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Reasons for procrastinating

Procrastination is linked to stress, anxiety, low self-esteem, lower well-being.

We spend 1.6 to 2.4 hours per day procrastinating. This is a loss of about 55 days/year. 55 days! What could you accomplish in 55 days? I bet you could rebuild your life.

It’s a symptom

If you’re procrastinating, first of all give yourself a break. You’re not lazy and you’re not alone. Procrastinating is not just a thing we do – it’s a symptom of something else. There are several potential reasons: lack of direction, goals that are too large, fear of failure, boredom with the task, lack of dopamine (dopamine has been shown to help with motivation) or, for some people there is difficulty associating an investment today with the payoff that’s somewhere in the distant future.

If you’re lacking direction, here is an exercise to help you.

If your goal(s) feel too large and unwieldy and you’re not sure where to start, take a look at this and this.

And if you’re terrified of failure, take a look at this.

If you’re not active, you may be lacking dopamine. The fastest (takes about 8 weeks to build up levels) way to increase it is with exercise. If you want help starting an exercise habit the *right* way (so won’t quit), contact me.

Bored? This is where you have to look at if this thing is actually necessary. If it is, I’m sorry but there’s no way around it – you just have to do it. But! Give yourself the freedom to bitch and complain the whole time. As long as you do it. However, often, even when it seems there’s no way out, there may be a way out. Bored with your job? Seems impossible to leave and do something else? It’s not. It’s not easy but it’s also not impossible. Contact me and let’s walk through the scenarios.

If you have trouble associating tasks with future rewards, you may have immediacy bias. This is the tendency to favor short-term rewards over long-term benefits. Or, you may be experiencing future discounting, where the brain places less value on rewards that are delayed. Here are several things to try in order to overcome either of those scenarios:

• Break large tasks into small bites and consider every small bite a completed task. This way you get the short term reward and satisfy the immediacy bias. These bites or sub-tasks can be as small as needed. For example, if you need to make a presentation, you can make just the headline one task.
• Always track your progress. This helps build and maintain the sense of accomplishment and helps to keep us going forward.
• Spend time visualizing the ultimate reward. Make a vision board if that works for you and refer to it often.
• Use the 5 minute rule – commit to just 5 minutes of work. If after 5 minutes you want to stop, go ahead and stop. Most often, the difficulty is just getting started – after we’ve started doing something it’s relatively easy to keep going. The 5 minute rule makes it easy to just start.
• Consider rewarding yourself after each task of sub-task is completed.

And finally, you may just need some urgency. The average human lifetime is 879 months. Subtract however old you are and a bunch from the end (when we get older, we get slower). How many months are left to do the things you want to do? Unfortunately, not as many as we’d like. I know that this is a bit harsh but there’s no way around it.