Manana Manana
“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.”
– Theodore Roosevelt –
If there’s anything that permeates everyone’s life at one level or another it is procrastination, and we would all love to have a better understanding as to why we procrastinate.
Depending on your level of self-awareness, you might realize you’re doing it or not; you might not even care. Regardless of that awareness, chances are you are doing it, at least in some areas of your life. Don’t be mad about that. Even the most productive people in the world procrastinate once in a while. In a way, this behaviour is part of being human.
Procrastination is not always bad, but that doesn’t mean that it should become a lifelong habit or that you should be okay with it. Procrastination is rarely a good thing, and most of the time, it’s one of the culprits leading to a lack of accomplishment, anxiety, and frustration.
So, why do we procrastinate? What drives us there?
You Are Not a Procrastinator
First of all, you should stop calling yourself a procrastinator.
Instead, use the verb: I procrastinate.
When you label yourself in a certain way and repeat that label, you teach your brain to believe it, you cement that label into your mind, and, over time, you’ll start using that label as a lame excuse for your behaviour.
(This is a tip for other labels you use in your life)
Resist naming yourself things you don’t want to be.
Instead, look at it as a verb, an action.
The difference is that action can be changed by doing something else, which is way easier than trying to be somebody else all of a sudden.
When action changes, mindsets shift, and with it so do behaviours and attitudes.
Eventually you will become something else too, you will embody the energy of the things you do so it is important that we make sure what we do reflects who we want to be.
So, to summarise – You are not a procrastinator. You procrastinate.
Why We Procrastinate?
Let’s take a look at the main reasons why we procrastinate.
You might see yourself in one or more of these or even all of them.
For each one, I’ll give you a few ideas on how to change your mindset in a way that would either eliminate or reduce the impact of procrastination on your life.
If you want to learn more techniques, you can reach out to me for more in-depth coaching on this.
The most important first step in understanding why we procrastinate is through honest self-reflection.
Consider the thing you are procrastinating over – is it a task you need to complete or a change you want to make.
What is preventing you from taking the first step and getting started?
Once you understand why, you can make changes.
- Fear of failure
You will want to take on many tasks and projects during your life, and you won’t exactly feel ready for them. You may lack self-confidence or experience and because of that, you’re afraid that you might fail.
First, failure in itself is not always a bad thing.
Let’s reframe the word fail. Fail means
First
Attempt
In
Learning
It is part of our growth and development.
When you fail, you learn.
When you expect everything to work out as you planned, you will be less and less enticed to act until you feel an utmost certainty for a favourable outcome.
Because our lives are inherently uncertain, that’s an impossible aim.
So, when you fear failure, that feeling often translates into procrastination because you are avoiding it.
After all, if you don’t do it, you can’t fail right?
Imagine how you’d feel if you decided to run a marathon and found yourself unable to finish the race. The embarrassment? The shame?
Let’s flip this.
There’s no shame in taking on a huge task and failing at it.
It will teach you what not to do and how to work harder next time. First attempt in learning.
What can you do?
Assume that you will fail. Not that you might fail, but that you will fail for sure.
Set your mindset in such a way so that you look at failure as an opportunity for learning.
This is not to say that you will psych yourself into failure. Expecting failure will dilute your fear of it.
If you are okay with failure, you’ll be more likely to move on and work toward success.
I’m going to learn how not to run a marathon.
Once you fail once or twice, you’ll be able to adapt your training and next time you will make it.
- Lack of purpose
Every day you wake up, and you do stuff. Unless you’re somehow bedridden, you’ll get up and do something. It might be something you enjoy or something you find unpleasant, or something else in between.
No matter what kind of day it is, you’ll either do something or do something else.
The question then becomes whether the thing you do is intentional or merely moving where the wind blows.
Do you run your life according to a vision or set of goals?
Have you thought about your place in the world and established your WHY or purpose?
Do you have a clear mission in life?
If the answer is no, you shouldn’t be surprised that you’re procrastinating.
In fact, you’re not procrastinating at all—it’s way worse.
Procrastination implies that you don’t do something you believe you have to do and want to do.
When you have no vision and no sense of purpose, there is nothing that you want to do.
You haven’t thought of it. You lack a purpose, and therefore there is no momentum in you to get moving; no catalyst, no fire.
You simply exist without an intention.
What can you do?
Take some time to create a vision for yourself.
It sounds like a daunting task, but it’s not.
You can go through the steps I have created in my goal setter to goal getter programme or you can use something like a vision board.
Either way, once you have a vision, your purpose will be easier to define.
It will flow through you naturally.
Bask in it. Let it seep in and create a spark on intention.
You will begin to feel a strong sense of purpose, and you will never procrastinate ever again because now you have something to chase that you’ve connected with emotionally.
- No motivation
There’s a strange relationship between motivation and action. For most of our lives, we’ve been told that we need the motivation to act. Get motivated! Get psyched!
The big problem with that is that it doesn’t work.
You might get motivated once in a while when you see something that genuinely moves you, like listen to a motivational speaker, a podcast, or reading something profound and inspiring but largely you won’t get motivated out of thin air.
Instead, you get motivated when you take action.
If you sit on the sofa and wait for motivation to get up and go to the gym, you’ll never get to the gym.
But, if you push yourself on day one to hop on the treadmill, that action will motivate you to get up faster and sooner on day two.
When you move, you tell your body what you want to do.
Your brain listens and the chemistry in your brain will activate to help you.
What can you do?
Listen to your inner chatter and pay attention to it.
There’s a lot of value in letting yourself think, but then pause and analyse your thoughts.
Every time you hear the voice that tells you that you don’t feel like it and perhaps you’ll do it tomorrow when you’ll probably feel like it, know this: it’s just another way you’re telling yourself you’re waiting for motivation.
Tomorrow, that voice will tell you the same thing again, again, and again.
The muse never comes when you’re merely waiting.
It comes when you create because creation attracts the muse.
So, next time you hear that thought, quash it right away.
As soon as you hear it, you have less than 5 seconds to act before your brain hijacks the momentum and freezes you in place.
No matter how many temptations your mind throws at you, don’t listen. Push it away.
Move first, and motivation will bloom, and where there’s motivation, there’s little room for procrastination.
- No Planning
I’ve mentioned the vision earlier; Vision is a prerequisite step you need to take before you can fight procrastination. Having a dream is not enough.
The vision is big and glorious; it’s empowering and uplifting. However, it doesn’t tell you how to get there. It merely points you in the direction of your dreams and connects you with them.
To move, though, you need action. But if you act without a plan, you’ll find yourself back into the arms of procrastination.
When you don’t know what to do this hour, today, tomorrow, and next week, guess what?
You won’t do anything.
Instead, you’ll simply do ‘busy’ stuff that falls in your lap or find yourself prey to distractions, such as binge-watching TV and surfing the internet.
Planning implies taking that vision and chunking it into bite-size actionable goals.
It also means prioritising those goals and assigning them to the months, weeks and days ahead.
What can you do?
Become a master of time management and learn how to do time blocking.
Planning your days and weeks is a critical step to prevent procrastination from even having a chance.
You can use an app or a simple paper planner.
No matter what method you use, if you know your priorities for the day and the week, you can put them in your calendar, and there will be no question about when and what you have to do.
When you approach your time in this type of intentional manner, there will be simply no room for you to procrastinate.
- Urgency-driven Mindset
This idea goes back to a lack of priority. When you allow everything to become mission-critical before you act on it, you run your life with an urgency-driven mindset.
That means that instead of using your logic, intelligence and knowledge about your life to decide the priority of things, you allow the world around you to evolve into priorities by urgency.
When you do so, you’ll constantly be putting out fires.
More often than not, those fires are things that are not important to you, but you have to do them because now they are incredibly urgent.
That will eat up your time, but psychologically it will make you feel like you’re doing something, at least.
When you feel busy, you don’t realize you’re not working on the important things.
Not only that, this mindset will keep steering you away from the essential things in your life, but it will also teach you to take a lax approach to how you set your priorities and plan your life.
What can you do?
Use a tool such as the Eisenhower Matrix to plan urgent and important tasks.
Over time you should have fewer and less urgent matters. Those that are urgent will be true emergencies.
This enables you to run your life on your own terms, and you will have the mind space and energy to work on what is critical.
Most importantly, you won’t be able to use ‘I’m too busy’ as an excuse to avoid working on the significant things in your life—one less chance for procrastination.
- Perfectionism
Another common cause of procrastination is perfectionism.
The opposite of procrastination is doing the right thing at the right time. That implies finishing a project and moving on to the next one. When you are a perfectionist, you’ll keep accumulating unfinished projects.
Every project, email, piece of writing or whatever else will need another 1% to improve and another 1% and another 1% and so on.
When you are a perfectionist, you are never ready to complete anything until it’s perfect.
As a result, you don’t finish anything!
You’d much rather set something aside forever and wait for a day when you’ll have the energy and inspiration to finally perfect it.
The problem is that day never comes.
Even worse, you might continually work on perfecting those projects and, under the guise of working on them, you’ll neglect other critical things.
What can you do?
In the words of Dan Sullivan, 80% gets it done, 100% doesn’t.
You need to practice letting go and moving on.
Perfectionism is not easy to beat, but there are ways, and it starts with practicing imperfection in areas of life that are safe until you are practised at releasing stuff that you don’t feel is perfect.
Note that imperfect doesn’t equate to bad. That’s the mindset you need to change.
- External Locus of Control
The locus of control is a fascinating psychological phenomenon and one of the most cited psychological studies over the last few decades.
It discusses how some people believe that their life resulted from their actions and decisions, while others believe life to be a result of luck or the action of others. The former is the internal locus of control, while the latter is the external locus of control.
If you are a person that leans more toward the external locus of control, you’ll be more prone to procrastination than if you were not.
Remember the opposite of procrastination is action. If you don’t believe that your actions directly influence your life, you’ll be less likely to connect the importance of the action to your life.
In other words you will not feel enticed to do anything because it seems meaningless, leading to yes you’ve guessed it – procrastination.
A study from 2000 by Milgram & Tenne found that people with an external locus of control are more likely to procrastinate than those with an internal locus of control.
What can you do?
Although the locus of control is difficult to change, you can practice not letting it drive your actions. Even if you have this innate feeling that the world has conspired to get you to where you are today, decide that you will take charge of one aspect of your life starting today.
May it be health, fitness, finances, romantic relationships or anything else.
Understand that even if your entire life has been, up to this point, the exclusive result of external factors, it doesn’t mean that the future must follow that pattern.
Hold yourself responsible and decide that from now on, you will take action, no matter what your past looked like.
By shifting your way of thinking, you’ll quieten the voice that tells you that your efforts are meaningless and that everything is up to luck.
- Thinking too big
Another way most people fall prey to procrastination is through fear in the face of a massive challenge. As one of the most powerful emotions, fear can change our actions despite our logical thinking.
Frequently, we are unable to do anything in the face of fear, and fear often pops up when you’re thinking too big.
Earlier I mentioned the importance of having a vision.
A vision is usually a big bold dream and that’s exactly how dreams should be.
Those dreams will translate into big and bold goals.
Sometimes, those goals will seem so big that they’ll scare you into inaction.
The bigger the goals, the more chances your motivation will turn into fear and when fear creeps in, you freeze.
Procrastination, in this case, comes from paralysis because you were thinking too big, too soon.
What can you do?
Divide and conquer.
That means slice those big goals into smaller, manageable action steps that you can take right away and move forward.
With every step, the big goal will seem less scary, and fear will be less likely to paralyse you.
- Distracting Environment
The environment in which we operate has a direct influence on our actions, behaviours and attitudes.
Most people find themselves in an environment and begin to adapt to that environment. But when the environment is prone to distractions, your ability to concentrate and focus on your tasks will suffer.
It’s well known that our brains can only focus on one thing at a time. Multitasking is a myth.
We know that to concentrate, we need an environment conducive to such focus and starved of distractions.
What can you do?
Don’t accept your environment as something fixed.
Instead, learn how to create your environment in a way that is favourable to focused work and free of distractions. You can have distractions, so long as they are on your terms. In that way, they won’t distract you; they’ll merely serve as rest and recovery.
If you find it hard to clean your house because you keep watching TV, unplug it.
When you find it impossible to write your book or thesis because you keep checking Facebook, add a blocker to your browser.
If you can’t exercise because the gym is too far, buy a treadmill.
The idea here is to find ways to prevent you from becoming distracted and instead, invite you to do the things you have to do.
When you make the right thing the easy thing and the bad things the more difficult ones, that’s another victory against procrastination.
So, you want to beat procrastination for good?
Get in touch for a FREE call to discuss how coaching can help you.
One of the most crippling of feelings is when you know what to do, but you simply can’t do it.
To get to the root of things, you need to sharpen your self-awareness and spend some time in introspection.
Only when you truly understand the reasons behind your procrastination can you shift gears and work toward reducing and eventually obliterating it.
It’s not easy, but it’s also not impossible. It requires you to change your mindset and be self-aware enough to accept that you procrastinate and decide to do something about it.
When your mindset is right, procrastination has no chance.
Yes, it will creep in now and again, but that’s okay. You’ll learn how to manage it and even schedule your procrastination to take back control of your life.