Young children do not experience procrastination.
They have an honest tantrum if they don’t want to do what they are forced to do.
On the other hand, you cannot start crying; you are a serious adult. You choose to pretend you want to do something, but the sneaky distractors preoccupy you.
The destination draws you in, but not the road.
It’s time to admit that if you have persistent problems with procrastination, you don’t want to do what you want to have done. You have this dissonance because of the conflict between the outcome and the process.
If you are a procrastinator and have read all the articles to solve your problem but have never tried the self-help techniques, read this one.
Procrastination is often attributed to the brain’s inability to tune into a time-delayed reward when a million immediate rewards loom right in front of your nose. This is true, but this truth has a double bottom.
I have to ask you a cruel question: why does doing small daily tasks toward your dream or goal give you less pleasure than watching Netflix or YouTube?
Why don’t you feel a dopamine surge when you think it would be a good idea to take a step toward a result?
Of course, everyone can be lazy sometimes. This is normal. It’s your own sense of when laziness and procrastination become too much.
For example, if you want to write a book but can’t make a habit of it, you put it off, postpone it, and avoid writing it. You imagine how pleased you will be with yourself and how much pleasure, recognition and self-esteem the completed work will bring you. Still, you suffer because you cannot squeeze out a single line. You don’t like writing books.
Or you want to learn how to code. You envision your success, a new job, or your own startup. You take on a job but soon begin to forget about your schedule and switch to other things. You don’t like programming or don’t like learning.
I like the following thought:
If you don’t feel like working today, don’t work. The weather may be too nice today, and you feel like walking. If you don’t feel like working tomorrow either, don’t work. Maybe you are tired and need a rest. If you don’t want to work three days in a row, it’s not your job.
You are afraid to admit it because such a declaration implies the rejection of your goals or dreams.
It doesn’t have to be.
You need to figure out why you don’t like the process that leads you to such a desirable result.
First, we need to check that you truly want to do what you want to do.
Notice how you feel about the idea that your goal is actually being imposed on you by social media or those around you. As a rule, the more a person resists and proves that it is their inner desire, the more likely it will turn out that they have cheated themselves.
Modern culture teaches us that we can achieve anything. And we love it!
But as much as we’d like to, by teenage, a person isn’t a tabula rasa – a blank slate on which you can paint anything you want. You have skills, interests, preferences, habits and worldviews. You will need to forcibly paint over what is already depicted on the slate.
We should all strive for success, but it should be our personal success.
I know people who suffer and violate themselves daily, doing the work that others do playfully. It’s a depressing sight.
Such people react aggressively or contemptuously when others allow themselves to do what they want. Deep down, they are unhappy. Don’t trap yourself in this way.
If you have doubts about your goal, try freewriting. In this exercise, you must turn off your inner criticism and write whatever comes to mind. Just ignore thoughts of your imperfection. Write whatever comes into your head.
Doing it once is not enough. You will need to be alone with the flow of your thoughts. After a few days, your subconscious will give you food for logical analysis.
Do this exercise for a couple of weeks, 30 minutes every day, and you’ll learn a lot about yourself. Your goal may remain the same, but you’ll discover new details about it or look at achieving it from a new angle.
If you’ve thought hard and decided that your goal is your internal goal, let’s talk about your subjective perception of that goal.
You have to ask yourself how you feel. The answer will have to be pulled out with ticks.
If the goal is yours, but the process disgusts you, then you need to observe what emotions exactly you’re experiencing when it comes time to do the work.
If you’re procrastinating, you’re probably doing a good job of silencing your emotions. But suppose you concentrate intentionally on your feelings. In that case, you can identify some incomprehensible resistance, thoughts of “oh no, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, not this… again…”.
You need to ask yourself why.
Write on paper: I don’t want to do A, because… Write as fast as you can without thinking. At first, your logical part that is determined to be something and achieve something will resist, don’t give up.
Look at all the reasons written out. They can be silly; it doesn’t matter.
Can you isolate something in common with them? For example, here’s what came out of one of my students who wanted to and couldn’t become a data analyst but then changed her mind and was excited to learn frontend:
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming; I don’t know why…
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming; it’s boring
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming because I’m not interested
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming because my attention doesn’t want to focus on such things
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming because there’s no emotion
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming because I want something creative
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming because I hate numbers
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming; there’s no soul
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming because I’m a girl
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming; I don’t want to waste my life on something grey.
I don’t want to watch a lecture on programming because I don’t need to.
She thought analytics was boring (some people would disagree with her) quite sincerely, but she refused to give up. Someone once indoctrinated her that she had to suffer to benefit society and be a good employee.
Lack of interest and boredom didn’t really get in her way but helped her realize that her skills would find better use elsewhere.
The two main reasons you don’t want to do something are lack of interest and fear.
A lack of interest can mean that your goal is imposed from the outside, and you need to adjust it.
In other cases, fear is the reason for not wanting to do something essential for you.
Fear
One young student who came to consult with me about machine learning was very persistent in making himself a self-educational curriculum.
He was adding topics from various books he would have to read in the future, looking for assignments on those topics, and making a list of publications he needed to parse to become a good specialist.
Eventually, the list grew. The learner collected helpful everything but never got down to business, or he was only good enough for a couple of days.
He said that he changed his planning app several times a year, ruthlessly erasing his entire collection, his perfect plan with dates (when and what he should learn) because it became unbearably painful for him to look at it and feel like a worthless bum.
He thought that the most important thing was to make a good plan, even though deep down, he knew he was using planning to avoid action.
By the way, his plan was unrealistic to execute.
Of course, it was horrifying.
That person sincerely believed (before he met me) that a successful and hard-working individual should do more things than he could fit into a day. As silly as it sounds, he was convinced that a machine learning engineer was making one world-class scientific discovery a day.
He moved on when we reduced his grand plan to a daily hour-long programming session and a half-hour reading books on machine learning. Yes, he had to admit that he wasn’t superman, he was just a regular person, and it was painful.
We had to break down his inflated expectations of himself. After working on himself, he began to get excited about small successes and enjoy daily work. Honestly, he even started to accomplish more than planned.
Within a year, he was at a reasonable level, he was interviewing, and most importantly — he understood how to get better every day and succeed in prominent projects.
Many planning enthusiasts think of a person as a robot who follows instructions. And not just any person, but yourself (who you seem to know better) shortly.
Instead of the actual, you somehow imagine a superhero who defeated laziness and doubt in one moment(tomorrow) and will do everything. This is not true. You will never become a superhero.
Procrastination is an attempt to avoid a stressful situation in which you lack skills and confidence and are overwhelmed. You may not discover your fear or brag that you will overcome it and even overcome it for a while. As a rule, after a bit, the fear wins out anyway.
You can love a cause you would like to do regularly to achieve an enticing goal if you remove dread and over-expectations.
In fact, there are not so many activities that are actually boring and unpromising in nature. People experience them differently because of their different backgrounds and personalities. Maybe you don’t know how to love it.
Consider those activities that you love and don’t make you dread. Often these are creative pursuits, sports, reading books, cooking, watching popular science lectures and videos, and so on. Chances are, it’s something the result of which you attach little importance to but rather enjoy the process.
Your desire to engage in pleasurable and straightforward activities will diminish if you give them tremendous importance.
You may be surprised, but people worldwide suffer from procrastination when they need to do something you do without problems at your pleasure. More often than not, their earnings or self-esteem are directly related to the cause.
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Find out the reasons for your fears.
1. Too much importance on the result.
Significance needs to be reduced. High importance implies a high cost of a mistake, and inadequate perception of a mistake suggests a lot of unpleasant emotions: shame, guilt, sadness, and so on. Instead of enjoying the process, you are fearful.
What to do:
Stop thinking about grand changes in your life and outstanding accomplishments. Start taking minimal steps toward your goal.
If you’re going to be a YouTuber, turn on your camera and film something for 10 minutes.
If you’re going to write a book, write a couple of paragraphs of whatever comes to mind.
If you’re going to learn to program, read an interesting article about software development or watch a short introductory tutorial.
Just get used to the process, which should be your daily companion, and then we’ll see.
2. You have no idea how to do what you are going to do.
You want to write a book, but you’ve never written a short blog or social media post. It should be accessible in your imagination, and the plan works out when you plan. But when you take the job, the words don’t add up to sentences, and you can’t even get started.
What to do:
Get a skill first. Start with something simple, doing tasks that a child could do.
If you can’t swim but jump into the water in the middle of the ocean, there’s a slight chance you’ll swim intuitively but an even greater chance you’ll start drowning. And after that, you’ll develop a fear of water and won’t go to learn to swim for a long time.
3. You are ruthlessly critical of what you are doing.
Right in the moment of doing, you are morally destroying yourself and what you are doing. Your inner critic is too strong, and you must turn it off.
What to do:
Focus on overcoming critical thoughts about your performance as one of the skills you need to achieve to succeed.
Add a “develop the ability to turn off self-criticism” challenge to your daily planner and practice it for 10 minutes daily. To do this, do the critical work: writing, programming, solving math problems, and filming yourself as you get it.
In these minutes, focus not on the quality of the result but on silencing self-criticism. You may also return to the freewriting exercise.
4. You have associated fears that you don’t keep track of.
These are very insidious fears. Mild sociophobia can make you afraid to go to the gym, where a person with a phobia might occasionally start a conversation.
A friend of mine used to procrastinate almost every time she needed to go out. She used work to do this. That is, her distractor was WORK. Sure, she achieved significant work success during that time, but her quality of life was severely ruined.
And the cause turned out to be a case of aggression by a stray dog on the street. It threatened my friend.
What to do:
Either look for that variant of activity which will not be connected with other fear or eradicate fear at the root: go to a psychotherapist.
5. You have not created the value of the process.
This means you have clear instructions for the action, but you don’t enjoy the act itself. You may sabotage activities for fear of wasting your life on something boring.
What to do:
Remind yourself that the moment you spend precious minutes of your life writing, studying, drawing, programming, analytics, sports-you are still living.
How could you make the process unique and enjoyable for you?
Music or silence, colourful stickers, structured notes, discussion with others in a group, choosing specific topics to explore? Look for things that would make the process unique and inspiring just for you.
6. Too many goals.
This happens to the most inspired of us sometimes. You want everything at once. You do one thing, then you quit, and then you remember something else you forgot.
Make a conscious choice. Agree to do for a month to do only 1 or 2 things to achieve 1 or 2 goals. Make a habit tracker and mark the days you did something in your dreams’ direction.
Make yourself a list and call it “Ideas Quarantine”. Write down everything you want to accomplish there, but let the ideas “settle down”. At the same time, you’re busy experimenting for a month with the goals you’ve already chosen.
7. You really aren’t cut out for this type of work.
Quit mocking yourself. So many things in the world can make you feel good and lead to success.
Try to look at your desired goal creatively, and you’ll realize that what you want to achieve can be achieved in other ways.
