What exactly is procrastination?
“A year from now you are going to wish you started today”
[procrastination] is a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.
Procrastination is a serious issue for two main reasons:
It prevents you from achieving your goals.
It causes you to suffer from a range of secondary issues, such as anxiety and stress.
In my opinion, procrastination is the main killer of a human being, since you don’t do what you know you need to do in order to become the person you want to be. Eventually you degenerate to such lows that you, and the person who you want to be, end up being miles apart. And that is sad.
Unfortunately, despite knowing that you shouldn’t procrastinate, many of us continue to do so anyway, so we need to understand two main points:
Willpower is not enough. It’s not enough to simply want to stop procrastinating, you have to use practical techniques and strategies that will help you do it.
Your solution has to be right for you. Different people procrastinate in different ways and for different reasons, which is why there isn’t a single solution that will work perfectly for everyone, all the time.
Many natural procrastinators, including myself, are people who are quite often praised for their intelligence, and misinterpret that as a sign that they do not need to have structure for their brain’s daily activities, and they don’t need to give it the proper respect and exercise that it requires and deserves. So they neglect it - let it run wild on the internet, gorge itself on Facebook and Reddit and games and porn, and allow it to lapse into a vicious cycle of unaccountable information binging and inevitable self loathing.
Darth brainer.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce a non fictional character who is not lightyears away, rather very close to us - darth brainer. Darth lives in our heads, and he should be the last creature who should be in charge of our decisions, but unfortunately procrastinators have long lost the battle with darth. Darth only thinks about the present, ignoring the past lessons and disregarding the future altogether, he only concerns himself with making the present situation as easy and pleasurable as possible, by offering thousands of alternatives for our minds to feast upon, just not what actually matters. Why clean the dishes if you can do it later? Why work now if you can relax and enjoy a movie? Why practice the piano if it's not fun? Well done Darth, you have killed all my goals and passions…
Darth creates a chain reaction of gloomy procrastination induced undone tasks that ultimately make us fail and suffer. He is hell itself. The thing is, darth brainer wants instant gratification, but that gratification isn’t exactly fun, because when unearned, thoughts of guilt, dread, anxiety and self-hatred cloud the mind.
As it turns out, there is one thing that frightens the living hell out of darth: panic Joe. Joe is dormant most of the time, but he comes out the night before an exam, when our jobs are in danger, generally something that involves a scary consequence.
When you think about it, it’s quite simple. How can a person who can’t write a single introduction to an essay in three weeks suddenly have the ability to fight exhaustion, stay up all night and write an entire paper? Joe does wonders. Unfortunately this is no plausible way to live since even for the procrastinator who manages to sustain his lifestyle and stay a normal member of society thanks to Joe, has to change something. BECAUSE panic is never pleasant.
What the procrastinator faces is something that runs deep, and simple words like “work on your will power” or “be more self-disciplined” are not enough to cause a change, the problem is involved in the protagonists own story, and the story needs to change.
To cause that change, there are two essential things that need to be done: planning and doing.
Planning
(the easy part)
There is this mental high procrastinators get when they plan something. Tomorrow I will do my assignment. In November I will start working out. And when the time comes to doing what is planned, darth brainer invades the mind and all hell breaks loose.
What we need to talk about is effective planning.
Effective planning breaks up scary tasks into smaller, more clear and manageable tasks. The example of building a house is perfect. You don’t immediately get a house on the ready, you build it brick by brick, until eventually you have completed your goal. A wannabe author who doesn’t do anything will not achieve anything, but an author who writes a page per day will have a novel ready in a years time. It’s all about the small steps, and the good news is laying just one brick per day is not a scary task. But it is important that you schedule bricklaying days, and stick to it. This is non-negotiable, and you cannot cancel it. For example, you have to study for the SAT’s during December, but you can’t start learning the SAT’s in December. But you can start your SAT practice on December 12th, from 5:00 - 6:00pm.
When effectively planned, everything seems much brighter and doable, now you can become a SAT guru, only left thing to do is…
DOING
When the procrastinator puts down the dates and the times, they have that moment of bliss when they imagine how fun and great that activity will be. But what they fail to imagine alongside these blisses, is darth brainer. When the moment of doing arrives, nothing changes, darth still takes control over the situation.
The number one thing you need to do to OVERCOME darth, is put away all distractions, so that you can solely concentrate on the planned activity. This is the hardest part since darth gives his fiercest fight. This is where you have to prevail and overcome the daunting voice of giving up, and do what you have scheduled. By making progress on tasks, positive feelings of accomplishment appear and your self-esteem raises. After a long battle, you and darth finally became a team, and you both want to have fun, since it is earned! When darth is on your team, trust me beautiful things start happening.
You know what's even better? You might accidentally start feeling fantastic about what you are working on after a while. And can you imagine how much more fun you will have when you indulge in leisure activities? If you continue this way, you might even achieve a state of mind when everything besides the job starts irritating you since the job is so very important. You and darth become even greater buddies!
Persistence is key when it comes to success. By laying brick by brick you create an inner struggle, which is of core value for the procrastinator since their struggle to regain control is based on overcoming a specific mindset, where darth win’s everything and you take all the damage.
If by reading this article people would stop procrastinating, the world would be procrastination free, but there is only one path which truly leads to the defeat of the enemy.
A nasty, dehumanising habit such as procrastination does not go away at once, it does by little improvements over time. This process is important because you show to yourself that you can make changes and get shit done. Again, the author who writes a page per day has a novel by the end of the year. A procrastinator who improves a bit each week is a completely different person a year later.
Don’t think about going from A to Z - a simple A to B will suffice.
Can you imagine all the truly wonderful things that will happen when procrastination is beat? First and foremost you will gain control over your own life, you will do the things you believe need to be completed. Your self-esteem will reach new highs, your relationships will improve, and most importantly, you will feel like a person in control, which is something we all can agree on is really serious.
It might feel like shit at the beginning, but you accept it and power through it anyway. The emotions that an addict suffers through while quitting are sweet siren calls, seductively beseeching you to slam your ship into the rocks. Your brain is used to the habits. It likes habits. It doesn’t want you to stop. It will present you with thoughts that tempt you to break your combo and forsake your willpower.
You are not your habits. You are not your thoughts. They are the many drops of water in the ocean that you are sailing in. The waters may be stormy and fickle, and may, without the force of your will, push you into shipwreck after shipwreck. It may seem easier just to let your ship be tossed wherever the follies of your brain take it. But it is your duty to captain your ship, especially in harder waters, and wrest yourself back on course with gritted teeth and the knowledge that you are stronger than the storm.
Meditation and Working Out.
The mentioned can truly help with the battle against procrastination. Meditation has really helped me since it promotes discipline, and - in my experience - you develop a generally more focused state of mind over time (focus is basically the core component of mindfulness).
“Enlightenment is not about reaching a point where you are able to meditate while peeling potatoes… it is simply peeling the potatoes.”
The procrastinators mind is usually clouded with hundreds of thoughts, darth gets really loud sometimes. Meditation can make it easier to fight him. 5 minutes each day is better than nothing at all. The same applies to working out. Working out truly does wonders for the body, and a healthy body is linked to a healthy mind. And again, doing 30 push ups a day is better than nothing.
Final notes: it is not easy. You have to fight to live, but you don’t need to make the fight even more complicated than it is, on the contrary, you can make it easy. By creating doable, on time, non-cancellable, non-negotiable tasks and complete them little by little, you will start gaining back the control you lost so long ago. So be friends with little darth, he’s a great guy when you get to know him.
The time Matrix
Stephen Covey's 4 Quadrants Time Management Strategies
By organizing our lives through Stephen Covey's time management matrix, a lot of things will become more simple including beating procrastination. The goal is to shift our lives from the 4th quadrant to the 1st quadrant, where everything is much more organized, and important things are not urgent because you have the time to deal with them. Organize your own quadrants and see for yourself how is your life organized.