I must admit it. My favorite thing to do is nothing. I love it. Just sitting around with nothing, in particular, to focus on and let your mind drift, and drift, and drift. Thinking about it, I know I have a few things to do. I know I have to make important calls, get some groceries, clean, read, write, etc. But I just can’t be bothered to do anything. Well, my friends, that is Procrastination and there is a big difference between that and laziness.
What is procrastinating?
Being lazy is being unwilling to work or use energy. Procrastination is putting off or delaying, especially something requiring immediate attention. Procrastination is ignoring or delaying doing something that has to be immediately done. Procrastination is a needless voluntary delay.
The difference between laziness and procrastination is the element of delay. For instance, I have not been breathing well for the past 6 months. Instead of going to the hospital, I am having second thoughts because I don’t want to hear what the doctor has to say. I am thinking, could this be more serious? What if he says something like you have lung cancer? How do I handle such horrible news? So many thoughts going through my mind. Are these thoughts valid? This gets us to the major reason why we procrastinate: fear of the unknown. You are afraid of what the Doctor may say.
What is the main cause of procrastinating?
Well, Hell Yes! I am afraid of what the Doctor will say. But let’s think about it, why should I be? I am not a doctor. I cannot predict what he will say. I have no evidence of what is wrong with me. To add salt to injury, things only get worse when you ignore your problems. The point is knowing about your challenges actually gives you the opportunity to act and generate options to solve them.
When unchecked procrastination can lead to bad grades, poor job performance, unhealthy diet choices, health issues, and financial problems. If you’re someone who procrastinates, then this bad habit is limiting your success in a variety of ways. As Seneca writes in Moral Essays “ It is not that we have so little time but that we waste much of it”.
As with all human challenges, procrastination is an old problem and thus has simple and effective solutions. I will first discuss my favorite strategy for tackling procrastination and move on to list a variety of practical tips to eradicate it.
Just start!
The most important challenge in eliminating procrastination has to do with your ability to start. Starting eliminates about 90% of your challenges on procrastination. Simply moving from the couch to exercise, write or study makes all the difference. It is fighting the force of inertia. It comes down to making yourself start.
How do I achieve this? To just start on any task or project, I set a timer for 10 minutes and resolve to do the work. As Brian Tracy says, “Eat that Frog!”. Get your most difficult task out of the way.
I tell myself if I don’t feel like working after 10 Minutes, I will quit.
What usually happens most of the time is I don’t want to stop because I get into the flow of writing and actually end up finishing. I am a firm believer in the school of starting. This is one of my favorite strategies in beating procrastination.
How not to procrastinate?
The following are some of my favorite practical tips on avoiding procrastinating?
- As a daily habit, you must consider focusing on your 3 most important tasks for the day (3 MITs).
- Use the 25 minute Pomodoro timer to stay productive for brief periods. Then reward yourself after each successful period of focused attention.
- Each night, create the next day’s daily to-do list from the items on the weekly to-do list. Because once you make a task list, it frees working memory for problem-solving.
- To handle big projects, you must break them down into small tasks. This is referred to as the elephant habit of chipping away at a big project by tackling it. You will gain clarity by breaking the task down.
- Never keep an emergency on delay. You must act on all emergencies immediately.
My thoughts
I have been a procrastinator for as long as I can remember. But understanding why I choose to delay important actions has helped me minimize it. I mostly procrastinate because I believe I have to understand fully what I am doing before I start. This is crazy when I think about it. Because there are many, many things in this world where learning takes place in the doing. For instance, you can not learn how to run a business before you run a business. You need to start and learn as you progress along the way.
As Jan Van de Snepscheut says “ in theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is”. So knowing that reading or researching too much is a delaying tactic, has helped me be more proactive. The main point is starting is everything. 90% of the challenges with procrastination are solved by simply starting.
Until next time wealth builders, let’s build wealth
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