Procrastination: How to stop it.

 

Procrastination means the art of delaying everything. We often do delay the work which we want to do and which is important to us, but we often have procrastination behavior and wait until deadlines come or any external forces apply to us. Procrastination is very harmful, and the ridiculous thing is that we all know it very well and still doing it even in small tasks.

                “You can’t escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today”

Everyone has a story of procrastination, maybe it is about school/college life or your daily/working life. We know what is important but still, delay by saying I’ll do it tomorrow or we wait for deadlines or final exams or some weird situations or a reason for doing that instantly.

Do you ever notice, for your behavior of procrastination you pay some price in different forms?

Are you wondering? How do you pay for that? Let me help you to understand, apart from money there are so many other important things like

•           Time which once gone you can’t get it back.

•           Depression and Anxiety at last moments.

•           Stress and development of bad habits.

•           Your lifestyle and personality.

Procrastination is not normal behavior; it’s like a drug or slow poison that has sometimes severe outcomes that we can’t expect from life. You end up being a person who is doing a thing only under pressure when some situation or person invokes you. It is horrifying, isn’t it? We all are genius and strong in our minds but if you are a procrastinator; you can’t help to doing delaying every small or big task.

True, we all have fear to come out of our comfort zone. As humans having fear is completely fine unless it holds you back. It needs the courage to try something new initially, but you have to do so many things firstly throughout life. It’s not a big deal to do small tasks on time like wake up, shopping essential items, paying bills, etc. Decide not to do procrastination in doing these small kinds of stuff will lead you more firm when you do a big one.

Every task has a process to complete it. Initially, we are excited and doing it with full potential but after some time we lose out our pace and start to delay even after knowing its importance and waste our time in scrolling social media. You love to watch videos on YouTube or Facebook but to notice there is always a next video recommendation based upon your choice and you end up watch 5-10 videos. They want to consume you and your valuable time and that’s how they make profit out of it by using your time. Is this horrible? Think about it. That’s how we work most of the time and that’s not great.

In these situations, your will-power nothing to do but your system does. Your system overpowers all other things and you start doing your habitual action knowingly or unknowingly. You just say this is the last I’m doing this and move ahead.

Now the question is how you overcome procrastination? What’s the path you need to follow? Here I’m discussing some points that help you if implemented well.

1.         Elimination

Elimination is the most effective way to stop procrastination. It is one of my personal favorite parts.

What to eliminate and How to eliminate? So the answer is to eliminate all your time-wasters. It sounds great, isn’t it? So for elimination, you have to find out your time-wasters. One more thing you have to understand and that is time management. If you don’t measure your time it’s tough to stop procrastination. You need to know where your time goes daily. Your memory is not that great to retain all kinds of stuff you do last week, so for tracking, you need to develop a system. You should have records of your activity logs means whatever you do throughout your day. Keep a journal to write down your every hour activities. Do it at least for a week so you know where you spend your time.

Once you have a record of one-week activity logs now do analysis and identify your time-wasters. The next step is to eliminate all those time-wasters one by one. This is something like clean your room and gets rid of garbage. After doing this you will realize how much more time you have to do other important stuff and increase your productivity.

2.         Self- regulated deadlines

As humans, we all inclined to do work at deadlines. The self-regulated deadline means you decide limits at own for a task and complete it with-in time. Another aspect is self-management. Sometimes being hard with yourself is good for your growth. Being hard doesn’t mean you do unnatural kinds of stuff or torture yourself. Relaxation and enjoyment are essential parts of life. It’s possible to be productive all the time.

All the great achievers and learners have self-regulated life with their own set of rules. Many people think have rules destroy their freedom. Freedom without rules is more harmful than benefitted; it makes you a procrastinator and irresponsible. When it comes to productivity rules are best partners. I have some set of rules like:

•           Self-discipline

•           Exercise daily

•           Reading good books and writing daily journals

•           Never blame others

             

            “Solving a problem requires a weird combination of freedom and constraints” 

3.         Commitment

Commitment is just a promise that you do with yourself, it increases your will power and makes you firm at your decisions. You have heard in relationships peoples are committed with their partners for having a great life, similar way do some commitment with yourself. You will feel motivated and start doing things without procrastination.  

4.         Health

For human survival, Health is most important than anything else. If you are unhealthy in any way whatever wealth you gain is all useless. Here I’m referring to both physical and mental health as well. If you are healthy, you will feel more energetic that leads to more productivity.

You are going to spend each life span with your body and mind. Don’t you think you should give some time to nurture your body and mind?  Like you do with your car care, which can be replaced later if any damage happens but once your single body part is damaged you can’t replace it. So you can’t afford carelessness when comes to your physical and mental health. 

30-45 minute rule: It’s enough to spend only a few minutes to keep you healthy. You can customize your time as per your needs. How are you going to plan your 30-45 minutes? Think about it. Kill your laziness and do your work and this will further help to stop procrastination.

5.         Set your priority list

Priority is to make choices. Priorities help us to keep living well organized and give us a clear vision of day to day life. Everyone is busy in their life in doing a lot of stuff but if ask what are we busy about? How do you want to spend your life? What would you like to gain more health, career, finances? Would you like more fun with your family or stuck at work? To prioritize your daily task will help you to stop procrastination.

I hope this will help you to stop procrastination. These are methods which help me a lot.