Procrastination is one of the biggest thieves of our time! Time is so precious in human life, yet we spend it frivolously and then wonder why we have no time left to get the things done that we need to!
Procrastination is real and is ugly, but it doesn’t have to limit you or steal your time – you can be the boss of procrastination by taking back control of your life and time! Push the guilt aside and combat procrastination instead.
Below are 5 ways to eliminate procrastination to get a better hold of your time:
Track Your Time
Procrastination forms because of an underlying reason or a set of underlying causes that trigger putting off work. The reason may be because of a fear of failure that resides deep in your subconscious and can be almost impossible to detect on the surface. To eliminate procrastination, you need to find out what’s causing it and treat the cause.
An excellent strategy to find out the cause is to keep track of the amount of time you spend procrastinating and how much work you’re getting done. Write down what you were doing that caused you to have the motivation or what caused you to delay. You will begin to notice the patterns. Once you find out the reasons, you can start to kick procrastination to the curb!
Silence Your Inner Critic and Celebrate Success
Please do not criticize yourself when you catch yourself procrastinating and not hitting your goals, but rather, celebrate! Give yourself a mental high-five whenever you got some work done – ANY job that you complete is better than not getting anything done! If you criticize yourself, it will only feed into the cycle of procrastination, and you’ll become even more afraid of failing on the next project, which will make you procrastinate even more.
Be gentle on yourself and remember that you’re human, and this happens even to the best of people!
To help you get even just some work done, work in small chunks of a project at a time, and focus on starting rather than finishing them. If your projects are too big and intimidating, break them down into smaller tasks first!
Set a timer for 20-30 minutes and start working once the timer is running. Do your work, as best as you can, during this time, and once the 20 minutes is up, walk away and take a break by doing something different. You’ll find you’ll get big projects done with less resistance!
Set One Goal at a Time
It’s helpful to set one goal at a time and work on that first before moving onto the next task or project and remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect! Each completed goal will lead to the next one that’s waiting for you!
Put Perfection Aside
No one is perfect, including with their time- not even billionaire Bill Gates! Using wisdom with your gift of time accounts for success more than perfection! Perfectionism creates fear of imperfection, which starts a nasty cycle of procrastination. Focus your priorities on what needs to get done first before rushing to complete the next important thing, however big or small!
Remind yourself you are only one person (if you have a team of help, remember then that they’re not perfect either!) and that you can only do so much, and that that is OK! The more you focus on perfecting something you’re doing, the more things you do will NEVER be good enough for you anymore, and that alone can lead to mental distress, which in turn, will lead to more procrastination!
Practice Self-Care
One reason that people procrastinate is that they are already too stressed to work on more things – this is where practicing self-care comes in. Self-care doesn’t mean to procrastinate, though! Tending to yourself and making sure you get the breaks and care that you need will help motivate you to get to work when it’s time and will help you to stay calmer when you start to tackle a task, making it more enjoyable! The more you de-stress ahead of time, the less stress you have to face when it comes to finishing a job, therefore putting off procrastination (pun intended).
Take Back Control of Your Life and Work Less to De-Stress
Procrastination is a symptom of a deeper cause than a cause itself. But, what if you cured this cause and had complete self-control so that you could start work whenever you wanted and what if you could tackle big projects to have time for other things you love and need to do – in chunks! Doing less work at a time but getting everything done that’s needed in a manageable, reasonable way can have excellent results! You’d be surprised how much you’d get completed in a shorter time if you really put your time management to the test with control!
We need to realize that procrastination is not an inborn trait, and we are not procrastinators by nature. Once we know this and accept this, we simply need to find out why we procrastinate and implement these essential tips to kick this unhealthy and unproductive habit!
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