Want to know how to to stop procrastinating? Are you someone who always puts something off until the last minute? Or even worse do you have have goals that you are procrastinating on taking the necessary actions to achieve and as a result you keep moving the ‘deadline’ back? Either way, you are in the right place. Keep on reading to find out how to stop procrastinating.
Procrastination is the act of putting something off for a later period in time. It might sound quite harmless and done occasionally it usually doesn’t have a detrimental impact on your life. However, if you get into the habit of regularly procrastinating then the likelihood is that it will have a detrimental impact on your life. Therefore, it is important that you think you procrastinate too much that you learn how to stop procrastinating.
HOW TO STOP PROCRASTINATING
Ask yourself ‘Why am I procrastinating?”
There are multiple reasons for why people procrastinate and you are likely to have different reasons for procrastinating on different tasks. Some of the reasons you might be procrastinating include:
- You like the pressure of doing things last minute
- You are scared about having to take the action
- You are a perfectionist and worry about being able to reach your high standards
- You have low self-esteem and don’t think you are good enough
- You are worried about being criticised
- You are scared of trying and failing
- You are being pushed outside of your comfort zone and don’t like it
- Understand why you are procrastinating over the specific task or action will help you to understand how to stop procrastinating.
Remind yourself about the reason for needing to take the action
At this point you should be able to clearly identify why you are procrastinating but now it is important to remind yourself why you need to overcome those feels and take the action. You need to concentrate on the why for taking the action. What are the benefits of taking the actions? Why is it important to you?
Earlier I mentioned procrastinating in relation to achieving your goals. If you have a vision for the life you are trying to create then tap into that vision. Remind yourself of what you are trying to achieve and use that vision to help you overcome the feelings that may be causing the procrastination.
Break bigger tasks into smaller tasks with clear deadlines
If you notice that you procrastinate until the last minute, but always do meet your deadlines then you should break bigger tasks into small tasks with clear deadlines. The key here is to try and make sure that you have often deadlines to keep you taking action. For example, maybe you are writing a book proposal and need to have 10,000 words to submit to publishers. Rather than giving yourself 3 months and you ended up trying to write all 10,000 words in the last week you should set yourself the deadline of writing 1,000 words every week. Now it might be in the first instance you find yourself writing those 1,000 words on a Sunday evening because you left it to the last minute, but even if you do that, by the end of the month you’d have 4,000 words done rather than none in the other scenario. And hopefully once you’ve started you won’t feel the need to procrastinate any more so you might finish earlier than the initial deadline.
Surround yourself with action takers
As the saying goes “Birds of a feather flock together”. Have a look at the people who spend the most amount of time with. Would you describe them as a procrastinators too or action takers? If you surround yourself with other procrastinators it is easy for you to justify your behaviour. Surround yourself with other people who take actions promptly. When you are in an environment where everyone is taking actions promptly it will become your new normal and assist with you stopping procrastinating.
Share your goals
Sometimes procrastination results in you not taking action until the very last minute. Obviously, this isn’t ideal, but in this scenario at least you still end up taking the action. Where procrastination is particularly dangerous is when you don’t take the action at all. This is most likely to happen in relation to actions that you need to take to achieve your goal. s, especially if you haven’t shared those goals with anyone else. If you haven’t shared your goals with anyone else then it is very easy to keep on moving the deadline back. No one else knows so you don’t have to justify your actions to anyone else. However, you lose out. Your goals aren’t achieved by the original deadline and in some cases you never achieve them. The best way to stop this from happening to you is to shared your goals.
Have someone else holding you accountable
Sharing your goals is one thing, but if you really want to stop procrastinating you should get someone to hold you accountable. When you share a goal it would be nice to think the other person will remember and will hold you accountable. It might happen and it might not. Asking someone to hold you accountable is different. In this situation you share your goal, but you also ask that they will hold you accountable. That they’ll check in with you to hear how it is going.
When you have accountability you know that someone else will be checking in with you so you will have to tell someone about what you have and haven’t done. When choosing someone to hold you accountable you need to choose someone who you know will check in on you and someone who will challenge you if you don’t complete what you should have done.
To find out more about accountability read How to use accountability to achieve your goals.
That’s it! You now know how to stop procrastinating.
If you’ve got into a habit of procrastinating then it will take a bit of time, but by following the steps you’ll find over time that you are procrastinating less and feeling the benefits of that.
In the comments I would love to know what your biggest takeaway was.
