PROCRASTINATION AND PRODUCTIVITY

On today’s episode on being productive, I will be centering on procrastinators and productivity. But first, while is productivity a frequently misunderstood concept? Most people believe that to be productive, they’ve to work harder and longer. Notwithstanding, productivity isn’t about following through further, but rather about investing your time and attention in a further strategic way to add value to your life, connections, and career. The only way you’re going to change and improve your productivity is if you take the necessary way to rule out the reasons why you may be suffering from a lack of productivity.

Why Do People Procrastinate?

Nearly everyone is guilty of procrastination sometimes. High-priority tasks are usually difficult or time-consuming and it’s frequently easier to find straightforward, less important tasks to do instead.

Most people at some time or another will have set up themselves putting off starting a task, even though they feel uncomfortable about doing so. This is known as procrastination, which can be defined as ‘ The act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of lower priority or doing something from which one derives enjoyment, and therefore putting off important tasks after time.’ Or ‘To freely delay an intended course of action despite awaiting to be worse off for the delay.’

This putting off important tasks results in a sense of guilt that causes a loss of motivation and personal productivity. It can also lead to stress as a result of disapproval for not meeting commitments.

If you are uncomfortable justifying to yourself why you aren’t getting on with a particular risk, you also need to accept that you’re presumably guilty of procrastination. Indeed if you don’t suffer from this problem yourself, it’s possible that someone in your team does and you may be able to help him or her overcome it.

What Triggers Procrastination?

The task appears boring or pointless. Most people admit to putting off jobs because they find the job dispiriting or unwelcome, or they hope that the job will ever go down, or they just don’t know where to start. They may justify this by finding simple tasks to do instead.

One thing that you’ll need to guard against is the tendency to justify procrastination on the basis that you’re just putting a job off until you’re ‘in the right.’ However, you can now look back at it and see if you keep a record of how you spend your day. You can identify any tasks that you typically have difficulty starting or sticking to. Once you recognize the types of tasks that cause you to procrastinate, you can try to manage and exclude this behavior from doing it.

Your capability to be successful at any task isn’t dependent upon your mood.

There are occasions when you will have to do something you don’t like, even if you don’t feel like it, that is just essential that the task is completed. That doesn’t mean your results are going to be of a better quality, or that the task will be a failure. It just means that in this instance your motivation comes after you’ve started work on something.

Sometimes, working on a project helps bring about a change in our mood. We can’t always expect to be in the right mood all the time. Neither should you expect to be able to work on things in life only when you’re in the right mood. These are just elaborate excuses we make up to reinforce our procrastinating behavior.

Summary

It may be impossible to determine which is the cause and which is the effect. Are you de-motivated because you’re a habitual procrastinator or are you procrastinating because you are demotivated? In either case, procrastination will cast a shadow over your working day that will make it disagreeable and unfulfilling.

In the longer term, you’ll find that it damages your character as a productive worker and it can ultimately lead to chronic depression. Motivation is a complex topic and is difficult to measure because it’s entirely subjective.

Procrastination on the other hand is easy to identify because it’s always specific to a particular task and because it manifests itself as an inability to begin it or progress it.

All of us have a conscious thought process that ‘speaks to us’ throughout the day. We do have control over it in as important as we can purposely impact it, but it also tends to ‘do its own thing’ if we don’t actively try to direct it. Most of the motivational programs that have been developed involve educating this inner voice to be wholly positive. Whilst this does help, it’s a lot of work because it takes a lot of practice to train it. An important simpler tactic is to make yourself purposely aware of it particularly when it becomes overly negative. These are just many exemplifications of negative task-specific thoughts, but you can probably come up with numerous others of your own.

Eventually, and maybe most importantly, you need to appreciate how delicate it is to overcome the habit of procrastination. The act of putting off something difficult and doing something more enjoyable instead will always give an immediate price Remember, however, you’ll only succeed by diving into the problem one task at a time.