I wonder if there’s something else you should be doing right now? Did you come across this download whilst in the middle of something else and get distracted and diverted? Was reading this blog really at the top of you to do list today or were you in the middle of something else when you got tempted away? If that’s the case, now look what’s happened! Is it time to get to grips with your procrastination?
If you type the word, ‘procrastination’ into any search engine you will come up with literally millions of hits which is an indication of how many of us are wanting to do this work.
Does this sound familiar?
Are you the person in the team who is always ‘just in time’? Burning the midnight oil to get something completed minutes before the deadline. Telling yourself that you work better under pressure as you are running around like a headless chicken when the printer runs out of ink 10 minutes before you need the document. Maybe your computer decides this is a great time to do an update. Perhaps your workload feels overwhelming and yet you seem to be shuffling the same things over and over again. Maybe there’s a difficult phone call you need to make that you never quite seem to get round to.
What do we mean by procrastination?
Before going any further let’s make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of what we mean by procrastination. The definition I’m going with is:
Voluntarily delaying an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay.
Put this way it’s a bit bonkers isn’t it? It’s something we do to ourselves in the knowledge that things will only get worse. How crazy is that?
We knowingly put ourselves under pressure and force ourselves to work from a place of stress and anxiety. If that wasn’t bad enough even when the job is done we don’t necessarily feel the reward of doing a job well. We may not feel great about the output, being left with the feeling, ‘I know I could have done a better job if I’d given myself more time’. Or conversely be kicking ourselves and wondering why we put something we’d been dreading doing off for long, ‘It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.”
If we are a part of a team our tendency to procrastinate may impact also on our colleagues as we push deadlines to their limits. This can place pressure on other people to stop what they’re doing to help us out or to give us the vital information we need to complete the task in hand.
Is it time for you to get to grips with procrastination?
Maybe you long to be the person who cracks on with the task in hand, gets the report in with plenty of time to spare. Can you imagine preparing your presentation weeks in advance and sitting back and smiling knowingly as other people rush around? Well here’s a question – are you willing to start getting tougher with yourself, holding yourself to account and building some intention into your schedule?
Whilst it is tempting to think that procrastination is down to poor time management when you delve deeper you find that there are a range of factors which influence our procrastination, It’s not just how managing our time more effectively. Some of issue are more emotional like fear of failure, feeling unclear about the task in hand or the lack of personal meaning in the task. It is important therefore to be clear about the underlying reason for your procrastination to enable you to pick the right strategy to get you moving.
With this in mind I have written a short introductory ebook to help you on your way. It is free to download from here and will introduce you to a 3 step process of reducing your procrastination and explore a few strategies that may be helpful.
So, if you’re up for doing this work download the ebook and get started.
…… or maybe time to make a coffee and catch up with a friend!