Procrastination – What it is and what can you do about it

We all find ways to avoid starting or performing certain activities for some unknown reason, until we are virtually forced to do so. This is procrastination. Procrastination is a choice people make to delay or avoid doing something, whether the choice is consciously or subconsciously made. Yet, procrastination is not necessarily bad. Many times procrastination can be considered good. In the interest of this article, we will focus on how people can reduce or eliminate procrastination with ease and with positive consequences.

I bet if most people would look at the activities they procrastinate in starting and/or completing, they will observe fairly clear patterns. In essence, they will most often discover that they procrastinate in performing the same or very similar activities. For example people who procrastinate in cleaning the kitchen, which constantly gets messy, will also find they procrastinate in cleaning their room, vacuuming the house and/or washing the car. These are all similar activities.

The real reason virtually everyone procrastinates is because they do not want to perform the activities they avoid. Instead of performing the undesirable activities, most people seek other more desirable activities to do. The undesirable activities are left undone, by choice, either consciously, or most often unconsciously. Frequently, outside pressures build up that become so strong that they outweigh the desire to avoid performing the activities and they force people to actually face the prospect of doing the things they had been avoiding so long.

Unfortunately, too many people belittle themselves because they procrastinate, in believing they are inferior, or weak. The procrastinators then further degrade themselves when they see others do so well at performing the activities they have been avoiding. People who procrastinate are not inferior or weak. Instead, they are human. If they closely observed the people who easily performed the duties they have been avoiding, they will notice that the other people enjoy performing these activities. They would also notice that these same people most likely avoided performing other duties that they disliked as well.

For example, one of my first houses that I owned in Houston, Texas, had a well-established grassy yard that was fairly small. We were on a street of very well kept yards. Grass grows rapidly during all but the three winter months in Houston. I felt a strong community pressure to mow my yard at least once a week, normally on Saturdays, to keep up appearances. But I noticed early on that while it took my neighbor whose yard was more than 50% larger than mine, only 30 minutes to cut his yard, I would procrastinate as long as possible and spend at least five to seven hours to cut my smaller yard. And I was grumpy virtually the whole time, which ruined almost every Saturday during growing season. Winter provided be a welcome relief to actually not have to cut the grass. I tried everything to overcome my supposed weakness of procrastination. It was not until I moved years later that I discovered through coaching that one of my main (subconsciously based) self-imposed obstacles was my strong distaste for cutting the grass. Why this is true I do not know nor do I care. Since I discovered my subconscious distaste for cutting grass, I have organized my house ownership to always include having lawn cutting services. Now I spend those five hours every Saturday I would have wasted avoiding cutting the grass doing other things that I enjoy and are frequently more valuable, like yard work, cleaning, tennis, and spending valuable time with my family. Grass cutting lawn services thrive in South Florida, to assist others to avoid the pains cutting their grass. Other families purchase town homes and condos with no yards to cut, as a way to avoid cutting their grass.

The key to procrastination is to spend the time and effort to discover what actions you dislike performing.

This will require a trip into your subconscious. Get help (Using a life coach would be an excellent option) to assist you to uncover the activities you prefer avoiding, and if possible the degree of negative intensity you assign to each undesirable task. Remember, it is not important to know why you wish to avoid these tasks. Then try to rearrange your daily life and conditions to allow you to avoid performing them as much as possible. If there are some tasks that must be done for you to live a desirable life, then having others perform them for you will be an excellent option.

Yet, there are just some tasks that you do not like performing that are much better performed by you than others for various reasons. So avoiding them might become a bad option for you. Everybody has these types of must do activities.

The four keys to completing undesirable, yet mandatory activities without unwanted procrastination

There are four keys to reducing and/or even eliminating the normal procrastination for performing the tasks you do not like to perform, but that you feel you must personally complete.

The first key is to discover which tasks you dislike performing that must be performed by you.
Be sure you really are the best person to perform these activities, knowing that you have a strong distaste for doing so, and that this conflict might reduce your capacity to produce the most favorable results you would want.

The second key is to create ways to avoid as many of the tasks you dislike, that others can perform better. This way you do not burden yourself with unnecessary stresses, and self-criticism. There is little reason for you to feel the burdens of procrastinating for tasks that you can and want to have others perform better for you. Reducing unwanted and unnecessary stress is always good.

The third key is to organize the timing and places to perform the tasks you do not like but must perform in a manner that best suits your priorities and conditions, to make the activities as less distasteful as possible. Reduce as many outside distractions and stresses on you as possible so you can get through the undesirable processes as quickly and effectively as possible.

The fourth key is to openly celebrate the completion of these must do distasteful tasks every time. Celebrate by rewarding yourself in some way to create positive events that are associated with their completion, which will reduce your reluctance to start performing them the next time.

For example, I personally dislike completing the end of the year financial statements for my business and in filing tax return forms. It is the mere act of preparing the financial information and most certainly in completing any types of forms, especially the very confusing and ever-changing IRS forms that I dislike. So I made sure I found a CPA who was very capable and willing to take my simple year end Profit and Loss statements and convert them correctly to the Tax Return Forms. Then I organized the recordings of every financial transaction throughout the year to be sure I had all of the data I needed in a form that I wanted to produce very accurate year end Profit and Loss Statements. It now takes me only several hours to produce these annual statements, when before it literally took over three days of very tedious confusing effort to figure it all out. I still celebrate the completion of these annual statements to the point that I look forward to the celebrations more and more.

Conclusion

Procrastination is a very normal and human activity. Everybody procrastinates. But, too often people degrade themselves because they feel their form of procrastination is bad, or makes them inferior. The key is to understand that procrastination is a choice process, whether a conscious or subconscious one. The subconscious choice to procrastinate is frequently the most troublesome, because the person does not know that they are really making a choice. The conflict caused by their rational brain telling them to complete the task versus their subconscious inner heart telling them not to complete the task creates stress and frequently causes people to think less of themselves. When a person discovers their true inner subconscious motivations about the duties that cause the most procrastination, they can take numerous steps to overcome this form of negatively induced procrastination.

We welcome your opinions and comments.

Bill Dueease
Editor