Photo by j.lee43
Try to put me in a room
Distraction less
(Everything is everything)
Spare me from worse
In the studio, I would finally burn
(All the time is all you got)
Tempted to work
~Amy Winehouse~
In short procrastination is a habit if you will, a very bad habit, that consists in putting off something for the next day. Procrastination is to blame for most of our productivity problems and yet it seems that very few people actually do something about it. And this doesn’t solely apply to your personal life either, it just as well happens in your career as well, because chances have it you’ll behave the same way at work as well. Missed opportunities, frenzied work hours, stress, overwhelm, resentment, and guilt are just a few consequences.
I’m pretty sure most of you’ve told yourselves at least once in your life I’ll do it tomorrow, I have the time or tomorrow’s another day. Ok, that’s true, but to paraphrase a common proverb, why put put for tomorrow, what you can do today? It’s safe to say that everybody knows that procrastination is hazardous, but what compels people, like you or myself, to do it? There’s a few reasons why people result to postponements like fear of the unknown, fear of change, perfectionism, fear of failure, disorganization and so on, but probably the most common reason is … laziness. That’s right folks laziness can really be a bugger, some go as far as saying it’s a terrible sickness, I personally think it’s all just a psychological issue.
The key to overcoming procrastination is inner strength, inner strength to motivate ourself on completing a task no matter how big or small it is. However most of us lack a particular strength in character and get sucked away from our goals and plans. Do not despair though there are ways to help pass procrastination and eventually get things done.
1. Take It One Step At a Time
Photo by mistybliss
Some tasks, at first glance, may seem simply overwhelming or require a Herculean amount of effort, so in term we don’t do anything, at all. It’s important not to let yourself discouraged by any particular amount of work or pressure involved in an activity; what you need to do is start off slow, in small baby steps, in a revere pyramid style and you’ll soon find that things are actually beginning to shape up. For example the other week, I went in with my dad in the garage to clean up the place. There were wrenches, old car oil stench, used car parts, an old refrigerator, a broken TV and a bunch of other useless crap lying all over the place. I didn’t even know where to start from and it all seem like it was gonna take for ever to clean up the mess. My dad soon approached me and told me “there’s no hurry son, there’s no pressure, we’ll just take it one step at a time and see where we get.” We started off with the floor, then with the stocked up drawers and went to more and more difficult task from there on, until around midnight we finally finished. My garage never looked cleaner. This is not only a methodical technique of getting things done, but also a provider or motivation.
2. You Don’t Need To “Have To,” You Need To “Want To”
Photo by My Brother Godzilla
If you feel like you “have to” do something you’ll automatically feel a sense of restrainment and negativity, that comes naturally when we’re feeling obliged to do something. This leads to some serious procrastination issues and is most encountered at work. The solution here is to shift your mindset from “have to” to “want to.”Be a firm believer that if you don’t want to do something, then you don’t have to. Simple as that. This might of course have some serious consequences, like loosing your job for instance (in the most extreme cases), but if manage to master the art of avoiding unwanted activities, you won’t have any trouble. There are some unpleasant tasks that we can’t avoid, like work for some (I never could understand why some people would choose to make their living in a field of activity they displease), but even then we can avoid procrastination by tricking our brain. You can do this by finding anything remotely pleasant about what you’re about to do, no matter how small and then think about it all the time, while you pursue the respective unpleasant task. This will cheat your brain into thinking you want to do it, not have to.
3. Brainstorm Your Way Out
Photo by Paul Mayne
A common reason for procrastination is lack of ideas, when dealing with any kind of tasks, that mildly requires some creativity. We’ve all had our days of mind blocks or plateaus, it’s actually fairly common, but if this period of blockage is too long, procrastination can settle in. What you need to do is brainstorm. Go outside have a walk and freshen up, observe and analyze everything you see or encounter. Always bring a ben/pencil or a PDA (for those of you more tech savvy) and start taking notes of what you see. Don’t criticize yourself, write down even the most preposterous ideas your mind might produce, you never know when something brilliant might come up.
4. Time Yourself
Photo by LynGi
I’ve found that many people resort to procrastination because they have to much time on their hands and so they put off things for the next hour, day or even weeks. Go to your desk, grab an alarm timer and set it for 10 minutes, 30 minutes or whatever time you believe is necessary to complete your work. Be sure not to leave too much room though, in example this post in normal conditions might take me 2-3 hours to write, I’ve set my timer for 40 minutes. It’s still ticking. This will help you motivate yourself in completing your work, but also most importantly it will help you focus.
5. Eliminate All Other Distractions
Photo by alessandro pucci
This means no IM, TV, no e-mail, no internet whatsoever (unplugging your chord would be a good idea), no music (for those of you that find it distractive, I personally can work fine with music in my headphones) or anything remotely distractive, that might break your concentration. Anything that might come between you and whatever task your trying to fulfill may disrupt your current activities and thus lead to procrastination. It’s better to avoid this by eliminating anything that might cause you to suddenly abandon your work. However, be careful. Don’t over exaggerate with this and lock yourself from the outside world, from your family and people that care for you.
6. Stop Being A Perfectionist
Photo by mrjimbou
Another cause of procrastination is perfectionism. It’s natural for us humans to try to be the best at something, but sometimes along the path we can tend to over-react with our ambitions and turn to perfectionism. This way we try complete a task flawlessly from the very beginning, but this takes a lot of work, that in term leads to a lot of stress, which in term leads to procrastination. This is because your brain will soon associate that stress with the respective task and will try to avoid it, most often by postponing it.
It’s important to understand that no one and nothing is perfect. It’s actually the imperfections that make the world around us so beautiful and most of all unique. You can try to write the most complete and helpful article ever or build the perfect software all you won’t, but you’ll never succeed, because there’ll always be room for improvement. Realize that an imperfect job completed today is always superior to the perfect job delayed indefinitely.
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April 1st, 2008 at 9:48 pm
wow.. ill try..
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:02 am
Thanks, some good, solid advice. I like the timing one especially. I’ve noticed that (more often than not) I will finish a task on time if given a time restriction, regardless of how long /short it is.
BTW – my perfectionism demands I point out that although you may have written this in 40 minutes, you may want to proof read it for another 10 minutes. There’s a couple of mistakes…
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:03 am
I was so involved in your article until I saw you use loose instead of lose. Then I disregarded everything I read and it lost all credibility to me.
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:14 am
Very interesting. I will try to some of these steps tomorrow.
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:28 am
Procrastination is like masturbation. At first it feels good, but in the end you’re only screwing yourself.
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:29 am
Story of my life… It’s even worse when you’re trying to make music. Nothing worse then getting into the studio and spending hours without even pressing record or saving a patch…
Although the best thing I’ve done is remove my internet connection from the studio computer…. #1 distraction. That and being a perfectionist…
Either way… good tips… great post.
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:55 am
Good article. I’d like to share some things I’ve learned about the human mind and how we . . . hey, is that a orange?
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 am
yeah…I’m gonna think about doing that stuff….maybe later.
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:08 am
laziness is often misconstrued as procrastination…
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:04 pm
I’ll tell you what I think tomorrow!
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
First things first: The most useful motivator I know is to decide what single thing is going to have the greatest positive impact on life. Then do it first thing at least for 15 minutes. Often, you’ll end up investing more time, but if you do it for 15 minutes first, each day, success will favor you.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I really liked the photos in your article…
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:25 pm
On number 4, “Timing Yourself” … if timing yourself produces the amount of mistakes that I found in this article, then I’ll pass.
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Those weren’t mistakes, SirGeekelot. The guy is terrible at spelling, grammar, and punctuation. *That* should be his 15-minutes-a-day top priority!
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I was going to send this tomorrow, but…Thanks for this post!
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:43 pm
wow, everyone had the same joke. I’ve never felt so typical.
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:49 pm
what about those people who feel that they are able to work much better under pressure?
I know I will get it done, but if i have 2 wks to do it i will finish it last minute no matter what. even though having it done already would be great but procrastination is like an addiction
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Hard work pays off in the long run. Procrastination pays off now.
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Learn to spell before you start dishing out the advice.
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
You might want to send your posts to someone to proofread before you post them. I stopped after the third sentence, where you used “as well” three times.
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:42 pm
“If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute.”
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:52 pm
found while browsing digg in an effort to make my Econ. work dissapear.
I found the irony ammusing
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:54 pm
quoting
” You might want to send your posts to someone to proofread before you post them. I stopped after the third sentence, where you used “as well” three times.
# Always Jason » Procrastination April 2nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm”
Someone obviously failed to grasp point 6
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Hmm …
Forced me to think about the distractions …
Great Article!
http://ajabgajab.blogspot.com
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:14 pm
why does this come out now! I already figure this out on my own. draw out a solution and a time constrains really works!
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Haha, just funny watching everyone complain about grammatical errors ^o^ Its okay, I’m sure your 5th grade English teachers would be very proud of you~
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:28 pm
The comments about the grammatical errors also have me laughing. Sure I noticed them, but the author’s main point is to get us readers to be more productive. I don’t think productivity= counting grammatical errors in an article, but that is just me.
I also think it is comical how the author advises the reader to wean off of perfectionism in order to reduce stress, when every other comment on here is pointing out the author’s imperfections. It only reiterates the fact that imperfections are not okay—hence my own perfectionism.
Thanks for the timer tip!
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:05 am
This are a very great ideas.
I think children should learn them at school, because it will give them a real advantage in the modern world.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I love the have to/want to distinction, something I’ve been talking about for a few years. Amazing how that change will affect your subconscious.
Dunno why one spelling error would cause that previous commenter to disregard the entire article, but I would suggest proofing these a bit better. There were a few silly mistakes (loose/lose, cord/chord, maybe a few others)
Great post regardless.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Thank you for all your comments and sorry about the grammar errors. I’ll have to admit I didn’t proof read it, frankly I didn’t expect the post would get so much attention (who would’ve thought this could get dugg?). And yes, I’m not a native English speaker. Again I apologize for any inconvenience my bad English might have caused, for those that actually found the article helpful and useful, I sincerely thank you for reading!
April 4th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
It’s been interesting skimming over the mixed bag of comments you’ve received. I found your article to be simple and thought provoking. I spend a lot of time researching and because of this habit I’ve exposed myself to writers who I have learn’t a lot from and been able to apply many successful principles to my business. One comment I will always remember is, “when you eat an orange, you spit out the pips” this can be appied with every article one comes across. You don’t have to accept everything, but take what is helpful apply it and spit out the pips. Well done for making the effort to try and help others. You can please some people, some of the time, but not everyone, all of the time.
April 6th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Sometimes it good not speaking English natively, I was not distracted by the spelling errors everybody else finds. Great article!
April 6th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
[...] Some even choose to list different ways in which people can ‘break the habit’ [...]
April 9th, 2008 at 6:20 am
I’ve never posted a message on anyones blog/article/forum, EVER. I’d just like to say though… please try and take all the criticisms constructively if you feel you need to pay them any attention AT ALL! The 40 minutes of your life you spent writing this have really helped save me from wasting so much of my life. Even though nothing is particularly ground-breaking or new to my ears I was in just the right frame of mind that I feel it made a real difference to the way I approach things. Thank you….
April 9th, 2008 at 6:36 am
Thank you too for your kind comment. Your much appreciated !
May 5th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
I hate procrastinating. I do it all the time. I think I am addicted to simply doing things on the edge.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
how you doin?
May 6th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
I really liked that quote, but upon further reading it turns out Amy Winehouse has some serious problems.
June 27th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Thanks for your advice and instructions, ‘THE SIX WAYS OF OVERCOMING PROCRASTINATION’. it’s really helping me in my daily living.
September 14th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Well I’m reading this right now and I’m still procrastinating. I think you need to just do twenty push ups every time you feel like stopping.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Looks VERY interesting, When i have more time I’ll take a good long look. Thanks
December 1st, 2008 at 8:53 am
s prazdnikov vasu
January 25th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
I really like this article. I have come to realize the unneeded stress procrastination outs on your life and actually slows you down. You only have one life to live. Might as well get all you can out of it.
January 28th, 2009 at 1:53 am
I find it really great! I don’t even bother the grammatical errors. I guess that’s not the purpose of this article so why bother? But that’s okay. I find this article well done. Thumbs up!
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July 24th, 2010 at 11:09 am
I badly need this guide… thanks for the motivation.
I like your last words
“An imperfect job completed today is always superior to the perfect job delayed indefinitely”
This will remind me always definitely!
December 18th, 2010 at 12:56 am
Thanks a ton..actually educational!!
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May 1st, 2011 at 2:28 pm
Awesome post! i have problems with always being the perfectionist… i have to keep reminding myself to stop wasting time and just get things done…
My problem is i go back time and time again to change things to make it perfect.
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December 1st, 2011 at 5:55 am
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August 9th, 2012 at 11:25 pm
A lot of people commented on the author’s terrible grammar but no one took some time out to correct the mistakes. I am not a native English speaker but if I were blessed with good writing skills, I would correct the mistakes instead of making fun of an article which is truly rich in content.
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