According to a survey conducted by Darius Foroux, it’s estimated that 88% of workers struggle with procrastination.
Procrastination is a very human phenomenon.
Even the most productive business leaders procrastinate from time to time, and there are psychological reasons for this that we’ll get into in a moment. But just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s healthy, for you or your business.
Procrastination is a sign that there are two issues you need to address.
The first is emotional self-regulation.
Because at its core, procrastination isn’t a problem with your work. It’s not even a problem with your feelings. Procrastination is a problem with how you deal with uncomfortable feelings when they inevitably arise.
The second issue is organization.
When you are highly organized, there’s little room for procrastination. You know what needs to get done, you prioritize what needs to get prioritized, and you’re less stressed as a result. And when you’re less stressed, you procrastinate less because you have less uncomfortable emotions to deal with.
Here’s 5 steps how not to procrastinate
at work:
- Understand why you procrastinate.
Procrastination happens when you want to avoid your feelings. Avoidance only makes those feelings stronger, and yet you keep doing it.
There are a few psychological reasons.
You might just dislike the task. It’s understandable, there are downsides to every job. But it’s not just doing the task that makes you uncomfortable.
You’re the kid who eats the marshmallow. You favor an immediate reward, however small, over a bigger reward later.
Poor organization make this worse. You’re much more likely to procrastinate when you feel overwhelmed. And you’re much more likely to feel overwhelmed when you don’t have systems in place to organize your time. But it’s not that you’re incapable of organization, (you wouldn’t have made as far as you have if that were the case!)
You really do have too much to do. Prioritization is difficult when you’re spending half your day trying to organize a million moving pieces.
- Name your feelings.
Once you understand where your procrastination is coming from, take a moment to name your feelings.
Ask yourself: “What does the discomfort I’m feeling right now remind me of?”
If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll be able to identify at least one memory that’s holding you back. Once you know where your feelings are coming from, remind yourself that this is not the same moment you experienced in the past.
- Make goals more manageable.
Procrastination only happens when you feel overwhelmed, and a lot of the time this is because the task you’re thinking about is too big.
If it were small and simple, you’d just do the task and move on.
But even if you have the skills to tackle it, a task you feel overwhelmed by becomes lot bigger and scarier when it’s allowed to percolate in your mind. You can stop the swell by putting a plan on physical paper or in a document, with small and clear action steps.
Small steps make big goals feel a lot more manageable so you’re less overwhelmed.
- Give yourself deadlines.
When you’re struggling with procrastination, it’s helpful to create deadlines for each step along the way instead of having a single daunting deadline in the more distant future.
Then, instead of suffering under Present Bias, you’re hacking it to your advantage.
You help yourself feel better, faster, by bringing a sense of accomplishment into your immediate experience when each small step is done.
Look at your plan first thing in the morning and decide what the biggest, most important, and/or most uncomfortable task is. Then do that first. Why? Because willpower expires as the day progresses. The more decisions you make, the less aptitude you have to make good decisions.
A 2018 conceptual analysis of decision fatigue, published in the Journal of Health Psychology, explains that just like stress, decision fatigue reduces executive function and inhibits reasoning ability. So, if you have important decisions to make, it’s best to make them first thing in the morning.
- Reinforce a “do-it-now” attitude.
Procrastination is a habit you have to break. And the easiest way to make or break a habit is to reinforce action-forward behavior by setting up rewards and punishments.
In his bestselling book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains that at the core of every habit is a neurological loop: A cue, a routine, and a reward.
In the case of procrastination, the cue is the uncomfortable emotion associated with an unwanted task, the routine is doing anything else and trying not to think about it, and the reward is the momentary relief you feel.
The perception of relief is amplified when you compare it to the pain you imagine you’re going to feel when you start the task, (even though it’s usually not that bad.)
If you want to break your procrastination habit, you have to come up with rewards that are even sweeter than that momentary relief.
A virtual assistant can help you stay motivated by reducing your to-do list and holding you accountable to what’s most important.