Habit

The Procrastination Cure👇 What’s in it for me? Overcome the barriers between you and your dreams🧚‍♀️ 1. What’s the trick to beating procrastination? Is it putting your phone in your closet? Blocking distracting apps and websites? How about a padlock on your fridge to keep you from snacking? While tips and tricks may help, if you’re struggling with frequent procrastination, you may have deeper things you can work on. Procrastination isn’t who you are. It’s a pattern of behavior that arises out of specific psychological dynamics – dynamics that may run deep, but that you can still change.  Procrastinators tend to fall into types and, while we won’t be able to cover every single case in this blink, we’ll focus on three of the most common types of procrastinators – and the specific steps and strategies that benefit each. Alright, no time to delay! Let’s get going.   1. Procrastination and Its Toll What’s the longest you’ve ever spent procrastinating something? A few days? Weeks? The author once coached a client who had put off filing her taxes… for fifteen years! While this may be extreme, it’s not without precedent. Every year, people pay millions in excess taxes for procrastination-related reasons; getting penalized for filing late or making expensive mistakes while in a time crunch. Experts estimate that 40 percent of Americans have suffered needless financial setbacks due to procrastination. But it’s about much more than your bank account. 3. Consider our 15-year tax-avoider. What was going on there? It all stemmed from fear. Her initial procrastination started with some anxiety or discomfort, which escalated into dread as the potential consequences loomed larger and larger. A vicious spiral of fear, winding slowly upwards until, by the time she sought the author’s help, she was so afraid she couldn’t sleep at night! This is perhaps the greatest toll procrastination takes. The loss of happiness and well-being.  So, why do people do it? What is procrastination, anyway?  It’s not the same as delaying a task. After all, we sometimes delay a task for perfectly good reasons: you can’t do everything at once. Procrastination is a particular kind of delay – it’s putting something off even after you know it’s time to start. 4. Procrastination is related to indecisiveness, but it’s not exactly the same. Indecision is struggling to make up your mind, while procrastination is when you’ve made up your mind, but still somehow fail to take action. Psychologists Albert Ellis and William Knaus have their own definition – procrastination is when you delay performing a task up to the point where you start to experience discomfort or bad feelings. This rings true. And yet – paradoxically – we procrastinate out of a vain effort to avoid discomfort. Something feels stressful, painful, or uncomfortable; and so we come up with a reason to do something – anything – else until, eventually, we start to feel discomfort about the avoidance. 5. As we’ll see, curing procrastination is less about managing your time and more about managing your emotions. A big step is getting clear about which emotions are driving us. We each have unique life histories and experiences that inform our behaviors. But – lucky for us – the author has coached thousands of people struggling with procrastination, and there are some patterns that come up again and again. 6. Good Enough to Start – And to Finish Picture this: you’ve dreamt for years of writing a screenplay. In your mind, it’s going to be a masterpiece. You read and research. You obsess over each scene, plot point, and character arc. You brainstorm, you draft, you revise. But you never quite get around to finishing. Years go by and, instead of making your mark on the industry as you hoped, your masterpiece is still stuck in “draft.” This is the plight of the “neurotic perfectionist.” Neurotic perfectionists, while often smart and talented, are their own worst critics. They’re typically dissatisfied with their work; the reality never seems to compare to the shining vision they carry in their heads. It’s hardly a surprise that they struggle to carry projects through to completion. This striving to avoid flaws causes them anxiety and even paralysis. Their fear of weakness becomes their weakness. 7. These perfectionists often end up as adrenaline junkies – that is, they depend on the rush of an imminent deadline to get things done. Why? It’s actually simple. Only at the eleventh hour – in that last night before a test, or that last week before a months-long project is due – does their fear of missing the deadline suddenly surpass their other fear, their greatest fear: the fear of not being good enough. Does this ring true to you? If so, what’s to be done? How do you break the cycle? First, you need to recognize that perfectionism isn’t just having admirably high standards or a discerning eye. Underneath it all, it’s likely linked to long-standing feelings of shame and inadequacy. To overcome perfectionistic procrastination, your first job may simply be to recognize this fact – and then, slowly, gradually, start to affirm in yourself a new narrative – a new idea – that you are enough. Let that sink in. You are enough … already. 8. This isn’t about giving up or producing inferior work. It’s about letting go: of baggage, of your psychological need to be perfect in order to feel good enough. It’s letting go of your desperate attachment to sky-high expectations and overly ambitious goals that you, deep-down, hope will validate you. On a practical level, recovering from perfectionistic procrastination is about working with new priorities; prioritizing getting started and getting done over getting it perfect.  9. Here’s a tip – one that’s deceptively simple, though hardly easy: at the end of each day, write out a list of things you can, and want to, accomplish tomorrow. These need to be tasks you can actually finish in one day. (If not, break them into subtasks.) Make this list brief and modest. And when you think it’s modest enough, bite the bullet and make it even more modest. It takes discipline, but it’s a technique that can keep you grounded and help free you from the overwhelm and disappointment that afflict so many. Remember, perfection is an illusion; good is good enough! 10. Preparing to Prepare Let’s look at John – another coaching client. John was a successful insurance salesman who decided to switch careers. So, he immersed himself in learning; he listened to audio programs, attended webinars, seminars, rallies, and conventions. He built a strong network of contacts and top coaches. For nearly three years, John prepared for his career switch, lining up everything just so. Unfortunately, John was doing all of this preparation on borrowed money – and going deeper and deeper into debt in the process. John wasn’t lazy. He was doing stuff. But he was still procrastinating; procrastinating starting his new career in earnest by, let’s say, actually reaching out to clients. 11. John’s problem? He was a “chronic worrier” – a close cousin of the neurotic perfectionist. You could say that, while the perfectionist is dominated by shame, the worrier is dominated by fear. These two tendencies often go hand in hand. Fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of rejection; all of these can manifest as pathological over-preparation, or what the author calls “getting ready to get ready.”  Worriers and perfectionists do this as a way of staying in the safe- and comfortable-seeming world of prep – far away from the big bad world. Or else they get caught in the trap of so-called “analysis paralysis” – over-intellectualizing instead of taking action. 12. Imagine the classic boxing movie Rocky, but in this version, the protagonist is stuck in a training montage that never ends – skipping rope and doing pull-ups interminably until, eventually, the film cuts to black; the credits start to roll. Well, friend, you’ve got to get in the ring! It’s ok to be afraid, but you’ve got to accept that some risk and uncertainty is inevitable. You’ve got to work on building your faith that, no matter what, you’re going to be ok.  Win or lose, at least you came out swinging. That’s the ethos you need to cultivate. Rebel Without a Cause 13. Okay, here comes another movie metaphor. Picture the iconic James Dean in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. Dean embodied a spirit of youthful defiance that resonated with a generation. He’s a powerful, passionate character, admittedly. But not a very happy one. There's a unique breed of procrastinator the author calls “rebellious procrastinators.” For these people, their identity becomes entwined with a sense of resentment and defiance. Rebellious procrastinators often possess remarkable talents. But their inner turmoil, marked by frustration and feelings of being wronged, leads them to rebel against their work. They may avoid tasks that seem too trivial, unimportant, or beneath them – rejecting tasks outright, or else resisting them passive-aggressively, by simply never getting around to them. 14. Frustrated by their work and their place in life, rebellious procrastinators may find themselves blaming others – ultimately in a bid to avoid blaming … who? You guessed it: the person in the mirror.  While seductive, blaming others is a trap – one the author himself fell into. He was once, in his own words, “addicted to resentment.” While righteousness may feel good in the short term, it only leads to disappointment later.  To escape the fate of the rebellious procrastinator, it’s essential to acknowledge the role that your feelings of frustration and unfairness play in holding you back. Your anger may be masking a deeper, unresolved frustration you harbor towards yourself, or people in your past. The key here is forgiveness.  15. Forgiving those who have wronged you, those who rejected you or hurt you, is actually a step towards forgiving yourself. And that forgiveness is transformative.  Because amidst the frustration and anger that rebellious procrastinators hold, lies a potent force – a genuine passion that you can harness; a fire within you. As the author puts it: “Your anger is passion turned inside out.” So, as glamorous as the rebel may seem – don’t let resistance and resentment sabotage your chances of success. Let go of your anger, so you can liberate your strengths.  16. Reconnecting and Recreating Alright, so when it comes to procrastination, we’ve talked about the big picture – you’ve got to understand and let go of the specific emotional dynamics that fuel your self-destructive behavior. But is there something else you can do, day-to-day, to help ease this transition? Here are two strategies. Be warned, though: they’re probably not what you’re expecting. The first: focus on addressing your anxiety and discomfort as they manifest within your body. While your fears may, in some sense, be “all in your head,” sooner or later they start creeping outwards – into a stiff neck, a tense jaw, a tight lower back. Your mind and body are inseparable. So, get a massage, see a chiropractor; start a yoga or tai chi practice; try martial arts. The choice is yours, but the point is to soothe and loosen your tense muscles and bring some relaxation and balance to the body. You’d be surprised how caring for your physical-self can feed into your work-self. 17. The second strategy: escape from isolation. It’s important to make and maintain strong connections with others. Try to spend a bit less time online and a bit more face-to-face. Reach out to old friends and look into activities you can do together. You’re not meant to be alone in this world! Many chronic worriers and perfectionists, especially, find themselves ensnared in a web of “what if”' questions. “What if I don’t succeed? What if I do? What if I fail to get that promotion? What if I do get it?” This kind of runaway self-talk makes it hard to take action. Connecting to your body – and to other people – is about getting you “out of your head” and into your heart; and in touch with the present moment. Because the present moment isn’t just where you live – it’s where you work, too. 18. So, when it’s time to work, take your newly relaxed body and your newly connected heart and simply focus-in on the immediate task at hand. You know: the one right in front of you. No need to delay. Just get in there and do your best.