Binge Working and Procrastination

Thanks to all of you who shared your experiences and thoughts about binge working and procrastination! Your insights have given me food for thought and an opportunity to make an addition to my hamster-wheel image. It now includes an additional stage: what one of my readers called the “tidal wave of joy and relief when you finish the thing and it is a success!”

It is clear though that there are many individual differences as to how people experience binge working. The figure only shows one type of a particularly stable loop of reinforcement.

For some people, for example, bouts of binge working are very positive and productive experiences, without any of the ill effects shown in the image. For them, intense phases of working around the clock are simply a temporary effort for special projects. Rather than leading to exhaustion and burnout, those phases are followed by perhaps a break and then a more normal schedule a again.

On the other end of the spectrum are those for whom the cycle has only negative effects: they don’t get the joy and relief at all, but sometimes finish their binge working with a mediocre result because of the earlier procrastination, or even end up with a failure or a missed deadline, despite intense last-minute efforts. Those kinds of crises sometimes have positive longterm effects though. They can get people to finally break out of an unhealthy cycle by making serious and lasting changes to their work habits.

In people who struggle with ADHD, the tendency to hyper-focus can also lead to a special kind of binge-working, which can fall on either side of that spectrum: it can be experienced as a joyful state of flow, or as an unhealthy and often insufficient last-minute act of desperation.

What I often see in my own coaching clients is that they have established a binge working routine, because it used to work well for them in an earlier stage of their careers or education. As they take on bigger projects though, binge working becomes unsustainable, or leads to failure. This often happens to students as they transition from high school to college, or later from college to grad school, or even later in an academic career, with the need to publish and create an independent research program. It happens similarly in non-academic careers, as people move from supervised to leadership positions, and it happens to people who transition from an employed position to running their own businesses.

The general rule seems to be: the more independent and self-motivated your work is; the bigger your projects are; and the less tied those projects are to strict and frequent deadlines, the less likely a binge working schedule will be an entirely happy and successful one.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR