Are you a procrastinator? I was. I always seemed to put off stuff for later even when I could get it done right away. A few months ago, I had an eye-opening experience. I received an email from a brand about partnering with them on promoting their product. I saw the email, and instead of replying right away, I told myself that I'd get back to it later on. Of course that email got buried deep in my in-box and I never did reply. Well this particular brand was pretty persistent. When I failed to reply to their email, they headed to my Facebook page and sent me a private message about a week later. I felt bad and finally replied to them and wound up collaborating with them on a project that paid very, very, very well. I almost missed out on a great partnership because of my chronic procrastination. From that moment on, I decided to make a change and took some steps to stop procrastinating. While I haven't fully kicked the procrastination habit, I have made a lot of progress.
If you need to overcome procrastination, you understand the stresses and pains that can result from delaying things. You may miss out on great opportunities, you might leave things for the last minute and then have to rush to get things done, or you might just not be motivated to take action Happily, conquering procrastination is fairly straightforward, once you have the right tactics. Here's how to stop procrastinating in a few easy steps:
- Begin with your most difficult daily task. Perhaps you have a huge backlog of emails to respond to, or maybe you have to make a difficult (but important) telephone call. Perhaps you have to complete the final few pages of a report for your boss. Regardless of what the task is, complete it before you do anything else. At the start of the day, you are more alert and better prepared to deal with problems. Also, once you have done this you will feel less pressured and you can relax somewhat, and give yourself a pat on the back. Better yet, your tasks for the remainder of the day will feel less daunting. You will be amazed by the effectiveness of this technique.
- Be thoroughly committed. Write down which habits you need to change, and which new habits you need to adopt. Write down a deadline for achieving this, along with a strategy for acquiring these new habits (and ditching the unwanted ones). You should commit to this strategy for one month, by which time your new habits should feel like part of your normal routine. This makes it easier to continue the good behavior. Tell as many people as possible about your goals. Inform your friends and relatives, write a blog post about it, put a notice up in your office, and promise to provide people with progress reports each day via email. By making other people aware of the fact that you want to change, and constantly updating them with your progress, you will have the incentive to see it through because hey, you don't want to let them down.
- Remove all distractions. This remains to be a tough one for me. I often find myself clicking over to Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest and wind up wasting lots of time. A few tools I found that can help with this are Freedom, StayFocusd or Rescuetime. All of these tools will help you increase your productivity by limiting the amount of time that you can spend on these time-sucking sites.
- Take regular breaks. If you find it hard to concentrate and are not fully committed to your tasks, take a short break. Set an alarm for fifteen minutes, read a magazine, telephone a friend or take a brief nap. Look at the things that have distracted you, to remove the temptation after you return to work. Make sure that you stick to the time limit though, and don't press the snooze button when the alarm sounds (yeah, I’ve done that!).
- Avoid perfectionism. Of course, a certain amount of planning will help you to achieving your goals. My problem is that I tend to over think everything and if I don't think my results will be perfect, I procrastinate. A perfect example is this blog. I purchased the domain name for this blog a full year before I actually took the plunge to start blogging. I was afraid that I would fail so I dragged my feet. When I received the notice from the domain company that the domain name was going to expire, I finally decided to just go ahead and do it. The lesson here is, rather than striving to be perfect, just aim to make a start on your next major project. Believe that you can do it and you can.
“Procrastination is opportunity's assassin.” ~Victor Kiam