The Procrastination Cure – Damon Zahariades

: 21 Proven Tactics for Conquering Your Inner Procrastinator, Mastering Your Time, and Boosting Your Productivity!

Why we procrastinate?

1. Fear of failure- failure is not final.

2. Perfectionism- 95% is not good as 100%. But its lot better than zero

3. Fear of wrong choice-any decision is better than no decision.

4. Boring task- delegate, if can’t delegate make it a fun activity, set a time to complete.

There are many causes of procrastination. Unfortunately, there’s still a tendency to associate procrastination with laziness and mental weakness.

Your Focus

Your focus is a precious resource. It’s what allows you to cultivate relationships, meet personal goals, and achieve professional success. But it’s also a resource that needs to be channeled.

If you sit down to work in a space that’s crowded with environmental distractions – like a loud television, a pile of clutter, or noisy coworkers – you’re effectively trying to channel your focus through a sieve. There are simply too many outlets for it to explore.

Recognise Negative self talk

Do you blame yourself when something goes wrong?
Do you attribute perfectly understandable mistakes to your own laziness and ineptitude?
Do you expect to fail at a task before you’ve even started it?

Negative self-talk can creep into your consciousness in many different forms.

You might engage in self-criticism, comparing yourself to others, or beating yourself up for your perceived failings. You might be a constant worrier who imagines worst-case scenarios based on very little evidence. Finally, you might be a perfectionist who sets impossibly high standards, only to berate yourself when you can’t live up to them.

Use time management tools and techniques to make the most of your day.

Achieve more by doing less

When you review your to-do list, you might realize that some of the tasks are completely unnecessary. For example, if a task doesn’t relate to your goals, and if scrapping it wouldn’t let anyone else down, it’s probably not worth doing at all. More than that, leaving it on your list can prevent you from focusing on high-priority, high-impact tasks. So be ruthless: cut any unnecessary tasks from your to-do list immediately.

Stream your to-do list

1. Keep it short- concentrate on essential one, magical and possible number is 7 or lesser. Should not be over filled or under filled.

2. Prioritize- scale the list and one being high priority and 5 being last priority.

3. One thing at a time- rather than half finishing a lot of tasks complete one.

4. Cut down unnecessary task from to-do list.

How to get started

1. Eat the frog- take up the difficult task first.

2. Focus on first 10 min to gain momentum- like start making first slide you will continue with it.

3. Start task when you know you’ll have energy for them- morning person or active during night.

Pro Tips

Set time limit for each task

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If it takes you three hours to write a report, but you give yourself eight hours, it will take eight hours to write.

Focus on long term goal

Procrastination is a battle between your present self and your future self. Your present self is all about immediate gratification.

Eliminate distractions

1. work in a dedicated workspace.

2. Invest in a white noise machine or a pair of quality headphones to block out noise.

3. Put off internet or on the aeroplane mode or install internet blocker apps.

Recruit others to help you fight procrastination.

1. If you make yourself accountable to someone else, you’re far more likely to achieve your goals. Ask them to check in on your progress from time to time.

2. Don’t set your own deadlines. We rarely respect self-imposed deadlines because we don’t feel too bad about breaking promises we’ve made to ourselves. But we do respect the promises we make to others.

When you sit down to work, be careful not to multitask. Trying to concentrate on more than one thing at a time diminishes the quality of your focus, making it all too easy to slip into the trap of procrastination. So rather than half-finishing a lot of tasks, be a single-tasker who does one thing from start to end before moving on to the next.

Face up to why you procrastinate to finally kick the habit

There’s no point in plastering over a chronic procrastination habit with productivity hacks if you don’t understand why you procrastinate in the first place.

One reason we abandon tasks is because the fear of failure makes us give up, sometimes before we even start. After all, if you don’t try, you can’t fail! To address this, remind yourself that failure isn’t a character flaw. Instead, reframe failure as data. It’s just feedback that your current approach needs improvement.

If you suffer from perfectionism, you could find yourself procrastinating whenever you feel that your efforts will result in a not-quite-perfect outcome. In that case, ask yourself why you need to achieve perfection, and if not achieving it would be the disaster you imagine. For example, a test result of 95 percent isn’t as good as 100 percent. But it’s a lot better than zero!