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Always defeated by procrastination?

There are these times when we really want to do something, like a project, to finish it early and won’t have any problems later on.  But procrastination is just so tempting during these times.  We may have wanted to fight it at times, but its just so tempting.  Its like the perfect time to do something else.  So how can you fight this off?

Perseverance.  Have perseverance over your goal.  Concentrate hard on reaching that goal and do not think of any excuses why you should do other things.  Sometimes we would have this excuse that we are not in the right mood to finish something or that its too noisy to study our lessons.  Every time we think of this, think of your goal.  Think of it like you have already succeeded to give you the motivation and would make you to persevere more.

Perseverance gives you more courage.  Fight procrastination with perseverance.  Think of it as an enemy that you want to defeat.  An enemy you won’t allow to overpower you.

The soft cottony bed is just so comfortable that you don’t feel like getting up in the morning.  Maybe a few minutes more would do before you start to work.  Then the  “few minutes” is now nearly an hour.  You just can’t get enough of the comfort that the bed  provides.  But you’ve got stuff to do and finish!  Procrastinating over an unfinished and should-be-finished-now task is not healthy, we all know that.  So how would you set your mood in doing it and forget procrastinating?

Be creative.  Put some creativity in doing your task.  Like challenging yourself that you can finish mowing the lawn in a matter of minutes or maybe an hour depending on the area.  Then, if you can beat it, you treat yourself for a good lunch or something (even though you can really do it even if you can’t beat your challenge).  Or maybe you can tune in your favorite song while doing your task to keep your spirit alive.  Just like when cooking, you can sing and dance if you want.

It is only you who can really stop yourself from procrastinating.  Being creative is just one way to stop it.  There are a lot of ways to stop procrastinating.  While early, you must stop it before it becomes a habit.

One reason why we procrastinate is the lack of motivation.  But did you know that our environment also affects us?  Yes, it affects our mood and our motivation.  If we work in an office that has a pile of papers in top of your table along with leisure magazines, wouldn’t you be tempted to take the magazines instead of those pile of papers?  Seeing a pile of papers mean a pile of work.  Seems discouraging in the eyes.  Then there’s the magazines tempting you instead.

What you need to do is to strategize  your environment.  Make it more like a room relaxing to work at.  Organize your papers that are waiting to be finished.  Put it in order so that you can work on it one by one.  Unlike if you see it as one, it seems to be a heavy workload.  Put away those that can distract you from working like the magazines.  Put it in a cabinet at the corner of your room where you cannot reach it easily.  Better yet, put it in your house.

Put your whole room/office in order and always clean.  It would make you feel relaxed to work and wouldn’t feel much stress, too.  By putting things in order, you can also make your work organized.  It would really feel inspiring to work if you have a nice and quiet environment.  Also, if you are rather too busy to accept visitors, better put a “don’t disturb” sign outside the room or heed your secretary.

Do you always feel like procrastinating over your job that you seem to be unproductive already? Is it affecting your performance as an employee? It’s about time you do some action about it. It doesn’t mean that if this is what’s happening to you, you will quit already. You just need to be motivated once again.

First off, know the reason of your procrastination. There could be a lot of reasons for your procrastination. It may not be directly connected to your job. It could be from family, friends, or your environment. You might be feeling stressful every time because of your problems at home or with your friends. Try to see also if the reason is in your workplace. An officemate that irritates you, an annoying boss, or the working environment itself. But you can make yourself free from all this if you just motivate yourself. Maybe you can influence them to be more positive towards you. Knowing the reason of your procrastination will help you analyze your situation and find out what to do with it.

Once you knew the reason, think of what could motivate you. If an office mate irritates you, you can try to avoid him/her without being rude. Just don’t mind him/her and do your own job. Concentrate on your job and don’t mind them. Remember also that it could not be directly from your job. Maybe you need some relaxation or some treat for yourself to make you feel better. It is important that we always take care of ourselves. We may be working hard but always take care of ourselves.

I have stumbled upon a procrastinator’s blog and found out that procrastination somehow does him good.  As a typical college student, he found himself a procrastinator, doing assignments usually at the last minute.  But he also do some in time.  Funny thing here is that he gets an A grade with those works he crammed.  He said that what motivates him during cramming hours is not to fail in his subjects.

So that’s what procrastination sometimes do to us.  It brings out the best in us.  Or does it?  It actually strengthens our motivation to work and makes us concentrate hard on our work because we are pressured to finish it.  With that, there is less extra things in our minds and we focus on our craft that we would not expect an excellent outcome.  Little did we know that we have done well on that.

Given all that, what we actually need then is not procrastination but motivation and concentration.  We just have to strengthen both to be able to do our tasks better.

Procrastination doesn’t only affect the procrastinator.  It doesn’t only destroy one’s life.  It also destroys relationships, be it private or in an organization or workplace.  When you procrastinate, it affects other persons as well.  Those persons that relate directly to your life are mostly affected.

When you get your work delayed, the one assigned to you by your group, the whole project will totally be affected.  In a team, every member, every task is very important.  Without the other, the whole project won’t be completed.  If you delay your work, the whole project will get delayed.  Especially those tasks that are dependent of your task.  When this happens, your teammates will react negatively of you.

In private relationships, procrastination can cause misunderstanding.  Just like in organizations, your partner might get delayed of his other tasks because of your procrastination.  Every time you waste, you could have spent it with your partner, only if you didn’t procrastinate.  You  might always get busy because you cram with your task that you might have lesser time with your partner.

Procrastination indeed destroys you and the people around you.  So always avoid procrastinating and be ashamed to the people around you that they get hassled because of you.  Throw away procrastination in your life and get rid of worries.

So how do you really motivate yourself? Two known factors that motivate humans are pleasure and the fear of pain. One good way to motivate yourself then is to know the pains and the pleasures that you will get if you will procrastinate on a certain task. This will help you realize the things that you will miss out by procrastinating and what you get in return if you forgo an opportunity.

Better yet, you can make a list of these things to make you more motivated to work. Seeing or reading it in a paper would let you imagine the outcome and would make you more motivated to gain the pleasure instead of the pain.

If you are doing a long-term task, time might discourage you as you wait longer for the result. So take a look at your lists of pain and pleasures once in a while to keep you reminded of the possible consequences. Also, you can breakdown your task into small ones so that you won’t feel the difficulty of it. Doing this will also help you take track of your progress with your task.

Mood.  One of our excuses whenever we procrastinate is because we’re not in the mood to do a task.  In reality, our mood doesn’t do the work but action does.  If we wait for the right mood to do a task, we might end up cramming or even lose an opportunity.  It is just with our mind that we think we are not in the mood.  Sometimes, the hard thing is to start a task.  We feel like we are not in the mood when we haven’t started yet.

All we need is a force that would get us to move and start the task.  Sometimes, I command myself to do it.  All it takes then is motivation to get started.  Let your subconscious mind to command you.  Little by little it will make you move and get on the task.  As you have started to get up don’t stop telling yourself to get started until you are actually starting it.

The key here is to get started.  Once you have started doing a task, you will not notice that you were not in the mood to do it.  You will then be working on it continuously.  When you finish it, you won’t regret that you have started and not wasted the time.  You will even be thankful that you have started it earlier than you planned because you are now free of that task.  Just remember always that mood is just an excuse to procrastinate.

Weird as it may sound, but there really is fear of success and it often leads to procrastination. So how does this happen?

There are people who are afraid of succeeding. It is not actually fear of succeeding a certain thing but fear of facing the next step. Like in education, we fear of what will happen to us after we graduate. Because staying in school is like being dependent. You get allowance, you are being fed well, and the likes. But after going to school, allowances will be cut and much are expected from you. Sometimes, we also prolong a project for the fear that we might lose something to work on if we finish it.

Although success leads to another stepping stone, it should not be feared. We must understand that life continues after every event in our lives. You must be ready with the consequences of success. We just have to remember that after every success, we must take a better step in continuing life. We have learned a lot from experience and so we are ready to take another step after succeeding on the last one.

Success should inspire us, give us courage and confidence, make us stronger, and the experience should serve as our guide in taking the next step.

Procrastination can sometimes do something good for us. Mostly on our emotional issues. It helps us get through from an emotional stress. Here is an inspiring story from a mom who had been through a lot in life that caused her to procrastinate:

January 1, 2007

An Unexpected Lesson About Procrastination

My second son was born a year and a half ago with hemifacial microsomia. That means half of his face is deformed. I’m not linking to a description of the birth defect, even though I know you will Google it. I’m not linking because the pictures are always the worst cases. He does not look like the pictures.

Still, I knew he was deformed the minute he came out. The nurse handed him to me, and his face looked uneven. I tried to tell myself that maybe it was because babies’ heads are scrunched right after vaginal birth.

His Apgar score was fine, but after a few hours, when my husband left the hospital to go home to sleep, I went nuts. Summoning every available professional — there were very few that late at night — to tell me a diagnosis.

In the morning, they did emergency tests on his hearing, because his ear was deformed, and on his breathing, because the inside of his mouth was deformed. Then someone came to do a kidney test because the kidney and ears develop at the same time during the pregnancy and when one is deformed the other often is, too.

The baby did not pass his hearing test and one kidney did not look right. The doctor told me that the kidney problem is common and he just won’t be able to play contact sports.

I must have looked really bad because social workers started streaming in. I don’t remember what I said, but my brother remembers my first phone call to him: I am crying so hard it takes five minutes for him to hear that the baby is deformed. Then, when I calm myself down enough, I tell my brother that my husband will die when he hears this so I have to hide it from him forever.

This is when my brother says, “I’m coming there.”

I say, “No. I don’t want you to see the baby.”

The world can publish ten thousand books about how parents love any child they get. And it’s true. But it’s also true that there’s a moment, a short moment, when you think you might die from the news.

Right after the phone call to my brother, my husband came back, and I said, “The baby is deformed.”

He said, “Are you kidding? You think I can’t see that? I know.”

We took the baby home two days later. We diagnosed him by looking at pictures on the Internet. We were absolutely stunned to see a whole population of children who had the same weird deformity.

I brought him to New York University’s Institute for Reconstructive Plastic Surgery. Hemifacial microsomia is very complicated because it can affect eyes, ears, nose, throat, heart and nervous system, all at once. Many specialists work together to come up with a plan for surgery. At my son’s doctor’s appointment, I presented him at the front of a room, with a social worker next to me, while fifteen doctors asked questions and examined him.

Here’s what happened: My son’s surgery was performed by one of the best teams in the world for hemifacial microsomia. All the doctors were incredibly compassionate. The support team of social workers, speech pathologists, and administrators always knew what my son and my family needed before we did, and they figured out how to get it. My son has a scar, and his face is a little uneven, but many people don’t even notice at first glace.

I told myself that I should write thank you notes. The team at NYU changed my son’s life, and helped my family at a time when we really, really needed it. That was six months ago. It’s been on my to-do list for six months. It moves up and down. A few times, when I’ve been really industrious, writing thank you notes has been at the very top, the only thing on the list, and I still didn’t do it.

Last week I admitted to myself that my son will probably need more surgery once his jaw grows to full size. And I thought, Oh my gosh, I had better write those thank you notes or we won’t get into NYU for the next round of surgery.

So tonight, I finally wrote them. There were a lot. Each note made me cry. I thought about how much people did for us. How kind they were. How fragile I was. How tiny my son was. Everything. Every sentence made me cry.

And I learned a bit about procrastination. I had been so angry at myself for waiting so long to write these thank you notes. But I do not procrastinate because I am lazy or unorganized. I am not those things. I procrastinated because I could not bring myself to think about the operation again. I was not emotionally capable of writing the notes until tonight. Sometimes procrastination is the best tool we have for taking care of ourselves.

source: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/01/01/my-clean-slate-for-2007/