Are you avoiding success in your life purely by procrastinating? The words “productivity” and “procrastination” go together like oil and water. Twenty percent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. Good news: Procrastinators can change their behaviors!
Procrastinators must first understand the problem in order to become more effective. The reason why you wait until the last minute does matter, but how much time you waste ignoring it matters more. Gossiping and daydreaming distracts us from completing the task. Although distractions existed before the world wide web, the internet helps people waste more time. Distractions are easy because they are enjoyable. The task is boring, uncomfortable, difficult or stressful. How will you resist?
Notice patterns of where the time goes. Are you leaving in the middle of a project to check Facebook? Are you avoiding the task by reading news stories and checking emails? Time yourself about how long it takes you to start or go back to the task from the time you enter the workplace. You’ll see in detail how long it takes. Once you see the time pass you’ll start to focus. It isn’t going to take a day to solve. It is going to take constant notice about the time to understand how much of it is wasted.
You can be a productive procrastinator with these suggestions:
- Reward yourself. Give yourself a five or ten minute break for every assignment you complete. Let the distraction be the motivation to complete the task.
- Break up a big project into tiny ones. Large projects require extra concentration and energy. Doing it all at once is tiring; when we are tired, our mind wanders. This encourages us to distract ourselves from the project. If the project is in tiny steps, we can get parts of it done until competition. Add easy tasks in-between the large project as relief.
- Offer self-deadlines. A deadline pushes us to do something. If we place self-deadlines on ourselves we can complete more. For example if you want to complete 10 tiny tasks or half of a large project today, this will motivate you to finish it on time.
- Remove high expectations. Daydreaming about the best PowerPoint presentation that has your co-workers on their feet is a high expectation. These kind of unrealistic fantasies set people up to fail. Revert to number two and take it slow.
- Swap out the workload. If you cannot handle the project, hand it over to someone who can. This is the last minute choice. Be sure to take on projects you can handle next time.
Two words that don’t go together work well with effort and patience. For more information on how to bring your best self to the job, contact us.