We’ve all been there.
We’ve all had that oh-so-important thing we had to do but just kept pushing it back and back and back and back… until eventually we were made to do it or risk the repercussions of missing the due date.
Whether your specialty is leaving assignments, work projects, phone calls or any other number of important tasks to the very last second it doesn’t matter because there is another way.
What if instead of time making the decision for you, you instead initiated and got things done, moved on with life and saved yourself from having to stress about the task for days or weeks?
What if you made proactive and efficient your new mantra?
I’m going to walk you through a quick 4 step guide to overcoming once and for all the cycle of procrastination.
By the end you’ll be fully equipped and fired up to take leadership of your life and get stuff done.
Step #1 Identify the source of your procrastination
First and foremost, you must understand why it is you keep putting this or that thing you know you have to do at some stage off.
Broadly speaking we put things off because putting it off or avoiding it altogether serves us a purpose.
It protects us from something uncomfortable.
Logically you know it will be more uncomfortable if you don’t do the thing, but that uncomfortable repercussion is further in the future. The future is harder for your brain, as the human brain it is, to be motivated by.
You might easily be able to think of the pain associated with not doing it and know full well logically that you must do it yet still there is a reason you are not. If you take a moment to get crystal clear and specific (and honest) on exactly why it is that you are avoiding you will generally realise that what you’re avoiding isn’t all that scary anyway.
To help you out with identifying what it is for you here’s 5 common contributors to procrastination:
Perfectionism
You’re not starting that project because it’s never going to be ‘good enough’.
Unfortunately, perfectionism is often portrayed as a good thing.
I’ve seen people put it on their resumes as though it is a skill and something to be admired. It’s not.
Attention to detail, wanting the best from yourself and others, working to your highest standards are desirable but true perfectionism itself uh-uh. Nope.
True perfectionism is crippling.
For those of you who experience true perfectionism you’ll know why it isn’t something to be revered.
Perfectionism stops us from competing or often even beginning tasks because the outcome could never live up to our self-imposed unrelenting and completely unrealistic high standards.
Uncertainty
Uncertainty of the outcome and a fear that it will be unpleasant or undesirable.
The outcome is always out of our hands and it can be extremely uncomfortable to know you are not in control.
Time
Fear of wasting time.
The fear of investing time and energy into a project and it not working out can stop us from putting in the effort it needs.
You see this all the time in relationships. People don’t fully commit or give the relationship their best our of fear it’s not going to work out anyway where often times the only reason it doesn’t work out is that they didn’t give it their time and energy.
Tedious
Do you perceive the task as tedious or unpleasant or simply uninspiring? Paperwork come to anyone’s mind?…
Simply not enjoying a task is a pretty logical reason to put things off even if the future pay off of doing the task is big – remember short term pain for long term gain isn’t the natural way for a human brain to think.
Habit
Anything we repeatedly do, or don’t do quickly becomes a habit.
Your brain is faced with so many decisions in a day and to avoid overload it pre-makes decisions based on your past behaviour. This means when you are put in a similar circumstance your brain will default to what you’ve always done.
This is why habits can be so difficult to break because we’re not choosing to do them and often only realise, we’re doing them long after we’ve started or finished.
If your past behaviour was to postpone or avoid your brain will go to that by default because hey, you didn’t die last time and for your unconscious mind that’s all the information it needs to know that’s a habit worth keeping.
Step #2 Focus on the Positives
Now we’ve explored the reasons you may be avoiding or putting things off it’s time to look at the other side.
There are likely some great reasons you should be doing this task isn’t there?
Whether it be calling your mum, taking the rubbish out, doing the shopping, finishing an assignment, completing (or getting started on) a work project, cooking dinner or anything else there are important upsides to doing all of these!
What is something that you have left to the last minute in the past, gotten all stressed out about only to finally get it done and find it wasn’t that bad?
I am sure there are numerous things.
In that situation did you focus on the negatives or the positives of doing the task for longer?
Often, we put so much time and effort into avoiding doing something and as a result become so caught up on the negatives of doing it that we don’t even think of the positives anymore.
When we do eventually get it done it is a last-minute panic to avoid the negatives of not doing it!
We spend no time on congratulating ourselves for a job well done because we don’t feel as though we have earned it (and let’s be honest if we left it to the last second we probably didn’t earn a congratulations). It just becomes a relief that it is over and done with and we move on to do (or avoid doing) the next hard or slightly inconvenient thing.
I don’t know about you but to me this isn’t sounding like the recipe for a fun life!
A fun life is also not the removal of all hard tasks because challenge and growth are both fundamental human needs. The reality is if you plan on being human until the day you die your life will always have tasks of varying degrees of hardness but in order to make them doable we have to shift our focus to ‘why’ we are doing them.
What makes doing them worth it to you?
What are you going to gain from doing them?
What are you going to gain from doing them now?
As you’ve already experience fear can be a great motivator but it is usually a last minute motivator and wouldn’t you feel less stressed, much more content and possibly proud if you could proactively get things ticked off your list well before that deadline panic?
A practical way of doing this is retraining your mind to focus on the positives of doing it early.
What will doing this allow me to do?
What will I gain from getting this done now?
If for no other reason than to have one less thing to be worrying about and nagging at the back of your mind while you are trying to do something nice on the weekend, do it.
Being the leader of your life is being the one who makes the decisions.
Don’t wait for someone else or time to make them for you.
Empower yourself by focusing on the positives to making the decision and going for it. Soon your mind will realise this is a far more comfortable, satisfying and likely successful way to live and do it as your new default habit.
Step #3 Practice
A great way to teach our brains that something is very scary, and we should avoid it is by avoiding it.
On the other hand, a great way to get our brains to do things they are afraid to fail at is to do them.
In the real world I find it helps if we tell ourselves we are practicing.
If it as a practice and not the be all and end all, we feel less afraid to ‘stuff up’.
Which means we do it and the doing it is where the true power is.
Someday never comes.
You don’t wake up one morning and decide all your fear is gone, you wake up multiple mornings and focus on what you are grateful for and actively decide to make this day a good day.
Practice gets your body used to what it is you want to do.
It desensitises your brain to the hard things and essentially practice for a good life becomes indistinguishable from living a good life…
Practice is doing it with permission to stuff up, aka permission to be human.
An important point is that you and only you can be the one to give yourself this permission because you are the one who is beating yourself up most when you fail.
We all have a memory of failing, perhaps recently or perhaps many years ago and when we are faced with hard tasks and new fear of failure we conjure our biggest failure or our big list of failures to mind as evidence of our incompetence.
Get some new practice in.
A ‘failure’ is only a failure if you don’t learn and grow from it. If you can learn from a ‘failure’ so that your life is better off for it then it is a success because the only thing successful people have in common is that they’ve failed more times than non-successful people.
You’ve learnt from those ‘failures’ don’t let them hold you back any longer.
If you ask for patience, you will get a long line at the bank. In other words, life gives you the lessons that you need to learn the skill. It doesn’t simply give you the sill.
Life is leaning.
There are no short cuts, there are simpler and quicker ways of doing things certainly but if you are looking for the shortcut and the least effort you will miss out on experiencing the passion and pain that makes life full and vibrant.
Have faith in yourself and your abilities and do without the need to get it right (practice) because whatever the outcome you are capable of dealing with it.
Step #4 Reward Yourself
This is an often-overlooked step because it sounds childish but it is actually crucial to maintaining decisiveness and action at a high level.
Stop brushing over your achievements!
If you don’t give recognition to yourself when you do the hard things, you’ll lose the momentum to keep it up.
If the hard things are only linked to pain, even if you’ve become a bit desensitised to that pain through practice, you’ll still have low motivation or inspiration to do them.
Most of the time we do feel pleased with ourselves when we eventually get the hard thing done, but it is more through a sense of relief than celebrating and congratulating ourselves on a job well done.
If you truly want to become productive beyond belief start taking just a few minutes to fully acknowledge to yourself in your mind that you’ve done a good job. “Wow go you, you just did that thing you were worried to do and you did it so well”. Say anything you want really it’s the inside of your mind you can be as awesome to yourself as you want. No one else will ever know.
You don’t have to take a holiday or buy yourself roses or expensive new shoes (but you can if you like!) rather just allow yourself those few minutes of full recognition, appreciation and congratulations that you did it.
Often our tasks are self-directed and self-imposed, there is no one else to be impressed by our small accomplishments and successes but you because most of the time only you can ever know how much it meant to you.
You are the only one who is going to ever know the effort it took you.
Don’t downplay it.
If we are constantly looking for outside reinforcement that we are doing the right thing or that we are successful we will never be truly happy.
What is difficult for you just might not be difficult for someone else and vice versa. Besides people can be a little afraid of celebrating the achievements of others because they feel it detracts from their own. It doesn’t of course. We’re a strange little species with such large brains most of us don’t properly know how to run that we get confused all over the place. Don’t get me started or what was intentioned to be a quick guide to getting stuff done is going to quickly become an essay…
Our brains are much more responsive to reward than to criticisms.
You can’t create health and happiness by fighting pain and misery only creating health and happiness creates health and happiness.
Be kind to yourself, celebrate your wins and your life will transform.
Summary
To tie it all together concisely your 4-step guide to stop procrastination and start getting stuff done is:
- Think of one thing in your life that you have been putting off, avoiding or dreading doing. Get clear on what exactly it is that is holding you back? Write it (or them) down.
- Make a list of all the positives if you were to just do it.
- Decide it’s a practice run and reassure your brain that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Now go do it.
- Irrespective of the outcome reward yourself with some kind words and recognition that you did it. Give yourself your full attention.
Now go be the leader of your life, get stuff done and enjoy your newfound productivity.
Ps.
Because there is very little that I now do from the level of purely the conscious mind I have to put a ps caveat that if you have truly large problems with procrastination and after following these steps you experience minimal success you’ve likely got unconscious work to do.
Straight up give me a call.
Helping people overcome procrastination, gain focus and motivation to come at their life from a proactive leadership position rather than a passive participant is one of my most rewarding areas to work in. Seeing that change is phenomenal and experiencing it even more so.
When you take leadership of your life there is infinite possibility and sometimes this truly does start simply by overcoming something as seemingly mundane as procrastination.
If there are unconscious blocks holding you back be this past conditioning or habit, it’s likely you’re going to need some unconscious work to make headway any time soon or possibly ever at all. In any case working with your unconscious mind is not only life changing but also fun.
If I could give one blanket recommendation to every human on this planet it would be to build rapport with your unconscious mind because the more functions you can hand over to your competent unconscious the more time and energy you have to be present enjoy and make life meaningful.
With my whole heart I hope you found this information useful and inspiring.
Become Great. Live Great.
Bonnie.
