How to Stop Procrastinating: 15 Practical Solutions to Stop Putting Things Off
17 September 2014
Read by 3267 persons
"I'll do it later... tomorrow... someday... didn't have time... too complicated..." Do these phrases sound familiar? It means you are, or you have a procrastinator in your entourage, that is, an individual who constantly postpones everything they undertake. Is procrastinating a fatality? No! The proof is in 15 concrete solutions to free yourself from an ailment that spoils your life or the lives of others.
You wake up in the morning full of energy, ready to conquer the world and, finally, to tackle the to-do list stuck to your fridge, without ever succeeding? There's a good chance you're procrastinating, from the Latin "pro" ("forward") "crastinus" ("of tomorrow"). "That's it, I'm afflicted with procrastination," you're probably saying now, relieved to be able to put a name to this ailment that's eating away at you, and that you prefer to consider incurable. Yet, that's where you're wrong. Because, as coach Michaël Ferrari explains in his book *Stop Procrastination, It's Smart*, procrastination is not part of you like an unalterable aspect of your personality. It's only a symptom of your poor time management, the cause of which you need to find.
Why do you procrastinate?
Among them, we find, in disorder and without hierarchy:
Minimizing the importance and urgency of your projects (basically, if a car were heading towards you, you wouldn't ask yourself 100 times before moving your butt),
Fear of change (having a health check-up, making that fateful appointment with your boss, taking your driving test, going on a diet... so many events that would disrupt your little habits, which doesn't exactly thrill you),
Perfectionism (you're the type to tell yourself that exercising without doing two hours a day is pointless, and so you don't do anything),
The desire to preserve your self-esteem (because yes, putting things off avoids the risk of failure... but also of success, but you don't tell yourself that).
The goal, to cure yourself of this addiction to procrastination, will be to determine these causes, as well as the situations that invariably make you postpone things, in order to gradually get rid of this bad habit, like a smoker giving up their post-coffee cigarette.
Prepare the ground for your healing process
To do this, you will also need to focus on the benefits, since very often your procrastination will have cost you money (various subscriptions never cancelled) or even a little of your health due to the stress generated by those nights of anxiety spent listing everything you haven't done.
Last but not least, you must, as if you were starting a diet, be truly ready to change. Your salvation will involve difficult steps, and you will often have to force your nature to get your ability to manage these daily tasks, which you can no longer fit into a proper schedule, back on track. A lukewarm desire would lead you straight to failure. Therefore, note your desire for success on a scale of 1 to 10, agree to make an effort, and follow this advice.
And don't forget that to take off, a rocket consumes more than half its fuel simply to escape Earth's gravity...
Let's go. 15 concrete solutions to get you out of it
Adèle Bréau.
Huffingtonpost.fr
Published September 11, 2014.
Posted online September 17, 2014.
You wake up in the morning full of energy, ready to conquer the world and, finally, to tackle the to-do list stuck to your fridge, without ever succeeding? There's a good chance you're procrastinating, from the Latin "pro" ("forward") "crastinus" ("of tomorrow"). "That's it, I'm afflicted with procrastination," you're probably saying now, relieved to be able to put a name to this ailment that's eating away at you, and that you prefer to consider incurable. Yet, that's where you're wrong. Because, as coach Michaël Ferrari explains in his book *Stop Procrastination, It's Smart*, procrastination is not part of you like an unalterable aspect of your personality. It's only a symptom of your poor time management, the cause of which you need to find.
Why do you procrastinate?
Among them, we find, in disorder and without hierarchy:
Minimizing the importance and urgency of your projects (basically, if a car were heading towards you, you wouldn't ask yourself 100 times before moving your butt),
Fear of change (having a health check-up, making that fateful appointment with your boss, taking your driving test, going on a diet... so many events that would disrupt your little habits, which doesn't exactly thrill you),
Perfectionism (you're the type to tell yourself that exercising without doing two hours a day is pointless, and so you don't do anything),
The desire to preserve your self-esteem (because yes, putting things off avoids the risk of failure... but also of success, but you don't tell yourself that).
The goal, to cure yourself of this addiction to procrastination, will be to determine these causes, as well as the situations that invariably make you postpone things, in order to gradually get rid of this bad habit, like a smoker giving up their post-coffee cigarette.
Prepare the ground for your healing process
To do this, you will also need to focus on the benefits, since very often your procrastination will have cost you money (various subscriptions never cancelled) or even a little of your health due to the stress generated by those nights of anxiety spent listing everything you haven't done.
Last but not least, you must, as if you were starting a diet, be truly ready to change. Your salvation will involve difficult steps, and you will often have to force your nature to get your ability to manage these daily tasks, which you can no longer fit into a proper schedule, back on track. A lukewarm desire would lead you straight to failure. Therefore, note your desire for success on a scale of 1 to 10, agree to make an effort, and follow this advice.
And don't forget that to take off, a rocket consumes more than half its fuel simply to escape Earth's gravity...
Let's go. 15 concrete solutions to get you out of it
- Focus your efforts on simple and immediate goals. Break down your goals into steps and focus only on the next goal, one at a time (running is 1/ putting on your sportswear 2/ putting on your shoes 3/ running for the first 30 seconds...).
- List what you need to do in a day, then in a week, and compare what you've accomplished with your initial list. If the gap is too large, it's because you don't know how to gauge what's realistic for you. However, the larger the gap, the more you risk locking yourself back into procrastination.
- Systematically block 1 hour per week to work on the project that is close to your heart, without using your eternal joker "I don't have time" (unacceptable excuse from now on. You have plenty of time to hang around on social media or news websites, don't you?).
- Don't commit hastily to others, but take the time to consider the potential completion or not of the proposed project (even if it's changing the bathroom light bulb before the end of the day).
- Count the time you spend on each task. It's tedious, of course, but with practice, everything will soon be recorded directly in your head as if by magic.
- List the advantages/disadvantages of postponing or taking action whenever you feel you're going to crack.
- Cut off the Wifi.
Adèle Bréau.
Huffingtonpost.fr
Published September 11, 2014.
Posted online September 17, 2014.
