Does any of these phrases sound familiar? If you have ever said any of these words or something similar, you have procrastinated, or are still procrastinating. Procrastination, the art of putting something off, or not doing it at all, is a more common symptom or rather sickness of our time. You have probably done it more then you would like to admit, and know at least a handful of people that also do it all the time.
Most of us are also hard on ourselves for procrastinating and we feel we should be able to control it. We think of ourselves as weak and the longer it goes on, the worse it gets. We read up on how to stop procrastinating, better time management techniques, goal setting and see all these great strategies on how to overcome procrastination. The problem is not that the strategies does not work, it’s that we put off implementing it, or stop reading the book half way trough.
If this is you, and believe me, it’s me too… stop feeling bad. There is a reason why this happens, and there are ways to start taking action and free yourself from the vice grip of procrastination. There is a solution. Actually there are a couple of different solutions, and since we are all different, we need to find the one that works for us.
1. Why do we procrastinate
To tackle this problem, we need to first understand why we procrastinate. It’s not as simple or clear cut as we think, and even if you don’t believe in all the psycho mumbo jumbo, you have to admit it must have something to do with our thinking and beliefs. If you read what all the experts say, and look at many of the reasons they give, it boils down to one thing – Bad Habits.
Unfortunately it’s not that simple. The habit of putting things off did not just appear out of the blue and will also not go away by itself. You see, a habit, by definition, is an acquired pattern of behavior that has become almost involuntary as a result of frequent repetition. We learned these habits over many years, and most of us were unintentionally programmed and conditioned to support those habits. These bad habits create feelings of low self esteem, a fear of failure and/or success and many similar feelings that basically enforce this habit of procrastinating.
Even though we recognize the stress procrastination causes in our life…and after all the promises to change our ways, we end up repeating the same tired actions over and over and over again. Bad habits are really impulses, we act on autopilot, so in stead of starting to control these habits, they end up controlling us, and we keep repeating them.
The biggest mistake we all make is to try and physically change our actions before we change our way of thinking, and we end up frustrated, tired and doing what we did before, not much. The big lesson here is:
We have to first change the way we think before we can change the way we act!
So how do we do that.
2. How to change the way we think to change our actions
Again, this is not that simple. We need to understand that it took many years to learn and implement these habits and to remove them, or replace them with more positive ones will be challenged by your subconscious. We are all resistant to change at first, and it’s going to take guts to push trough.
There are many ways to physically implement strategies to set clear goals, list great looking action steps to prioritize tasks, effective use of diaries, journals etc. Just do a search and see all these great looking actions all over the place. The problem is that these are all physical actions we take to change or manipulate our behavior, and in the end, when it’s going tough and we are tired, we fall back on our habits, and our great looking plans go up in smoke. Another tick on the failure meter and the self image drops another notch or two.
We have to start our thinking before we can take action. This is actually not that difficult if done right, and although not simple, it’s actually not that difficult. You do not have to do this on willpower at all, in fact that’s a sure way to fail. No amount of willpower will get you to change any habit. Ask anyone that’s been on a diet, willpower does not work, it goes much deeper than that.
The reason according to Joseph Ferrari, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at De Paul University in Chicago, a leading expert on procrastination, is that procrastination is not a problem of time management or of planning. Procrastinators are not different in their ability to estimate time, although they are more optimistic than others. "Telling someone who procrastinates to buy a weekly planner is like telling someone with chronic depression to just cheer up,"
For that reason you should not waste your time with things like clearing clutter, project plans and planners. You can however start out by writing down a couple of short term goals, list the reasons why you want to change, maybe even write down a good self talk, but you may find you never actually get to doing most or any of these steps.
In the end, you are going to need help. It’s really silly to try and do this all on your own when there are people and resources out there to assist you and actually make this process fairly easy to go trough.
There are 2 main ways to get assistance.
• Go to a professional person like a psychologist or life coach to guide and assist you by personally overseeing your progress and adjusting your program to suit you specifically. This option can work very well, but could be fairly costly. If you can afford it, I will suggest you do this in any case. Being accountable to another person can motivate you to keep at it even when you are really struggling.
• The other option is to get very specific resources to assist you in doing it on your own, but not really by yourself. The really good programs will have places where you can ask for help, and have a good track record and testimonials of people that were helped before. For a list of some of these resources and how they can help, go to http://endprocrastination.learnandtrain.com/Index.html
Here is wishing you well on your journey to unlearn your bad habits and a new life taking action.
God Bless
Jaco Dorfling
