How You Can Overcome Your Procrastination

Procrastination workshop postponed!

Procrastination is a problem that just about everybody has to one degree or another and it can sabotage your success in just about every area of your life. It’s so easy to procrastinate, yet learning to overcome your procrastination can be a lot more difficult.

If you want your life to be happy, productive and efficient then it is time for you to learn how to overcome your procrastination so that it no longer affects your life.

Would you like to free yourself from the guilt of procrastination? Would you love to get all those tasks done that you have been putting off? How different would your life be if procrastination was no longer a part of it? Here are four ways in which you can stop procrastination dead in its tracks!

#1 Break big projects into smaller ones

A big cause of procrastination is the feeling of being overwhelmed with the project facing you. A large project can look very overpowering when you’re only seeing it as a whole. Take some time and write down how you can break this big project up into smaller, more do-able chunks. When you have the smaller chunks write down the time you estimate it will take you to complete each one. Now you can cross off each task as you complete it with a sense of pride and accomplishment.

#2 You can do anything for fifteen minutes

We all have projects that we ignore because they are extremely overwhelming. But I have found that we can do anything for fifteen minutes. My desk was practically buried under a pile of stuff, and I had been ignoring it for months because it was just too overwhelming to even just think about cleaning it off. But, I got out my timer and set it for fifteen minutes and went to work on it until the timer went off. Then I found something else to do. Do this four times a day and you will work on that project for an hour each day until it’s completed.

#3 Accountability partner

I really enjoyed the calls a group of us shared to help us accomplish the things that we had been putting off. We would pick a day where we had a good five hours to spend on projects. We would call in at the top of every hour and state what we had gotten done and what we planned to accomplish in the next hour. We all got so much done during these calls and that is because we knew we had others to be accountable to. Get a group of people together and become accountable to each other, whether by phone, instant messaging or email.

#4 Reward yourself

When I have projects that I just don’t want to do I tell myself that if I do “this much of the project” I will reward myself with “fill in the blank”. The reward can be anything that you really enjoy doing. Mine may be things like: surf the internet for thirty minutes, read a magazine for 30 minutes, watch a movie, etc. Make the reward match the effort you put into your project. Don’t watch a two hour movie if you only did five minutes of work. 

Procrastination is a tough habit to break on your own. Talking to a life coach can help you with getting you off the procrastination treadmill and running towards accomplishing your goals.