A Little Story About Procrastination

Pro­cras­ti­na­tion used to be some­thing we laughed at and blew off. It was never taken very seri­ously. I used to be pretty bad with it, but in the last few years I have worked on get­ting myself not to pro­cras­ti­nate so much. Some­times you can pro­cras­ti­nate with­out even real­iz­ing it.

Let’s take a look at a lit­tle sce­nario. “Bob” has an arti­cle that is due today. He is also a pro­cras­ti­na­tor. Let’s see how it goes for him.

Bob crawls out of bed, grabs a cup of cof­fee and sits down at the com­puter. Today he needs to fin­ish an arti­cle for a client. Since he’s just wak­ing up he decides to check his email while the cof­fee kicks in.

Before long his break­fast is gone and he’s fin­ish­ing up his last video. It’s been a good 30 min­utes or so and he pulls up his arti­cle again. He stares at the screen think­ing of how he wants to start the arti­cle. He has a new email noti­fi­ca­tion but he shouldn’t do that right now. Tweet­deck is pop­ping up with pos­si­bly inter­est­ing tweets, but he really needs to do this arti­cle. His dog comes up to him and gives him the ol “pet me” look. “Can’t resist that.”

You see where this is going? This is what pro­cras­ti­na­tion is, they are excuses to avoid the thing that needs done. You can prob­a­bly argue that some of it is a dis­trac­tion, which you would be right. But Bob used that dis­trac­tion and turned it into another rea­son not to get to work.

He was hun­gry, but he could have made a smaller break­fast and he could have read some more infor­ma­tion instead of flick­ing through Youtube videos. Dis­trac­tions are going to hap­pen, some more than oth­ers. But in the case of the pro­cras­ti­na­tor, they turn into an excuse. Instead of ignor­ing the dis­trac­tions or using them in a lesser way, they become a rea­son to delay the task on hand.

I devel­oped pro­cras­ti­na­tion pretty bad in my later years of High School. I was really good at school but putting off my home­work sure made my grades suf­fer. And then I felt like crap about it and started to get depressed. Then I didn’t feel like doing home­work and it turned into a vicious cycle. I man­aged to grad­u­ate but car­ried that pro­cras­ti­nat­ing behav­ior on with me for some time afterwards.

As I said, we never took the idea that seri­ously but it can have a big effect on your life let alone your busi­ness. It’s not hard to do either.

One of the best ways I have found to deal with it is to set a cer­tain time for tasks and stick to that time. Set aside the time and take action. I’m not near as bad as I used to be, but it was actu­ally a big prob­lem for awhile.

So next time your work­ing on your tasks for the day ask your­self if what your doing is work­ing to move your busi­ness for­ward. Pro­cras­ti­na­tion can be a prob­lem but can also be over­come. It may not be easy but it can be done. And you become more effi­cient because of it.

~Chris

How do you deal with your pro­cras­ti­na­tion? Share your thoughts with oth­ers in the com­ments.

Sim­i­lar Posts:

• Going Back to My Old J.O.B.
• You Have Done a Great Job. Don’t For­get to Reward Yourself
• Has Your Ini­tial Excite­ment Run Out?

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