Procrastinators, what a lovely breed of humans, it’s as if we know we have to swim across this 100m pool, but we wait, I mean 5 Minutes? Pshh. NO problem! Then we wait. A little later it’s 3 minutes and we think, you know what I still got time I’m going to have a quick coke. Then suddenly its 1 minute left and you have no time to do anything. You jump into the water get 90 m and bam time is up. You didn’t finish because you procrastinated because you didn’t want to go through effort straight away. This is truly a flaw in the human condition. Yet, it is a flaw we can break.
A simple way to stop procrastinating is setting goals or making a to-do list with dates. However do not put one date on this list. If you look at this list and see okay I’ve got to do a project but its only for 2 weeks’ time. That’s when you start procrastinating, when you believe that you have a lot of time so there’s no point doing it now. Once this thinking starts it’s easy to continue then instead of 2 weeks you have 2 days. Putting multiple items on this list however avoids that. If you say you need to be done with the first quarter in 4 days, and two-thirds in 8 days, which would help you not leave everything to a last-minute panic.
That is one thing all procrastinators are truly good at. Stress induced work. Due to their habit of leaving things to the last-minute. This skill can actually be used to complete work quickly and doesn’t have to be used only when time is about to run out. If you can induce a working craze for about 30 minutes you can get a lot of work done. So try to just heavily work for small bits of time, use your inner panic!
Another common practice is the 2 minute rule. This rule floats all over the internet. The rule is that when you are about to put something off ask yourself will this take me more than 2 minutes? If the answer is no then go do it. I think that two minutes is to short I mean anything could take longer than 2 minutes so I suggest making this a 10 minute rule or at least a 5 minute rule to give yourself a bit less opportunity to procrastinate.
Finally don’t multi-task, it may seem like multi-tasking gets more work done or allows you some entertainment with your work but it only leads to inefficient work. Very few things get done and those that get done aren’t done properly. Therefore if you ever are going to work focus on one thing and do it properly.
Just do it and get it done!
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