Overcoming Procrastination - Part 2

Following on from parts 1-3 of the reasons why we procrastinate, here are the remaining 2 reasons:

4.   Forcing the flow

By forcing the flow, I mean trying to make things move at your pace rather than letting things unfold in their own time.  For example, have you ever put off ringing someone and then when you finally force yourself to do it hours or days later you find that they wouldn't have been in if you'd called them at the original time you thought of it?

Sometimes there are bigger things working than what we can see and we need to trust that we are doing the right thing by not doing what we think we should be doing at that moment in time.  So if you’ve decided to go shopping rather than doing that report, don’t beat yourself up ... just go with it.  It's exactly what you should be doing at that point in time.

In fact, experiment with it.  Take something you’ve been meaning to do (something that isn’t of huge importance) and when you feel like doing some work on it, do it and when you don’t, do something else instead but don't beat yourself up.  Just see how it works out.

5.   Chasing the wrong goal

There could be one very simple explanation as to why you can’t get your backside in gear to do that one thing you’ve been meaning to do for ages ... it might be the wrong goal.  As I mention in my post ‘Why Goals Fail’ it could be one of a few things:

a.    It’s not your goal, it’s something someone else thinks you should want.

b.    It’s what you think you should want but deep down you don’t

c.    It’s just not the right time to be thinking or working towards that particular goal

d.   You’re trying to do it out of desperation

Achievement of goals comes from those that you are inspired to achieve.  If you aren’t inspired the likelihood of you achieving that goals is severely compromised.

So ask yourself the question, “Is this something that I really want or am I acting out of desperation or I think I should do it/want it?”  If you answer the latter two, then ditch it.  Find something else that you feel inspired to achieve.

In summary, we can spend more time worrying about not doing something than we would if we actually just get off our backsides and did it.  So next time you feel like you’re procrastinating, ask yourself which one of the 5 reasons are stopping you.  Once you’ve established what it is, then you have your solution.  However, what I will say is that the thought of doing something is usually far worse than actually doing it and using the law of motion, just taking one step towards the goal usually leads to more small steps and soon you find you’ve achieved what you set out to do. 

I’ll give you a good example of what I mean - for the last few weeks I’ve been saying that I’ll remove the weeds from the path in my back garden and give it a good scrub with bleach, but I seem to never have the time, energy or inclination to do it.  At the weekend, I was putting some rubbish out and happened to pull up a couple of the errant weeds.  The next time I looked at the time, it was two hours later, I’d removed the weeds, been to the supermarket and bought the bleach and scrubbed the path ... I only went out to bin some rubbish. 

The moral?  Don’t think too much, “JFDI” as one my IT Directors used to say. Motion creates motion.

Until next time, have a wonderful day.

Jo