Are you someone who keeps on procrastinating very often?
Are you looking for ways on how to overcome laziness and procrastination?
Then you have landed in the right place!
In this article, I will walk you through the various steps for overcoming procrastination.
You might have experienced procrastination in many walks of your life. We can very well correlate our student life in this regard. We used to play after coming from school, and many of us may not have the habit of preparing daily. A day or two before the exams, we used to prepare. It would have piled up as a stack, and we would regret it later.
Do you know what the causes of procrastination are? Have you ever thought about what happens when you procrastinate too much?
The ultimate reasons for procrastination are primarily you don’t like doing that, or you may be afraid of doing that particular task, or else you might think that it is too tough to accomplish, or you might be lazy. The quote by Martin Luther King II goes like this, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase just take the first step.”
In this article, I will walk you through the proven strategies that you can follow to avoid procrastination and stop procrastinating.
Break it into small pieces
There is a famous question like, how do you eat an elephant? It’s annoying, right? The answer is quite simple. “Bite by Bite”
Yes! You read it right. Always make it a habit to break your task into smaller portions.
Say, for example, if you are about to write a blog post on some topics of about 1500 words, it is monotonous to write it at a stretch. We might often procrastinate them thinking it would be hectic to sit for a long time to finish the task.
The better way to accomplish this is to split the entire article into three parts of 500 words each.
Writing 500 words at a stretch is not a big deal compared to writing 1500 words. Before getting into the work directly, decide what you want to write about and how you want to deliver your thoughts. In other words, set your goal. Once your goal is clear, then make a plan to achieve it. Planning well is vital for successful execution.
“By failing to Prepare, you are preparing to fail”
Benjamin Franklin
Do the difficult task first
It is always customary for people to do the easy task first. But the harsh truth is that doing easy tasks first would decrease productivity on a large scale.
Research also shows that those who do the challenging tasks first are likely to be more productive and highly successful.
Moreover, people who do the easy task are more prone to multitasking.
Multi-tasking decreases productivity, and the stress of avoiding the challenging task makes them poor performers.
Use kaizen Principle
Kaizen’s principle is otherwise called the one-minute rule.
You do the task that you procrastinate the most for at least one minute a day.
Say, for instance, if you are procrastinating and feeling lazy doing exercises, then do a particular exercise daily for one minute and stop there.
As you consistently do it daily for one minute, that one minute becomes 2, 3, or even 5 minutes simultaneously. Soon you will get into the momentum and start involving yourself in that.
By doing so, you can reap the benefit that makes you get rid of your procrastination.
Create a positive environment to work
Creating a positive environment is one of the best options to overcome procrastination at work.
Before getting into the work, declutter everything and keep the workbench well organized.
Make your place more organized with the resources and materials required for accomplishing your task.
A poor organization could result in confusion and the needless loss of time spent looking for supplies or information that you would otherwise need to complete your work.
Take small breaks at regular intervals to break the monotony of the environment.
Since you keep sitting in one place continuously for hours together, it will be monotonous, and you intend to procrastinate. On the other hand, a cluttered workspace may bring in lots of distractions and reduce your focus.
By doing so you can very well overcome procrastination and laziness.
Set your goal and set deadlines
You have to have a clear-cut goal in your mind. Set a clear objective before you start anything. Ask yourself questions like, why do I need this goal? What are the positive and negative benefits for me by accomplishing the same?
Write down all the points and review them.
Putting them into writing will give you a clear idea and better motivation to do work that might increase productivity.
Once your goal is defined, set the deadlines. Deadlines will urge you to do the work soon without procrastinating them. If you fail to meet the deadline, set another deadline.
It would greatly help you to overcome your procrastination and laziness.
Declare your goal
Share your goal with like-minded people who constantly motivate you.
If you surround those who motivate you, then your productivity might increase.
Generally, our human behavior depends mainly on the behavior of the people surrounding us.
If someone is highly motivated and productive, we automatically start doing our tasks without procrastinating.
Just do it
Do something to get started with your task. Always remember “The Zeigarnik Effect”.
Once we start the work, our subconscious mind keeps thinking about accomplishing the task. The task we often procrastinate may not be difficult as we imagined. Better to start to minimize or completely eradicate the inertial to start the work.
Procrastinate positively
Procrastinating positively is otherwise called good procrastination. Do you wonder what good procrastination is? Let’s explore. Break the pattern of procrastination by doing positive procrastination. Sometimes you might get bored doing challenging and lengthy tasks, so you might intend to postpone. But replacing it with a few smaller tasks would help you to accomplish them much faster and increase productivity.
As soon as you do the little activities, you’ll be prepared to tackle the bigger ones without putting them off.
Reward yourself
Once you complete your work make a habit of rewarding yourself. Your brain is stimulated by rewarding yourself right away, which causes you to feel good and realize that your efforts have paid off.
By repeatedly doing this, your brain will begin to associate pleasure with completing the activity or target and will gravitate towards it in the future
You can reward yourself by taking a small break and watching a few episodes of your favorite web series, or you can gift yourself with a book that you wanted to read. Even it can be a coffee break or treat yourself with icecreams or dessert.
Such small rewards would motivate them to achieve more and ultimately lead to overcoming procrastination.
Conclusion
Procrastination is a habit like any other habit. So by practicing the above tips, you can overcome procrastination and laziness.
Cheers,
Shenbagalakshmi
