your progress.

There are many ways to monitor goal progress, and it turns out they are all helpful. However, some techniques are more effective than others, as was shown by a large meta-analysis, which included findings of 138 experiments. Three things in particular will make it more likely that you achieve your goals:

1. Measure frequently. The more often you monitor your progress, the greater your chance of success.

2. Share your information. You don’t have to make your information public; even reporting it in private to one other person helps. If you’re really not into sharing though, don’t despair – you’re in good company. This last point is still for you and becomes all the more important:

3.

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Event Series: Procrastination and ADHD Follow-Through

Free webinar series with Vicki Lind (MS) and Ursina Teuscher (PhD) on Procrastination and ADHD.

Do you procrastinate? Do you have ADHD? Stalled on a project?

Start 2023 with a clear plan and support by joining my colleague Vicki Lind and me in a webinar series and support hub. Do you struggle with procrastination or ADHD, or know someone who does? Learn more about procrastination and how to beat it, and get the support you need to follow through on your plans.

Vicki and I will teach three free interactive webinars together in January. Each week has a different focus:

Tue Jan 10, 9-10am PST: Support from Your Heart & Head
Tue Jan 17, 9-10am PST: Support from Others: Co-working, Bookending & Rewards
Tue Jan 24, 9-10am PST: Support from Your Tools: Your Calendar,

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How to Tackle Stubborn Goals: Implementation Intentions

What to do with those stubborn to-dos?

Do you have items on your to-do list that never get done? Tasks you meant to have crossed off ages ago, but instead they linger and get pushed back forever? Or how about those “little” things you want to do regularly (daily sets of push-ups, perhaps? connecting with friends?), but somehow they keep falling through the cracks?

In general, do you find some of your goals particularly hard to put into practice?

Try “implementation intentions”

A technique that helps is to “script” our intended actions in more specific terms by deciding exactly how, when and where we are going to accomplish each of our tasks. Peter Gollwitzer, a psychologist who has done a lot of research on this, calls those plans implementation intentions.

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Improving your Habits with Choice Architecture

Choice Architecture Coaching to Improve Habits Picture credit: Ben Deavin

What is choice architecture, and how can we use it to improve our own decisions?

Choice architecture is the art and science of how to present choices to decision makers. The way a choice is presented to us has a much bigger influence on our behavior than we may realize. For example, children eat more fruit when fruit is placed in more prominent positions in a school cafeteria. Or, people are more likely to enroll in retirement savings plans if the employer makes that plan the default option – which is the option that happens when you do nothing. Similarly, people eat less when the default serving size is smaller.

Two recent books shine a light on choice architecture, and on how it affects our decisions:

Eric Johnson’s The Elements of Choice (2021) offers a guide to creating effective choice architectures.

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Performing under Pressure

Have you ever choked when you needed to perform under pressure?

We all know what it feels like: you’ve been building your skill – whether it’s in academics, in your career, in sports, in performing arts – but when the big moment arrives, nothing seems to work. You hit the wrong note, drop the ball, get stumped by a simple question. In other words, you choke under the pressure.

Here, I will review a book by Sian Beilock about this topic, along with additional research, and I’ll highlight some findings that can help you perform at your own very best, even under pressure.

A book review and practical applications

Dr. Sian Beilock, an expert on performance and brain science, examines in her book “Choke” why we sometimes blunder and perform at our worst precisely when the stakes are highest.

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Interview: How to Beat Job Search Procrastination

Interview by Mac Prichard: How to Beat Procrastination in Your Job Search, with Ursina Teuscher

Mac’s List is a Pacific Northwest job board and “career hub”, driven by the mission to make the hiring process more human. In addition to local job listings, it offers an abundance of educational resources and community-building activities. I’ve been using it for my own education, and have been recommending it as a resource to my clients for years. Its founder Mac Prichard hosts the weekly podcast Find Your Dream Job and has interviewed me on how to beat procrastination in your job search.

Listen to it or find the transcript here:

How to Beat Procrastination in Your Job Search, with Ursina Teuscher

Summary by Mac’s List:

“Do you know it’s time to look for a new job but you keep putting it off?

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What Is Procrastination and How Can We Overcome It?

What counts as procrastination?

According to Wikipedia, procrastination means to “unnecessarily and voluntarily delay something, despite knowing that there will be negative consequences for doing so.”

What Is Procrastination? Latin origin: “Pro”: Forward/For “Crastinus”: Tomorrow

There are productive ways of delaying tasks, as well as inevitable delays, outside of one’s control. Those don’t typically fall under the term “procrastination”. While not all researchers draw the same lines when defining procrastination, I found Jason Wessel‘s definition and Venn diagram convincing and helpful in distinguishing procrastination from other types of delays. According to that, you are procrastination if you (1) intend to complete the task, (2) delay acting on the intention, (3) have voluntary control to do the task, and (4) an expectation of harm, or things being worse off,

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Summer Reading List 2021: Five Books that Changed my Mind

This past year gave me a fair amount of time to read and listen to audiobooks. Here are five books I found truly impactful, in that they managed to change some of my fundamental previous assumptions and opinions.

Steven Pinker (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Steven Pinker presents a passionate and persuasive defense of reason, science and progress. He shows with an abundance of data how a commitment to humanitarian values has kept winning – in the long run – dramatically and consistently over the destruction and chaos that would be the easier and more natural course. It is an uplifting as well as urgent perspective that challenges lazy dogmas from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

To get a first impression and hear his own voice,

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Summer Reading List 2020 – Book Recommendations on Leadership and Career Development

Here are a few books about decision making and leadership that I found worth reading and still very relevant, regardless of how things have changed since they were written.

The first two are not only interesting if you’re leading other people, but also if you are running your own business as a solopreneur. Both books talk about value-driven business models, although in very different ways. I found Simon Sinek’s particularly inspiring:

Simon Sinek (2013). Infinite Game.

Seth Godin (2018). This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See.

Aaron Dignan (2019). Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

Brené Brown (2018). Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.

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Summer Reading List 2019

Summer Reading List: Ursina's Book Recommendations on Creative Decision Making and Goal Achievement Somehow it became a summer tradition of this blog: here’s my latest list of book recommendations (you can see the lists from previous years here). As usual, they all have something to do with creative decision making and goal achievement. The first is a novel, the rest is non-fiction:

Wood, Benjamin (2016). The Ecliptic. A Novel.

More than the plot, it was the premise and setting that had me hooked from the start: an isolated artists’ colony on a small island – its anonymous residents lingering for years, all expenses paid. Relieved of their own ego and the burdens of everyday life, they should be free to create their next masterpieces. Needless to say, it doesn’t work out quite so smoothly for everyone. You can start reading here.

Two excerpts highlight why this book fits this particular reading list and the topic of my blog.

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