Why Do We Tend To Procrastinate?

A reason is that we tend to shift attention from something that scares us or makes us anxious towards something easier and less demanding.

Imagine you’d planned to work on a project, and then you find yourself watching a puppies video on Youtube!

That’s procrastination.

And what usually happens next?

You still have work to do because you didn’t complete your tasks and, many, many times, you will experience the situation with a strong sense of guilt that often generates greater anxiety, and it is not always easy to break this circle.

Therefore, it is necessary to look at the big picture and get the right dose of motivation.

Let’s also talk about procrastination and deadlines.

Researchers show that setting up long deadlines leads us to imagine the work more is difficult than what it actually is.

And this immediately leads us to procrastinate more. So the concept here is that the more we postpone an activity, the more difficult it seems.

This is also true even when the deadline is completely random.

That’s Parkinson’s Law: "The work expands to fill the time available for its completion."

This is exactly the reason why you should break down long-term goals into smaller and easier goals.

It is, in fact, demonstrated that people normally give more priority to less important tasks with shorter deadlines than more important tasks with longer deadlines, something that is called The Mere Urgency Effect.

How Do You Stop Being Lazy and Procrastinating?

Do you often postpone your commitments?

You don’t want to be a victim of procrastination, do you?

You don’t want to spend hours or even whole days not finishing anything and receiving a sense of frustration in return.

But if you are procrastinating, don’t worry because there are many solutions to stop putting off your commitments.

Let’s see some of the possible causes and how you can avoid wasting time from now on:

1. Turn Procrastination Into Productivity With Micro Goals

This can happen if you are not well-organized, if you don’t plan, and if you don’t know exactly what to do in order to achieve your goals.

It’s a lack of clarity.

If you don’t know your goal, you will never achieve it.

You are in this situation if you randomly work on your goals, you take a lot of breaks, and you get distracted quite often from Facebook or Youtube.

What happens is that working like this will take a lot of time and effort, and your final result will be continuously postponed.

Solution

As for planning and setting big goals, instead of looking at the whole situation, it’s better to divide it into many smaller tasks.

This is because performing a single easy action will be much simpler for us instead of completing the whole project right away. Smaller steps, less stress, fewer distractions, less tendency to be involved in other worthless activities.

If you have to write a book, start with a page. If you want to take a run for one hour every day, start to run for ten minutes.

If you have to create a new project, start with bullet points of the most important things and then develop each one of them, one by one, don’t do everything at the same time. Complete well-defined tasks, and your working sessions will be much more effective.

Start with the idea of taking small steps. I assure you that this has a different impact on your brain, and, in the end, it will be much easier to get the job done.

 

2. Procrastination Due To Lack Of Interest

Procrastination is often not an issue related to goal setting, but it can be strictly related to emotions.

This means that we tend to procrastinate more when we face a situation or a task that seems titanic to us, and this is why we may feel uncomfortable just even thinking about spending our time doing that thing because we are basically trying to avoid a situation of stress.

If you hate your job, or you don’t want to meet with that person, you will continue to procrastinate your commitments.

 

Solution

Write down a list of your passions, what excites you, what you would do all day long, what you would do even without being paid for it.

Then check if any of your passions have a connection with your job or what you are doing every day or what you are not doing that you should do!

Ask yourself if you have really lost interest in the final goal, or this just about a certain obstacle that makes you procrastinate (which could be an exam, a boring project or something else, necessary to achieve the end result).

If it’s about the second case, what you have to do is think about how you will feel once you have got rid of this boring task and how you will feel once you achieve the final result.

 

3. Beating the Fear of Failure that Causes Procrastination

People are scared to change.

It can be about a new job, starting your own business or even getting to know a person for a relationship.

If people are scared, they will always find excuses to put off what they want.

Procrastination dictated by fear is the worst that can happen to you: instead of chasing what you want, you are an obstacle to yourself, putting fear between you and the achievement of your goal.

 

Solution

The solution here is becoming aware so that you can act despite the fear; indeed, acting in spite of our fears is the only way to make them disappear.

You may find extremely useful “The Complete Time Management And Productivity Course” which is a video based training that covers all these topics in a structured way.