NEWS & INSIGHT
STOP PROCRASTINATING OVER YOUR UNPLEASANT TASKS
SCHOOL: Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin COUNTRY: Ireland
When there’s a task you don’t want to do at work, do you procrastinate and push it to the bottom of your to-do list or get it done as soon as you can to get it out of the way? Alternatively, might you even consider splitting the task up into little chunks to spread the pain throughout the day? Unfortunately, most jobs have at least some unappealing elements to them – but new research from Trinity Business School suggests that your best bet is to get an unpleasant task out of the way in one go. Powering through, the research says, allows your brain to fully engage with the task and lessens the depletion of your mental load. Switching between the unpleasant task and an ‘easy’ task you like doing is not advisable, as associate professor in organisational behaviour at Trinity Business School Wladislaw Rivkin explained: “To illustrate, imagine working on a task that is highly tedious at the beginning of your workday. After this, you switch to a task that is very
enjoyable. Following these two tasks, you resume the tedious task. On such a day, switching between pleasant and unpleasant tasks triggers a mental comparison between these tasks, making the unpleasant activity worse as you keep on thinking about the fact that you could engage in the pleasant activity instead.” The research also found that those who are chronically exhausted, such as those suffering from burnout, are likely to suffer more when confronted by fluctuating job demands, requiring them to overcome their inner resistances over the course of a workday. Avoiding the more harrowing tasks in this context would deplete these employees’ resilience further. Trinity Business School’s Rivkin co-authored this research paper with Fabiola H Gerpott of WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management and Stefan Diestel at the University of Wuppertal who did a daily diary study with 86 employees across 10 days. EB
Ambition | JUNE 2023 | 9
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online