How to Overcome Procrastination

Everyone puts things off now and then. The trouble starts when it becomes a habit, the kind of pattern that shows up week after week. There's a common assumption that procrastination belongs to students cramming for exams, but plenty of working adults wrestle with the same thing. Left unchecked, it chips away at your output at work and even your relationships. Getting a handle on it matters, mostly because the opportunities you keep postponing don't always wait around.

A good way in is to pick one small thing you never got around to, something that won't swallow your whole day. Maybe you've been meaning to sort the books on a shelf or empty that drawer full of junk. Choose a job like that, the sort that takes under an hour, and commit to finishing it within the next three days. The point is momentum. Once that first thing is done, the next one feels less heavy. Skip the elaborate planning entirely, because if you get tangled up deciding how to do it, you've just found a fresh way to stall. Pick something simple enough that no planning is required, and finish it.

Expect the excuses. They will come, and some days you'll go along with them. The usual ones sound like this: you're not in the mood right now; you work better under pressure anyway; you're waiting for the perfect moment; you don't feel well; or you've convinced yourself the last minute is plenty of time. When one of those catches you and the day slips away, wake up the next morning and let it go. Dwelling on it accomplishes nothing. Spend a couple of minutes asking why that particular excuse worked on you, then move on. That small bit of honesty makes the same trick harder to pull next time.

People who chronically procrastinate often have goals that don't mean much to them. Write yours down and look them over. Usually they don't need to be scrapped, just adjusted. If a goal is enormous, the sheer volume of work behind it practically invites you to delay. Break it apart. Say you want to reorganize the whole house. Do it one room at a time instead, checking each off as you finish. Each completed room gives you a little push toward the next.

Thinking in the abstract comes naturally, and it quietly feeds procrastination. "I'd like to write a song someday" has no shape to it: no deadline, no first move. Trade that for something concrete, like "I'll finish the first verse within seven days." Now there's a boundary and a single piece to work on, which is far easier than facing the whole thing at once. The specific version almost tells you what to do.

Go slow. You're not going to fix this in a night, because you're rewiring a behavior, and that takes time. Try to change too much at once and you'll struggle to keep it up, which tends to produce more procrastination, not less. One step, finished. Then the next. What counts is that you've started and you're clearing the backlog, a single item at a time.

- Rosemary Kitchen

Resources: Pavlina, S. (2015). Overcoming Procrastination. Retrieved on February 23, 2015 from http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/overcoming-procrastination.htm