Be Inspired..!!

Get ready to maximise your potential, maximise your living with empress2inspire’s new posts series “Daily Dose of Living”. These series will bring you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week. Your best life awaits.

In today’s post we will be looking into remedies for procrastination. All of us struggle from procrastination from time to time. It is steeped within us. We think we are going to do something later, but we always overestimate how much we can actually do later and we overestimate our ability to beat procrastination later. If your current self can’t beatpromrastination, why will our future self will.

Why do we procrastinate. We do it because :

• We want instant gratification. Resting on a couch sounds nicer than going on a run.
• We fear or dread something. This makes it want to put things off because we don’t think through
• It’s easy to have no negative consequences right now. We will pay for it later but right now no one is getting mad at us.
• We overestimate our future self. We always think we can do a lot in future. Nope. Your future self is also going to be lazy because your present self is lazy.

How do we overcome procrastination?

• Stop and think. When we allow the above thoughts to go on without really being conscious of them, we procrastinate. When we actually pause and think about those thoughts, we actually see that they are wrong. Instant gratification can lead to problems later. Fears are overblown and they stand in our way. Not having negative consequences now does not mean that there wont’s be any negative consequences later. Your future self is not going to be any different than your present self, so think about doing the most rational thing at the moment.
• Enjoy the process. When we dread something, we put it off. But if instead we can learn to enjoy it, it won’t be as hard or dreadful. Put yourself in the moment and enjoy every action. For example, if you want to go out and run, don’t think about the hard run ahead, just think about putting on your shoes. Enjoy the simplicity of that action and then focus on getting out the door. Small steps.
• Set up accountability. If no one is looking over our shoulder, we tend to let ourselves slack off. So set up a procrastination proof environment. Find people to hold you accountable. Use friends and family who are in your inner circle and who would support you.
• Block your future self. Your future self is just as likely to put things off, so block that sucker. Do whatever it takes for your future self to not procrastinate or give in to temptation or at-least force your future self to pause and think before it does something dumb.

A different mindset. Basic tenets about beating procrastination :

• Do what you love.
• Productively procrastinate.
• Sometimes procrastination is okay…keyword “Sometimes”

Hope this helps. Happy “Not” procrastination.