I have been given the gift of procrastination. How do I exchange it for something better?

What I would really like, is to be given the gift of time. Do you know what I am talking about? Just doing what you love to do ALL DAY, without feeling guilty about all the work that needs to get done. Without worrying about taking the kids to school, cooking dinner, doing the laundry. Without having to entertain or please anyone. Just some time alone to do whatever YOU want, not whatever you HAVE TO!!!

I truly believe that every person deserves the gift of time. But it seems that most of us have been cheated and instead of the gift of time we have been given the gift of procrastination. So we stay busy all day long, but there is still never enough time to start working on the goals that matter most.

Unless we do something about our tendency to postpone important tasks for later we will continue to feel that we are living below our true potential.

Here are some suggestions on how to overcome procrastination and get your free time back:

1. Get better at ‘mental time traveling’. As multiple psychological studies have indicated in order to be more successful at affective forecasting, we need to be more accurate at using our mental images of the future. Whenever you set yourself an intention to do something, picture yourself as vividly as possible working on accomplishing your task. For example, the assignment that your boss gave you several days ago is still not done. It is due in two days time, but you just can not seem to make yourself get started on it. Instead of saying to yourself that you will feel like doing it tomorrow, visualize what tomorrow will BE like. Probably the same as today. Only you will have more tasks at hand and less time to complete them.

Therefore, the first step to overcome procrastination is to be honest with yourself. If you do not feel like doing something right now there is a good chance that you will not feel like doing it tomorrow either. This realization may not boost your desire to complete the task at hand, but at least you will base your decision to put it off on more concrete and accurate information.

2. Think pro-actively. When you are faced with a task that you would like to postpone for later, ask yourself, what are your reasons for doing this? Is it just that you find the task boring or unnecessary? Or is it because you find it hard to concentrate, because you are constantly distracted by the phone ringing, your co-workers talking, new email notifications, people entering and leaving the room? Or maybe you fear that you might not be able to get the task done perfectly? Identifying the obstacles that prevent you from being productive is crucial, because the obstacles you face today will still be there tomorrow.

3. Do not count on motivation. Many people think that motivation is the number one component to be successful in achieving their goals. It is true. You certainly achieve your goals faster when you feel motivated and enthusiastic about completing them. But the catch here is that we rarely procrastinate, when we feel excited about the task at hand. We procrastinate, because we DO NOT feel like doing something. And if we do not want to do something, our motivation level will be low from the start. Of course, you can artificially boost your motivation, but it will not last long. Why? Because motivation is based on our emotions. And emotions do not remain stable over a long period of time.

When it comes down to success and efficiency motivation is not something you want to count on. It is neither necessary, nor sufficient to ensure action. Highly successful people realize that their current motivational state does not need to match their intentions in order to act. This is why they produce consistent results and are productive even when they are faced with tasks that they do not particularly enjoy doing.

4. Do not reason with yourself. Have you ever felt that inner struggle, when you could not make up your mind. If you are procrastinator like me, you know what I am talking about. You will be sitting in your office, surfing the Internet and thinking about going to the gym after work.  Your conscious will be telling you, “Come on! Just do it! Don’t you want to lose 20 pounds and have a flat tummy?!” Then there will be another voice in your head saying, “But I’m tired. I’ve been working hard all day long! I want to gooooo homeeee!!!! I’ll go to the gym tomorrow, and work out for an hour and a half instead of 45 minutes as I have promised myself. Besides it is raining!”

What are the chances that you will ignore the little voice in your head and stick to your goal? In my case, when I start reasoning with myself the ‘lazy guy’ always wins. Our mind is a tricky thing. It becomes very creative, when it needs to come up with excuse for not doing something that it considers ‘difficult’ or ‘unpleasant’. Actually the better you are at commonsense reasoning, the higher the chances are that you will lose the argument with yourself.

I have found that the best way to prevent myself from procrastinating is to turn off the logic and act on an impulse. For example, when your alarm rings, do not lie in your bed thinking whether you should get up straight away. Because the moment you start thinking is the moment when you start procrastinating. Instead hop out of the bed right away and go straight to the bathroom. After you have taken a shower you will not feel like going back to sleep.

I am sure you have heard of the law of inertia. It is the body’s quality to preserve its current state, whether it is at rest or moving, until some force causes its state to change. It is as simple as that – if you are lying down, your body will tend to remain in this position. However, as little as a single impulse is enough to overcome that initial state of inertia and become a “body in motion”.

5. Ask for help. What is the one single motivator that is stronger than any idleness or reluctance to do something? The desire to look good in someone else’s eyes. This is why we actually work out when we are at the gym with a personal trainer. This is why we say “yes” to requests and obligations that we do not want to do. This is why we hate to be criticized or told that we are wrong in front of other people.

Our need for respect, appreciation and affiliation makes us, to a certain degree, prone to what other people think and say about us. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. We can actually use it to our advantage. For example, if your goal is to work out 3 times a week, find as many friends as you possibly can to join the gym with you, make an appointment with a personal trainer, ask your spouse to meet you for a fruit cocktail after your workout, join a forum discussion dedicated to fitness and weight loss. The more people are aware that you are working out, the more support will you get, the higher the chances are that you will follow through with your goal.

If you want to spend more time with your family, have more free time to do things that you enjoy doing, lead healthier, more fulfilling life, become productive and efficient at work, decrease your stress levels, and achieve your most desired goal, you have to understand that the belief “Procrastination pays off now, while hard work pays off in the future” does not work for you.  Because the more you procrastinate now, the harder you will have to work in the future.

Many of us have spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to overcome procrastination. Some of us have succeeded. Some of us have given up. But most of us are still struggling.

We dream about so many things, we set goals, we visualize our desired outcome, we feel excited about our plans, but when it comes to actually following them through… that is when we suddenly realize that right NOW is really NOT a GOOD time to start working on our projects. Why? Because we know that TOMORROW we will feel more like doing it! This feeling that we are all familiar with is called procrastination.

The latest research in psychology has finally shed light on the two underlying reasons for procrastination:

The first one is called the ‘Affective Forecasting’. As it turns out, just like weather, economy, or political forecasts are not always perfect, we too often make mistakes when predicting our future affective states to positive or negative events. It happens because we base our ‘predictions’ on the belief that how we feel now, is how we will feel later.

For example, if I have just made a decision to go jogging in the park every morning, I will feel enthusiastic and good about myself. There are three main reasons for me to feel that way. Firstly, I know that it will help me to get back in shape and look gorgeous in my new bikini. Secondly, because I am very proud of myself for making such a wonderful decision that will help me lead a healthier lifestyle. Thirdly, because I do not have to do it right now (this is actually a ‘hidden’ reason, but it does not make it any less powerful).

However, when my alarm goes off at 6:15 a.m. the idea of getting up from under my warm blanket, taking a shower, putting my running shoes on, and going out of the house at dawn to run a few miles will not seem nearly as appealing. Most likely I will open one eye, look outside the window and see a somewhat grayish sky, hit the snooze button, yawn, roll on to the other side of the bed and continue sleeping. And of course, an hour-and-a-half later I will feel pangs of guilt, because I have chosen a short-term pleasure over my long-term goal. When making up my mind about jogging every morning and waking up early, I have not taken into consideration that at 6:15 in the morning I usually feel sleepy and tired. I wake up a little aggravated by the annoying sound of my alarm and feeling far from happy and enthusiastic.

We procrastinate, because we incorrectly forecast that our positive affective state at the time when we set intentions will remain exactly the same over a long period of time. Big mistake! Our emotions, feelings and intentions change quickly.

When we first set a goal or make a resolution, we normally feel optimistic and determined to stay on track. But we do not take into consideration how we will feel when it comes down to acting on our intentions. Our actions are largely determined by our emotions, not common sense. This is why we often ‘give in to feel good’, even at a cost of our long-term goals.

The second reason for procrastinating is ‘Focalism’. It is a natural human tendency to focus on current events and underestimate the extent to which outside circumstance will influence our thoughts, feelings and actions in the future. Again, it happens because we believe that our current experience or situation will be similar to our future experience or situation. Since we cannot fully control future events or be 100% right in our predictions, any assumptions that we make about our future that are based on our current experiences are only wild guesses.

So the first step to overcome procrastination is to improve our ‘affective forecasting’ skills. In order to do this we have to get better at ‘mental time traveling’. Whenever you set a goal for yourself, visualize exactly how you will feel when it comes down to you actually taking action. It is not so hard to do. Just ask yourself how you feel about working on your goal right NOW! If your mind immediately comes up with excuses why right now is not the best time to start, it means that the same thing will most likely happen tomorrow… and the day after tomorrow … and the day after that…

We all know how it works. You make a promise to yourself one day and then come up with a really great story of why you should postpone doing it until the next day. If you really want to overcome procrastination you need to break free from this vicious cycle of unfulfilled promises and excuses. In the next post I will share some really cool tips that will help you to beat procrastination.

Do you know what the easiest way to destroy any remaining shreds of motivation at the very beginning of the day is? Take your to-do list (if you have one), choose the most urgent, unpleasant and time-consuming task and start imagining yourself doing it. You will see that even if you have not started actually working on it, you already feel tired, and your determination disappears with the speed of light.

I am sure that you know the feeling…

You can plan and schedule. You can leave yourself reminders and put it on your priority list. You can make promises and resolutions. You can organize and reorganize. You can guilt trip yourself and try to artificially boost your motivation. But the bottom line is – it does not work!

Procrastination still remains a flaw most of us put off curing.

And it is not that we are irresponsible or slothful people. On the contrary, we rarely sit around and do nothing. We do plenty of marginally useful but very urgent tasks during the day (like sharpening our pencils, checking our mail box, organizing a messy desk, or getting ourselves a cup of coffee).

Any one of us can be easily motivated to do timely and challenging tasks, as long as those tasks provide us with an excuse not to do something more important. And if we have set our mind on sharpening those pencils, no force on the earth can stop us from doing it!

The more time passes, the closer the deadline looms, the more we are plagued by guilt, the more we become motivated to do other useful, but superficially less important things.

On the other hand, there is a small group of people that seems to complete everything on time and demonstrate the miracle of effectiveness.

How do they do it?

The latest research showed that the way we mentally approach a certain task will largely determine how quickly we will complete it.

When approaching any task, we can use either abstract or concrete thinking. Abstract thinking perceives a task as whole. It puts a mental distance between a person and the goal, making it seem hard to reach. This is why the more we think about doing something that we deem difficult, the less the chances are that we will actually get to it.

Concrete thinking is breaking down a challenging task into smaller, more manageable parts making our goal seem much easier to accomplish.

I call it “lumping” vs. “chunking”. You can either perceive the task as a ‘lump’ that cannot be subdivided and digested or you can break it down into smaller “chunks” that seem more realistic and can be dealt with systematically.

The teenager who wants to go out with his friends, will most likely view writing a paper on the economic factors involved in World War II as an ugly massive single-lump task and do everything in his power to postpone it for later.

Another great way to prevent ourselves from using abstract thinking is to focus on a small percentage of the task that needs to get done. Before getting to any task that seems difficult and timely, promise yourself that you will only complete 30% of it (or spend 45 minutes doing it). Give yourself permission to stop when you said you would, if you do not feel like working on it any longer.

What this technique does, is give you the right to procrastinate, without any feelings of remorse and regret, while still getting some of the work done.

You may feel that overcoming procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception. And you are absolutely right! It does! Only this time your self-deceptive skills will work to your advantage. Don’t you just love it when you can use one of your flaws to actually improve your character and become a more productive person?