💪🏻 🧠 5 Tips To Overcome Procrastination 🙌🏻 🙋🏾‍♀️

Procrastination means that you are not doing what you know you need to do when you know you need to do it. It’s putting things off because in the short term its easier, it's more comfortable, more certain, more pleasureful to be distracted than it is to sit down and do the actual work to create the outputs that matter when they are needed. Procrastination is a self-defeating pattern of behaviour to survive under pressure. Chronic procrastination has productivity and career costs and it leads to negative effects on our mental and physical health. Call it a friend without benefits because it helps you avoid the inability to complete something but in the avoidance, it sabotages your goals. 

Sooner or later, chronic procrastinating can really hold you back and hamper you in every aspect of life. It can affect our mood and state of mind by generating worry, fear, or added stress. Perhaps its most serious for people in a leadership position, procrastinating may cause peers and employees to feel that they’re holding up progress.

We all procrastinate – I know this stuff and teach this stuff and I still have days where I procrastinate.

The question is can you set yourself up so you can do less of it?

I strongly believe you can.

If procrastination has become a problem for you, here are 5 tips to change your behaviour so you can be more productive and feel better, feel less worried and stressed, and more confident about your reputation and effectiveness.

 1: Chill the Fault Finder Out

You have ambition and drive, you know what you need to do to get something done, yet you find yourself stalling or postponing action on a project due tomorrow morning. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Instead of planting yourself in front of the screen, and doing what you need to do, you watch yourself organise your emails, your calendar, or if you’re WFH you organise your spice rack, re-arrange furniture, or engage in unnecessary cleaning. You call yourself lazy because you can’t get motivated despite the looming deadline. But you’re not really a couch potato because you’re being productive. In the back of your mind, you know you’re not focused on your priorities, but you stall anyway. Then you spiral and ask What’s going on with me? You recognise you’re procrastinating, and you’re getting antsy, catapulted into a swirl of adrenaline and cortisol stew. Why can’t I pull it together? you grumble. A deadline passes, commitments pile up, and your inner critic beats you into smithereens. Why do we do this to ourselves? The solution seems so simple: Just do it already. But reality is far more complicated.

1st of all chill your faultfinding mind (your emotional part of your brain) out. From a bird’s-eye view, procrastination serves a psychological purpose. Studies show it’s a form of short-term mood repair. At it’s core, procrastination is the brain’s emotional response to a distressing issue protecting us against fear of failure, judgment by others and self-condemnation. You’re doing something against your “thinking brain’s” awareness, but you do it anyway because of the relief it provides. It’s not rational or logical because it takes effort and energy to procrastinate, but your efforts are going in the wrong direction. If you’re like most people, you have a relentless faultfinder that lives in your brain, ruling your mind and career, bludgeoning you with oppressive words such as must, should, ought and have to: “I must win that contract;” “I have to get that promotion;” “This project should be perfect.” When you are aware of this relentless voice (the psychologist Albert Ellis dubbed it “musturbation”), choose more supportive, comforting words such as “I can;” “I get to;” “I want to;” or “I choose to.” When you hear a voice within say, “You must or should do or be something,” then by all means talk to it with compassion and remind it that you will be the one to choose. That voice will be silenced, and you will get out of the way of your own procrastination.

There is a direct link between self-compassion and success. Coming down hard on yourself when you procrastinate reduces your chance of rebounding. Instead of kicking yourself when you procrastinate, being kinder helps you bounce back quicker.

2: Map It Out and Chart Your Moves

You’re more likely to do something If you have already prepared and stepped it through in your mind. This is the most obvious thing you would have heard before.

What does that mean? It means if you want to not procrastinate on Monday on Sunday night sit down and map it out. The day before sit project plan – this is not a too do list – that’s one element – think about the big picture- write out map out the big 5 moves that will take for this to be completed.

Work it through in your minds eye and preferably on a blank piece of paper – break it all out into bite size chunks and work backwards to what you can do tomorrow.

If your mind can't see completion – meaning you don’t know the path, you don’t have clarity on the path to fulfil or complete something. If your mind can't see the steps, your heart will ask to pause. Even if you are the most productive and passionate individual or high performer or dream oriented person there is ... you take away that clarity and there's no progress. No clarity, no change, so you find yourself procrastinating. Maybe you know the next 3 steps but that usually is not enough as sometimes your mind needs to see the steps through to completion. Mapping out at a high level, having an idea of the key activities, the timelines, the big moves broken down to tasks and to-dos makes it easier to act when you have a complete picture.

Taking small measurable steps that are easy and doable reduces procrastination and motivates you. In a way, you trick your emotional brain. The adage, “one step at a time” can prevent you from feeling overwhelmed. Studies show that if you take that first small step, you realise the task isn’t as challenging or difficult as your emotional brain told you during the time you were avoiding it. This change in perception allows you to break through postponement and move to completing your task.

A big project that you might not be tackling enough or starting or avoiding is kinda like a jigsaw puzzle. When we start it and it’s a hot mess pieces everywhere you walk past it you start it a then leave it and then think its not possible but the studies in timing doing jigsaws have shown that the fastest amount of time in doing a puzzle is in the last 20% because normally that’s when you honker down and can actually see the potential of getting to the completion. When you can't see where’s it going, you say to yourself: I’m not sure, I’m confused, I’m stuck and so on and that’s the part of the brain trying to protect us.

So if there’s an important project you are avoiding – sit down blank piece of paper – large post-t not about a perfect project plan or you have to know all the pieces but you want to map it out – map the 5 major moves break them down... put the questions in there where you’re stuck. It's usually because you haven’t seen the full way through.

3. Manage Your Mood

When I need  to be working on a project, with the clock ticking towards my deadline, I’ll sit there watching pointless political interviews or football highlights on YouTube (cat videos aren’t my thing). At its worst I can almost begin to feel a little crazy – you need to be working, I say to myself, so what on Earth are you doing?  Experts have proposed that procrastination is an issue with managing our emotions, our mood, not our time. The task we’re putting off is making us feel bad – perhaps it’s boring, too difficult or we’re worried about failing – and to make ourselves feel better in the moment, we start doing something else, like watching videos.  You know yourself sometimes there are days when things just get done and flow right and you’re in a great mood. Other days you start like that but get hijacked disturbed annoyed and then you spiral out of control and find it hard to focus and get stuff done because of something that upset you or annoyed or a genuine worry you may have.

Analyse what the underlying reason is that you’re procrastinating. For example, sending an email to someone important because you want to be perfect, starting a project but in your mind it’s too big. Maybe you’ve been triggered by an email that someone sent that annoyed you, so you’ve lost your concentration or you’ve got distracted

Our brains prefer immediate reward and Procrastination is the present-self saying I would rather feel good now. So we delay engagement even though it’s going to bite us later on.

According to researchers, we procrastinate when our brains become overwhelmed with conflicting emotions. Our feelings take over.

Fear of failure: we worry the outcome won’t be perfect.

Impulsiveness: we get distracted by more attractive activities that pop up while we are about to launch.

Denial: we don’t like doing certain things, so we erase them from our mind or we put them out of sight.

Rebelliousness: when we feel forced to do something, we just fight back and resist.

 We can learn to regulate and manage our emotional side of the brain and change up our emotional state and mood. When you get hijkacked, consider ways that help you get back into a better mood so you can attack the thing you are putting off and regain control of the feelings that are hijacking you. I use music A LOT to shake up my mood – I put on a few good tunes to change it up or get into a better emotional state.. Or Go for a quick walk, take a break and BREATHE deeply – recenter yourself. So ask yourself

What do I need to create in my Environment to manage my mood ? shake myself out of this and make this happen? See in your minds eye what you are about to go do and just  start doing the next 1st step...

 “Make your focus as simple as ‘What’s the next action – a simple next step?”.  Focusing like this takes your mind off your feelings and onto easily achievable action. “ Research and lived experience show very clearly that once we get started, we’re typically able to keep going. Getting started is everything.”

4: Analyse the Balance of Pain vs Pleasure

They say that all human behaviour is driven by two forces – the need to avoid pain and the desire for pleasure. This pain pleasure principle, developed by Sigmund Freud, suggests that people make choices to avoid or decrease pain or make choices that create or increase pleasure. The pain pleasure principle is the core of all the decisions we make. Beliefs, values, actions and decisions are built upon this principle. The principle is the foundation of who we are due to how pain and pleasure are interpreted based on personal past experiences. We seek pleasure to reward ourselves with immediate gratification. The pain pleasure principle suggests that while seeking pleasure, people will also seek to avoid pain. For those individuals where conflict is painful, they will do anything to avoid conflict. Allowing a negative situation to continue might be unhealthy and painful, but the thought of dealing with the conflict is far more painful.

So in summary, the level of discomfort and the level of pain or pleasure you associate with the task/ decision or change you are facing, will be the driving force behind whether you take action or procrastinate or not. We all have experienced the co-worker that has the longest tenure of the company and is immensely unsatisfied with their job. The employee is very comfortable with their duties and responsibilities, yet clearly unhappy. The fear of the unknown, the application process and different job duties, is far too painful despite their intense work dissatisfaction. The disgruntled employee will not seek other employment,  but continues to be vocal with their negative employment experience. This employee is motivated by pain because no matter how painful is it to continue to stay status quo, it is even more painful to take a chance and make a change.

We think taking action will be more painful than not taking action.

It's our brain's built in Survival instinct to protect ourselves and  avoid pain. The Trick is to Focus on how NOT Doing something is going to be more painful than just doing it.

So for example: Consider something you are procrastinating (or not following through on). Consider the level of discomfort / level of pain and potential pleasure you feel towards this “task” “area”. Break task down, analyse Pain/Pleasure story you tell yourself. Rebalance the weight.

5: Consider the long-term benefits

 When you procrastinate, you focus on the immediate relief instead of the gains of completing the future product. Flip your focus around and concentrate more on the gains of the final outcome and less on the short-term relief in the present. When a project seems like an uphill struggle, think of the view from the top, reminding yourself of how good you will feel after you complete the project that you’ve avoided. If you exercise regularly, you probably know the dread of getting to the gym. But when you remind yourself of how good you feel after a workout, it jump-starts your motivation and helps you get there. In the end, considering the long-term benefits moves you closer and quicker to the finish line. In the words of the writer Denis Waitley, “Winners take time to relish their work, knowing that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top exhilarating.”

Finishing a daunting task is satisfying. Remind yourself that you’ll feel incredibly virtuous when the chore is off your plate once and for all. Accomplishing what you’re avoiding will simplify your work life. You’ll feel more energetic. You’ll sleep better at night. Relish the feeling of success. 

So if you do these 5 things, you will start to overcome procrastination  and Fight the resistance of getting hijacked.

1: Chill the Fault Finder Out

2: Map It Out & Chart Your Moves

3: Manage Your Mood

4: Analyse the Balance of Pain vs Pleasure

5: Consider the Long-Term Benefits

It’s time to take the leap and tackle the task you’ve been putting off. When you do, you’ll likely meet resistance in the form of excuses, bad moods, and discouragement. Shake it off to let go of the  emotion that is hijacking you. Say to yourself, “I’ll feel better when I handle this.” Repeat it like a mantra until the urge to procrastinate passes.

No matter how crazy your schedule is — or how much work you have to do — a proactive approach to managing procrastination is the best way to set yourself up for success. Putting these 5 tips into action will not only help you feel less stressed, as you figure out what holds you back sometimes, but also help you to change your state and mood and get you going again... 

Facing your emotions and managing your mood is key to jumping into action. Go fight the battle in your mind.

Theodore Roosevelt said “In a moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing to do, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

Enjoy folks, thank you for joining me please share this blog post if it resonated with you or if you think it will resonate with someone else. See you on the next episode until then, stay safe, keep learning and unlocking your potential one day at a time.