Piers Steel, a leading expert on the science of motivation, defines procrastination as “voluntary postponement of an unpleasant task, often against one’s better judgment”.
Wadkins and Schraw (2007) further pursue that procrastination happens when we work on trivial tasks instead of urgent ones, or perform activities we enjoy rather than activities that we should or would like to perform.
Why do people procrastinate?
Decision paralysis
Ignoring The Value of Time
Lack of self-discipline
Procrastinators often put off doing things, leave them to the very last moment or sometimes even spend their time staring at the wall. However be careful, procrastination is not a synonym for lazy.
Lazy people, simply don’t do anything and are just fine with it. Procrastinators, on the other hand, have the desire to actually do something but can’t force themselves to start.
How to Get Rid of Procrastination
You can learn as much as you want about self-discipline, motivation, planning, and time management, but unless you make what you learn part of your daily routine, your habits, your thinking patterns, and your mental models, it will be only useless information stored in your memory without ever helping you.
1. Personal vision
The personal vision is one of the core tools, it helps you understand your skills and priorities, and by creating one, you will never feel lost in what is it that you want to do with your life. The personal vision as well helps you to focus your effort on the right activities and set priorities to avoid continually switching between actions. Understand what motivates you, and you will be able to maintain your discipline and make the most out of each day.
2. To-Do today
Long to-do lists tend to pile on, and this leads to procrastination. Seeing the long list of tasks can frustrate us so much that we have tendencies to give up on them completely. The To-Do Today method is there to help you get the most important and urgent tasks done every day, while also helping you prioritize the work on your schedule and limit new tasks. With its help, you will be able to manage much more in a day, with less stress and tiredness.
3. Make a Habit list
Learning new habits is one of the basic elements of personal development. If we make a habit of doing something, its implementation requires less mental energy to do it. Learning new habits is, therefore, very important. But there are several myths about what is working and what is not in learning new habits. The Habit-list is based on scientific research about proper planning, learning habits, and its tracking, which then motivates us even further.
Make a list of all the things that you’ve started and have not yet finished and begin to work on them immediately.
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