Everybody knows about procrastination, right? Everybody also seems to experience procrastination at a certain quantity. In fact, about 20% of the population is affected by procrastination and 26% of them regard themselves as chronic procrastinators. Here is a direct overview of the mental motives we give ourselves to procrastinate.

5. I have too much time, I can do this later.

Lets face it, most to-do’s are boring, and if you are like many people, you don't enjoy doing boring things. Well most people, when given a lot of time, will favor delaying it until it becomes urgent in order to do enjoyable tasks first.

That's tempting at first but you don't actually have a lot of time to do the work because you invest some time on cool things. You wind up being late and having a very short time span to finish your tasks so they get done awfully.

4. I'm not motivated enough

Motivation is the direction and the force with which you participate in an activity. In more common words, it makes you want to do something. Now, a lot of persons will, when faced with boring things to do, say they are not motivated so they can’t do their activities.

The thing is motivation isn’t a random experience that you have absolutely no influence over. You can and you should stimulate yourself and the path to accomplishing your aims will be more pleasing that way.

Also, you don’t actually need motivation to do things. I’m not motivated to get up of bed in the morning but guess what? I still do it! That is called willpower and it is the power we have that makes us do things independently of our mental state. You don’t need to train willpower, you already have it, simply use it more often.

3. That’s not really important

We do things in life to attain something or get something. In this process, there are actions we have to take (you don’t get anything by giving nothing) to get there.

These actions can be boring and seemingly unimportant but they are actually backing the bigger tasks that are really important. By putting of little things, you put off the bigger tasks that need a lot of attention. dispose of the little tasks first, so you can focus on the bigger ones.

2. I don't get results anyway, so why do it?

A popular realm where people procrastinate is fitness. They workout frequently for some time but get discouraged because they don’t see prompt results.

Perhaps you can relate to that in another domain? I personally use this mental subterfuge with cleaning up my apartment by saying to myself «Why waste your time with this, it’ll not even show up if you clean up», but it actually does make a difference.

1. I have a trouble with procrastination

Yeah, you heard that right, folks use procrastination as an excuse to procrastinate. That’s the all powerful process of self-fulfilling prophecies. You procrastinate, then your mental researches for a satisfying mental reason to do it, and it discovers the procrastination problem, what a clever brain we have!

The problem with these excuses is they make you vegetate. You don’t get out of procrastination by doing nothing, you get out of procrastination by taking actions.

I advocate that you monitor your thought processes when you procrastinate and you’ll find that most of them are illogical or inefficient. Act without thinking or should I say do something no matter what you are thinking, it’s painless, just decide to do so.