How to stop procrastinating
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Step 1: Understand why you are procrastinating
There are number of reasons that people procrastinate. Take a few minutes to try to understand why you are procrastinating. Here are some potential reasons:
- Fear of success.
- Fear of failure.
- Other fear (fear of cold calling, etc.)
- Not knowing where to start.
- Don't want to eliminate work that makes you feel important.
- Task is pointless so you'd rather not do it.
There can be hundreds of other reasons as well. One of the most common ones is inertia. Simply put, it is hard to get started. Once you get started on a task it is much easier to finish it, but the trick is to get started.
In the following steps, we are going to look at how to overcome procrastination by "getting started" or "overcoming inertia".
Step 2: Make a list of what needs done
This is helpful because it lets you see everything you want to accomplish. Until you write it down, you don't really know what needs done--no matter how good your memory is or how well well you can visualize things in your minds eye. Putting something down on paper makes it serious. It makes it part of a commitment. When you write it down you are committing to do that item. You are also increasing its importance. It's a lot easier to work on something that you feel is important and something you feel is unimportant. The mere fact that you took the time to write down raises the importance level and makes it easier for you to dedicate yourself to spending some time working on that particular item.
I know a lot of people will try to use some type of electronic system to make a list. On one hand there is anything wrong with this. Electronic lists are easy to sort, aren't as likely to get lost, etc. on the other hand there's something unique about putting a pen or pencil to paper and some people may find that works better. On the electronic side of things is easy to create a huge list and not having idea what's more important than something else. Even if you have a way to organize them and prioritize them the sheer volume of the list may overwhelm you. When you're dealing with a piece of paper and a 10 there's a limit to how much you can write down quickly. For many people this constraint helps ensure that they only have the most important items on the list instead of hundreds of things that just happened to pop into their mind.
Step 3: Pick 3 items that you've been avoiding
These are the first things you are going to work on. It probably makes sense to choose the most important tasks you've been putting off working on. The goal here is to find things that you've been intentionally putting off but that legitimately need done. One potential strategies to pick the items that have the worst consequences if you don't do them. For example cleaning out your garage may not have any significant consequence if it is in complete it. You'll just have a dirty garage longer. However not getting your oil changed on your car may have significant consequences–your engine may not last as long. Thinking in terms of consequences how she know what's important and what is most valuable to you. Just be aware that there are some things that are very urgent and not particularly important in others that are very important and optically urgent. Changing oil may fall into that category. If your car is in decent shape changing the oil even something that's going to keep you from having a breakdown next week. However year upon year not changing your oil will cause a significant trouble down the road. It's a task that is very important but is not urgent.Make sure that you don't give these confused and focus on urgent task that have very low importance and leave off any important tasks that might need done.
Step 4: Set a timer and work for 15 minutes
Take the first task and work on it for 15 minutes. Give it your full attention. After 15 minutes, if you want to quite and go on to the second task you can. Most of the time, you'll find that once you get started you won't want to stop.
The idea is that once you get started and focus on a task, you'll want to complete it. By giving yourself permission to stop after 15 minutes it is easier to focus on an unpleasant task. What most people find when completing this exercise is that once they get started they have no trouble completing the task. Procrastination can be thought of as inertia. If the tendency to not start something. An object in rest days at rest in an object in motion stays in motion. Once you started on a project it's easier to go and finish it, but getting to that point that you can start can be very difficult because you have to get yourself going–you have to overcome your own inertia. People with bad procrastination problems have an unusually high amount of inertia. You can overcome this by training yourself to get going on things easier–don't let yourself put off unpleasant things simply because you don't want to start them.