How to Eliminate Procrastination from Your Life
No matter which industry you belong to or the type of lifestyle you’ve adopted, you’re no stranger to procrastination. While Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones was regarded as King Slayer, procrastination is known as “Productivity Slayer.” Unfortunately, most people think of it as a time management problem.
It’s not!
People who procrastinate know they should be working. On any given day, they can complete their routine tasks way ahead of time.
However, there’s always that one day where they spend hours down the social media rabbit hole, rechecking emails, watching blog posts, or unnecessarily indulging in other activities that result in time wastage, disrupted workflows, productivity loss, angry bosses or clients, and financial loss.
Plus, when we’re running late, we end up panicking due to uncompleted tasks and hating ourselves for not starting earlier. This ultimately leads to stress, anxiety, fear, brain drain, fatigue, and other mental issues. More importantly, if procrastination becomes a habit, it can slowly eat you away and keep you from working at optimal levels.
Therefore, in this post, we’ll share how to eliminate procrastination from every aspect of your professional life, starting by diving deeper into the phenomenon.
Understanding Procrastination
Unfortunately, most people don’t understand what procrastination is. Some confuse it with laziness. However, the best way to describe it is to think of it as choosing not to do something important or urgent and indulging in easier, more favorable, or more enjoyable activities. In contrast, laziness is due to the unwillingness to act on something.
Whether it’s a rare occurrence or a habit, giving into the impulse to delay important tasks or activities can lead to serious consequences, including:
- Missing Important Deadlines
- Missing Out On Important Opportunities
- Losing Precious Time (Hours, Days, Months, or Even Years)
- Missing Out On Important Goals or Targets
- Losing Confidence and Self-Esteem
- Making Mistakes and Bad Decisions
- Damaging Your Mental Health
The problem with procrastination is that many people fail to identify it. Thus, they don’t learn how to eliminate procrastination from their lives. Therefore, here are the key causes:
1. Fear of Failure
Fear of failure (or Atychiphobia) is one of the biggest underlying reasons people procrastinate. This fear forces them to put off or avoid any task, event, or situation that could negatively affect them. Therefore, procrastinating people are less likely to take risks, experiment, or take on new challenges.
2. Fear of Criticism
Another reason people procrastinate is not that they’re incapable of doing something. Instead, it’s due to worrying about others thinking negatively about them, rejecting their efforts, or even who they are as people.
3. Perfectionism
Perfectionists have one enemy – mistakes. Mistakes can force people to develop negative emotions and prompt them to delay their work.
4. Others
Apart from the three most common causes of procrastination, here are other causes you should know about:
- Depression
- Self-Defeat
- Multi-Tasking
- Regret After Delays
- Task Aversion
- Burnout
- Disconnection from Goals or People, etc.
6 Hacks to Overcome Procrastination
1. Discover Why You Procrastinate
The first step in solving any problem is recognizing you have one. This is the only way to identify the root cause and do something about it. With that said, you need to identify what causes you to procrastinate. Is it perfectionism, fear of failure, or something else? Whatever it is, there are remedies you can try to fix the issues.
For instance, if you’re dealing with the fear of failure, you first must understand that failure is often the only guaranteed outcome of events. Therefore, you should accept this reality and permit yourself to fail. This way, you can re-assess your goals and boost your self-esteem to keep going no matter how much you want to do something else.
At its core, procrastination has nothing to do with productivity or time management. It is about managing emotions and ensuring we don’t fall for small rewards and lose sight of the real reward. In other words, completing a mandatory task on time is more rewarding than that funny video you were watching on YouTube to distract you.
2. Use Procrastination as a Task Prioritization Tool
Most people think of procrastination as a bad thing. This is mainly because they don’t know how to use it to their benefit. According to a study, there’s a faint line between procrastination and prioritization. By definition, prioritization is organizing tasks or activities according to their importance and urgency.
By putting off the most important tasks for the end, you can use procrastination as a tool to get laser-focused on less important tasks/activities. You can complete them quickly before moving on to the main event.
This can reduce delays, prolonging, or aversion significantly. More importantly, it can remove the negative emotions developed following completion, leaving you in a better mental state.
3. Make Temptations Inconvenient or Inaccessible
One of the many reasons we procrastinate is that we purposely place productivity obstacles in front of us. These obstacles tempt us to leave our tasks and activities, resulting in delays or failure – both factors can induce anger, frustration, stress, or anxiety. For instance, many people often leave what they’re doing by randomly checking their social media.
What if they didn’t immediately access their phones or social media apps? For instance, they could leave it in another room so they can add friction to the procrastination cycle. Moreover, they can disable automatic login and keep a difficult password, so they would have to type it in anytime they want to access their favorite apps.
Simple actions like these can make the reward value of different temptations and distractions more challenging to achieve since they’re now less immediate.
4. Practice Self-Compassion to Let Go of Negative Emotions
In many cases, our memories related to a similar task, event, or situation can cause us to drift into our past and stop us from doing what needs to be done. Whether it’s failure to finish on time, negative feedback, or other related issues, it can affect anyone’s confidence or self-belief.
As a result, people who go down memory lane tend to procrastinate fearing similar outcomes. However, there’s a simple fix to this. It involves patting yourself on the shoulders or giving yourself a much-needed pep talk. It starts with things like, “You’ve got this” or “Not this time, you don’t.” You get the idea.
You can also use this opportunity to challenge yourself and get over the line. Many people who fail use it to work harder and improve their focus and determination right while improving the basics and essentials required to get something done.
5. Brain Storm in Reverse
Reverse brainstorming is one of the best ways to kill procrastination and maximize productivity. By definition, it’s a thinking technique that enables people to think of ways to make a problem worse so they can change their perspective and focus on utilizing simpler solutions.
In context to procrastination, it involves thinking of all the things that could make your task or activity harder. Sometimes, it involves thinking of everything you could be doing instead of the task at hand. Once you have a few things in mind, you need to focus on the opposite to avoid feeling blocked or hesitant.
For example, you could think about getting everything right the first time without making any mistakes, which could be nearly impossible. However, the opposite is accepting that mistakes are a part of the game, and you can fix them. This way, you can avoid delays or bigger mistakes by not wasting time worrying about potential missteps or errors in your work.
6. Get Dirty Early
In the first point, we talked about using procrastination as a prioritization tool and leaving the most difficult tasks for the end so you can get the easier ones done first. While this strategy might work in many cases, it’s worth noting that you could do these tasks with less energy than when you started working.
In some cases, you’ll need all your energy to complete difficult tasks, and leaving for the last could result in overworking, delays, incomplete work, and burnout. Therefore, it’s often better to get the least pleasant tasks out of the way as quickly as possible.
Wrapping Up
So, there you have it – how to eliminate procrastination from your life using six smart strategies. Of course, you can try other things to break your habit of delaying important tasks. However, the trick lies in understanding your procrastination triggers so you can employ any proactive measure that works for you to overcome them.
You won’t stop procrastinating overnight. However, if you put your mind to it, you’ll notice the difference in every aspect of your life, whether calling an angry client after a mistake or going to a gym after a long day at work.
