Tips to Stop Procrastination

You Already Know WHAT To Do

Procrastination isn’t so much a matter of poor organization as it is a psychological block:

Trust me, procrastination is not a time-management problem. It’s a complex problem involving personality, situations and motivation.

Here are three psychologically sound tips to help procrastinators overcome this problem.

1. Just get started. Don’t waste time over-planning and over-thinking; research shows that once you actually begin a task, your perceptions of that task change. And making even a little progress boosts your well-being, which in turn gives you more motivation to work.

2. Suck it up. It is a distastesful task? It is difficult? Would you rather be doing something — anything! — else? Tough. You need to just plunge in and deal with it. It’s a  hard-nosed approach but necessary with procrastinators, who tend to avoid dealing with the negative emotions associated with unpleasant tasks.

Don’t Give in

Don’t “give in to feeling good” such that you focus on short-term mood repair. Keep your focus on long-term progress on your goal.

Brutal Honesty

3. Be honest with yourself. Stop the self-deception. You might argue that you’ll feel more like doing it tomorrow, that you work better under pressure, or that it can wait. As Pychyl notes, you won’t, you don’t, and it can’t. Instead of giving in, recognize these thoughts as red flags that signal your desire to procrastinate and go back to tips 1 and 2.

Action First, Feelings Follow

One can liken procrastinators to 3-year-old’s who don’t want to do something, arguing, “I don’t feel like it. I need to feel better in order to act. First, I need to feel better.” Wrong, he says; in fact, your feelings will follow your behaviors, so progress on that task will actually improve your mood.

While tips aren’t a sure-fire recipe for success — after all, tips are only useful if you follow them — I think these three could really make a dent in your procrastination habit.

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

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