(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:28 am)
Scrivs posted about being a workaholic over on Whitespace; his description sounds eerily familiar:
I go through bouts where you can’t pull me away from my computer (not to play World of Warcraft, but actually working) and then I get burnt out and go through phases where thinking about the computer makes me sick. Still trying to get into a routine of moderation, but rarely has anything in my life been done in moderation.
Someone commented (emphasis mine): “So, are we talking about being a workaholic or a procrastinator? There’s a huge difference.”
Interesting idea! I wonder, though, how they’re similar.
Workaholics:
- Have no problem with “working”, but there’s a difficulty in stopping. It’s compulsive and twitchy, until the workaholic runs out of juice and collapses.
- Are compulsive about working…
- …to the exclusion of other healthy activities like family and friends…
- …and eventually isolate themselves out of a life because people stop caring about them…why bother?
Procrastinators come in two flavors: conscientious procrastinators and sociopathically lazy. I’m talking about the conscientious ones here…you know, the ones who worry about not working. These people…
- Work represents “activity that makes progress toward the goal”. But for whatever reason, the work doesn’t get done.
- Are compulsive about not working…
- …to the exclusion of scheduling activities because they feel they should be working…
- …and eventually isolate themselves out of the life they desire because they never get anything done.
More simply:
- workaholics have no problem starting, but have problems stopping.
- conscientious procrastinators have problems starting.
Looking at these two ad-hoc descriptions, my first thought is that workaholics have a very powerful (i.e. compulsive) feedback loop that keeps them working, but that actually might be me looking at them through a procrastinator’s eyes. For me, I tend to work immediately when I can get immediate results. For work that has a deferred payoff, there’s a threshold of motivation that I need to reach before I start working, and then things are fine. Workaholics, on the other hand, may not need that motivation at all. They may just love the feeling of work itself, and rewards are a pleasant secondary benefit…they just go.
It occurs to me also that conscientious procrastinators are possibly less sure about what they want and need more justification for action, but aren’t consciously aware that these are factors. The workaholic, I suspect, is 100% sure of what they’re doing, for whatever reason.
I have no real conclusions, but maybe something will pop into my head over the weekend. I’m not sure my model of the workaholic and the procrastinator is accurate, so if anyone has any experiences to share, post a comment! :-)
6 Comments
brilliant ! am posting on it now…
brilliant indeed!
i think where you might go is where many of us are: both—procrastinating the beginning of a project or task but workaholics once started. overcoming that “gravity” of getting started is always the hardest part, and the tools and ideas you’re offering on this site are good things in that struggle.
The vicious cycle of procrastination addressed by clearing the decks of fun activities followed by depression and burnout which causes more procrastination is addressed in the book The Now Habit. It is useful primarily for knowledge workers who set their own schedules. It helps you put quality time on task and look forward to work. By working less! Fun and productivity – such a deal…
David, one nuance that your comments didn’t pick up on is the added element of Perfectionism.
Perfectionists can ironically become procrastinators, because they get so fearful of failing to meet perfection in a task that they will have difficulty starting it. However, once they start then they typically look like workaholics. In fact, many true workaholics are utter perfectionists.
So there can be a direct link, if that link goes through a pathology of perfectionism.
If you’re interested, a former professor of mine, Dr. Richard Winter, has written a book called Perfecting Ourselves to Death that gives some good insight into how this works.
Came across this article at Chronicle of Higher Education, looking at procrastinators.
Ed: good observation…it’s a familiar pattern. I often won’t start anything until I have a good idea of what it will take to do it, and these days I’ve come to realize that what it takes is getting started, and trusting that I’ll work out the details on-the-fly. I guess I’m a “pragmatic perfectionist” now, but when I was younger I would be concerned about not knowing exactly how it would all come out.
I also tend to get caught up in the huge amount of work I know it will take to get something done; I wrote about that a bit in the “optimization and procrastination” article I linked.