Hello fellow readers!
I’m sitting at my laptop trying to think about how to start this piece. I am noticing an impulse to pick up the phone and check my Facebook (yeah, I’m that person with Facebook). Then I notice how I want to get up and go eat another piece of cake (Christmas, right?).
Without doing much, it’s been 20 minutes and I wrote nothing.
Sounds familiar? Most likely.
This is the very definition of procrastination, or putting off things. Or postponing until the last minute.
Procrastination essentially means putting off things that we need to do (whether they were given to us, or we set them ourselves).
It seems that we procrastinate about 55 days a year.
Now a quick show of hands how many of you think that procrastination is about laziness?
Or lack of will.
Or lack of motivation.
The thing is, procrastination is never about that.
Procrastination is about our profound dislike of discomfort.
It’s about the fact that it’s hard for us to sit with an unpleasant emotion that appears when doing something hard. And it always does.
I wrote about why this happens even to things that we like here.
When working with procrastination (or against it, I might add), it’s always useful to have a map of why you tend to do this and in what contexts.
Of course, we would not procrastinate watching a movie or catching up on social media (right). But we do tend to procrastinate those activities that imply some kind of discomfort.
For this week’s tool, let’s try to find the best way for you to lose 55 days a year:
Let’s go:
Think about what kind of activities are important to you so you tend to not do them:
Doing a hard task at work
Doing something that you set for yourself
Going to the gym
Paying taxes 🙂
Then think about what you can do to postpone them better.
Make a list of stories & activities that you get into instead of doing what’s important.
I tell myself I’ll do it after I eat/ have a coffee/ check this social page just one more time
I tell myself I’m not in the mood and that I will do it tomorrow (when presumably I will be in the mood)
I answer unimportant emails from the day before
I tell myself that I will do it when I am in the mood for that.
Then think about the stories that your mind is telling you & help you postpone it better.
I want to do a great job and I don’t believe I can achieve it and I just don’t do it
I need the pressure at the last minute to motivate me to work better
I think a lot about how great it will be when it’ll finally do it - but I don’t like the tedious road towards that.
There you go! Do this every day and you are guaranteed to lose those 55 days even faster. :))
Joke aside, this is your procrastination style - it’s all it takes sometimes to just be aware of it.
Never underestimate the power of being aware of your behavior if you want to change it.
Sometimes, this is all you need to make small changes.
‘Till next time!