It’s common for all of us to procrastinate from time to time. We often procrastinate those things that are either mundane and don’t interest or those things that are complex and require efforts on our part. Whatever is the reason for procrastinating, it makes us lethargic and piles up work for us. Things that are to be done by us whether we like them or not, whether they are easy to do or not, we ought to finish them on time in order to streamline our activities and organize our life. We often find too many excuses to procrastinate – there is still more time, exhausted to do it, it is risky; it is a very petty job, so on and so forth.
The first step to conquer procrastination and overcoming it is accepting the fact that these are all lame excuses and are not valid reasons. Once we make it clear to ourselves that we are making excuses to procrastinate work, we can work on overcoming it with solid steps. Like any other goal we want to accomplish, to overcome procrastination we ought to chart out a strategy and follow it rigorously. We can cross the hurdle of procrastination with ease by following some very simple methods.
1. Follow a routine: Set clear tasks and goals on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis and work out a plan to work towards these goals. To accomplish the goals set, we ought to plan our tasks and work accordingly to a routine. Sticking to a routine helps us to remember and avoid skipping the tasks. Also, following a certain routine eliminates the need for making unnecessary daily choices and decisions, thereby making it easy to perform the needed task.
2. Tackle the petty things immediately: It is often found that whenever we ought to do some big task, we remember something petty like clearing the mess and start doing that instead of the originally required task. To tackle this issue, we ought to clear up our mess around us on a daily basis so that we have clear surroundings and mind for our work. Discard unwanted bills, papers, or any other kind of stuff that you no longer need immediately so that surroundings are not cluttered and spring up as another boring task sometime later.
3. Break down the task: A big hurdle to start working on a task is the overwhelmed feeling related to the task. When a task is too big to handle, we tend to procrastinate doing that, fearing struggle and failure. To overcome this fear, we ought to break down the bigger tasks into smaller and realistic units. By doing this we make the task much simpler and enjoyable.
4. Implement self-accountability: One of the best ways to stop procrastinating is avoiding lame excuses to leave tasks unfinished and taking responsibility on self. When we take accountability on ourselves for finishing tasks we perform better and quicker.
Procrastination is a habit that we have developed over the years. So, in order to overcome this, we ought to make some small changes in our life and make it a habit to work towards doing things without postponing.