PROCRASTINATION!? — STOP MAKING EXCUSES AND INCREASE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY!!

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Stuck with something that you don’t want to do? Are you not able to persuade yourself to do that important task just like I stopped everything important to learn about procrastination and thus I am now writing about it? 😀😅

You find something trivial to enjoy like scrolling over your Facebook feed or that special person you want to stalk on Instagram or maybe watching a movie. You are not alone!!

HOW PROCRASTINATION WORKS?

Procrastination is like “putting something off for later”. This is normal behaviour. A more accurate definition would be deciding to delay or not complete a task you’ve committed to, instead of doing something of lesser importance, despite the consequences. Now contrary to popular belief, procrastination is not laziness.

It is more like an intentional decision to avoid discomfort caused by the task. This feeling of discomfort could be nervousness, anxiousness, fear, anger or even boredom and could affect areas such as work, study, health, financial ,or social relationships.Once you avoid these negative feelings, you often reward yourself with enjoyable work. That’s why it feels so good when you procrastinate.

While this might relieve the short-term discomfort, it makes you feel worse in the long run because the task hasn’t gone away. You still got to finish that deadline, homework, job and now you have less time to finish it.

Factors for procrastination

1. Mental Barrier: These are the assumption is that you develop that trigger your discomfort. You tend to limit the beliefs that you must have about yourself and your abilities. It may be related to promotion, public speaking, financial investing, losing weight, etc.
2. Intolerance for discomfort: So even if you face discomfort, sometimes you're unable to handle these feelings and therefore turn towards enjoyable activities.
3. Excuses machine: When you choose to procrastinate rather than complete your task, you often feel guilty. So, you justify your actions, often create excuses for them.
4. Your bad habits: these are happy states I found because of a continuous cycle of procrastination and this may cause a permanent issue if not resolved.

You begin to think about how strictly your manager is going to be looking over things and you have thoughts like “I am must do things perfectly and not fail “. These thoughts start making you feel anxious and worried. You are unable to handle these feelings of discomfort so you avoid completing the task. However, feelings of guilt and shame come in so you make excuses to justify your actions. You start saying “I am too busy to do it now”.

This cycle then repeats itself so much that procrastination becomes your reflex reaction when dealing with hard tasks. To break out of the cycle won't be easy because this is something that you might have been doing for quite some time.

WORKING ON IT

I understand that it is much harder to do than just saying and it might be hard to overcome these mental barriers at first, but it is not impossible to do so. First, you need to identify and know what your mental barrier is. You then need to create helpful beliefs by asking yourself “ Is it reasonable, realistic, helpful, or fair) and can anything be changed the way I am thinking right now? What would be a more balanced approach to this?

GETTING MINDFUL AND EMBRACING DISCOMFORT

If you gave just enough thought about the things that I talked about you understand that to make it up you need to do something that you don’t want to and that’s a huge challenge for most of us and thus creates a sense of discomfort. So as the comfort increases you are more likely to procrastinate. Thus embracing discomfort is of utmost importance here. So I’d recommend you to give it a shot and think about the present moment and for a few minutes become a non-judgemental observer of your own experience.
It’s much harder to do so right!? So imagine that you are procrastinating to choose between two options. You are not comfortable because you’re afraid that you might end up getting hurt by making the wrong choice.

THE PEN AND PAD TECHNIQUE —

Take a short break and get into a comfortable position, close your eyes and focus on your breathing or the way your abdomen expands and contracts, or any other thing related to your sensory input. It’s alright if your mind wanders bring it back to focus. Now you’re ready to go. The second thing now is to try writing down your experience in a non-judgemental way. Become an observer and don’t just have an opinion on it yet.
Write your thoughts and try to make them in the third person. An example would be: “I can’t understand what to choose between option A or B.” instead write it as: “Manan can’t decide between doing option A or B. Manan feels like he’ll choose the wrong option and end up getting hurt”.
Once you do this you’ll you will surely observe it without any struggle and might get rid of the problem just by watching it as is. This might make you uncomfortable and you just acknowledged your discomfort. Now, instead of letting this discomfort control you, accept it and try to push it through.
The main lesson with exercise was to increase your tolerance but not to get over your feeling. It simply means adopting an attitude of “ I don’t like discomfort but I can tolerate it because I need to get it done”.

CHALLENGE- EXCUSE CYCLE

If you were able to keep up till now then you would surely agree that when you procrastinate, the feelings of guilt and shame come in. You make statements like “I’m tired”, “I’m too tired to do it, I’ll do it tomorrow or like I don’t think I have everything I need. Sounds familiar right?
You might be feeling anything from a range of things from feeling fatigued or lacking motivation. So instead of making an excuse, try to challenge them. You could rate it from 1–10 on how serious that feeling is? Once you do this, take out 10–15 minutes and do the task. After doing it try again to rate it. Chances have you already knocked the rate of the excuse by several numbers down. In this case, continue for another round. Even if it remains high, it is alright. But the key takeaway is that you separate the truth from the excuses.
This takes us to an important lesson that when you try to break down the task into smaller duration, you can achieve your goal in a much better way on the other hand if you take a large pile of work in the last hour then you might give it up more often.

TOWARDS BETTER HABITS -

We learned about different ways of how procrastination works and a small exercise to cope up with the discomfort of change. Now you can finally focus on how to create better habits by managing your time and planning approaches.

Managing time —

1. Firstly, make a to-do list of all the tasks you need to work on. I can suggest several apps like Todoist or Microsoft’s To do, Google tasks, Any.do, and so on. These are available across all platforms so you don’t need to switch apps. This blog just describes the top 52 apps for personal task management.
2. Break down tasks into smaller steps. As you would break down food into smaller pieces for better digestion, similarly you must take down a task into smaller doable chunks so that the chances that you complete your task is highly likely.

For example, if your paper is due on Friday, create a plan on how to tackle it throughout the week. Plan and outline by Monday, research by Tuesday, and so on. Breaking down each task and giving yourself a short deadline for each part will give you more of a structure to follow rather than doing it when you feel like it.

3. Finally, estimate how much time each step will take. It may be possible that Monday’s task of planning an outline might take 30 minutes whilst Tuesday’s task of researching might take around 4 to 5 hours. But you need to be careful while estimating because sometimes overestimate or underestimate things that are taken into consideration.

We either don’t get things done or get put off by the longest estimated time and the task is a far bigger deal than it is. A good suggestion is to keep a record of time for other reference points.

Planning approach —

You can start with something that you like or something that you don’t. If you start doing a task that you would like that gives you a really good feeling and then quickly switch to a task that you have been putting off without a break, for example, you could use the motivation and momentum you get from a task you like for example cooking to help you get the task you don’t like cleaning the refrigerator. You could also do the reverse, start with the worst one. Once you get it over with, all the other task seems easy.

The second strategy is planning using REWARDS. For example, you could reward yourself with a nice meal after you clean your finish cleaning. When you do this, can use the activities that would usually be distractions as motivation can enjoy them without any guilt.

I understand this is not achievable in a day or even a week and just like any other works that need some effort, beating the procrastination will also take time. So don’t lose hope.