Beating Procrastination

In my last post I talked about the enemy called fear and how it can prevent us from reaching our full potentials. In this post, I would be looking at yet another issue that can serve as a deterrent to personal/professional achievement, personal development and fulfilment of our potentials. This time I would be talking about Procrastination; the enemy called Procastination.

Ok, we all know what procrastination is and we all, at a particular point in time have been guilty of this insidious crime. You know, those times we find ourselves putting till later responsibilities that needs to be attended to. And we do this, not because we do not have the resource necessary to get the job done at that moment, but because we just don’t feel like it.

“In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority actions or tasks with low-priority actions, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time. Psychologists often cite such behavior as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision” via wikipedia

Truth is Procrastination reduces performance. It reduces both our efficiency and effectiveness. In fact procrastination can be listed as one of the top reasons why most people do not attain the top performance status.

With procrastination we neglect important activities and instead busy ourselves with trivia ones.
Like someone once put it:

Truth is Procrastinators work as many hours in the day as other people (and often works longer hours) but they invest their time in the wrong tasks. Sometimes this is simply because they don’t understand the difference between urgent tasks and important tasks, and jump straight into getting on with urgent tasks that aren’t actually important.
They may feel that they’re doing the right thing by reacting fast. Or they may not even think about their approach and simply be driven by the person whose demands are loudest. Either way, by doing this, they have little or no time left for the important tasks, despite the unpleasant outcomes this may bring about.

So now that we are clear on the ills of procrastination, guess the next question is how to eliminate it. But before we talk about how to eliminate or reduce procrastination, I think we should talk about some of the things that could lead to procrastination. By identifying the cause, we should be on our way to solving the problem of procrastination:
I once read a nice write up on this issue, and I think It won’t be a bad idea to share some of the insights I glean from the article. According to the article, some of the causes of procrastination include:

• Waiting for the “right” mood or the “right” time to tackle the important task at hand.
• Poor organizational skills.
• Fear of failure (“I don’t have the right skills or resources to do this perfectly now, so I won’t do it at all.”)
• Feeling overwhelmed by the task.

Other causes of procrastination may be identified, but these other causes can be broadly categorized under the aforementioned causes. For example perfectionist tendencies, which could be a reason why some procrastinate, is nothing but fear of failure.

So now that we are done with causes, let’s look at some of the ways procrastination can be eliminated. I would quickly list some simple tips that if followed, would help in abating the habit of procrastination. They are:

• Recognize that you’re Procrastinating.
• Employ ToDo List.
• Avoid saying yes to unimportant task others ask you to do.
• Avoid taking too much responsibility that would overwhelm.
• Find someone else to be accountable to. Someone who would check on you and track your performance.
• If you are confronted which a huge project, instead of being overwhelmed, break down the project into a set of smaller, more manageable tasks.
• Learn to delegate tasks.
• Make an habit of rewarding yourself on task complition.

Always remember that there is no way we can be top performers if we are plagued with procrastination. Understand that procrastination is a limiting factor and take conscious steps, every point in time, and in whatever you do to “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today”