Does your time matter? Do you respect your own time and live life to its fullest or do you always count on tomorrow to get stuff done?
Procrastination steals your time away from you. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, even months can slip away and the same things keep showing up that need to be done. Procrastination makes you feel bad, you create negative stories up about what it is that you have to do and all of a sudden the task is consuming you, it has become a heavy weight on your shoulders that you dread. Procrastination affects your happiness and can affect your bottom line, so why do so many do it?
A procrastination habit will rob you of life’s enjoyment. A lot of the time, many of us don’t consider our time to be of any importance when they are procrastinating, after all we will always have tomorrow to do what we need to do.
There are a few things that happen when you continually procrastinate: You feel negativity about yourself; You start to justify not doing it in ways that are probably untrue; It can affect your work, which could in turn affect your financial bottom line or your job; It will affect your relationships; It will affect your health.
Are you procrastinating starting a healthier way of living or do you actually feel the physical stress of procrastination?
–The task never gets done so you don’t move forward to the next great thing in your life;
–You continually silently feel bad and may even feel like a failure.
What has procrastination and feeling overwhelmed cost you so far? It can be a big deal if you don’t learn how to manage it.
If you have had enough and today is the day, there are steps you can take to managing your procrastination. Like everything you do when you are breaking a habit, you have to make time to practice these steps every day to keep your desire for change to keep you on track.
Procrastinating Busting Steps
1. First step is your awareness. You must be aware of your procrastination habits. Do you have projects that continually flow over to the next day? Are you feeling overwhelmed or bad? Be aware of your feelings around procrastination so you can recognize when you are doing this habit.
2. Your daily schedule. I am big on writing a daily priority list. A lot of the time, we feel overwhelmed because we have a lot to do and we try to keep it all straight in our heads.
Depending on your lifestyle, some structure can be very satisfying. Write down what is important for you to do in the different areas of your life. Count work, count home stuff, count your social life.
Three is a very manageable number for me. Everyday, I put three priorities in each area of life on my list to get done that day. Schedule your priorities, including what time you will do them and how long you suspect they will take to complete. It is really important to be realistic about this so that you are setting yourself up for success and not failure. The idea is to start to feel in control and successful getting stuff done.
3. Mind management. Now that you know what you are doing for the day, you will have to manage your thoughts. Negative, procrastinating thoughts are the habit you are kicking. You know what you need to do, you have your priorities for the day. Now, it’s up to you and your thoughts to make it happen.
Having negative thoughts or happy thoughts are a choice. It can be as simple as turning the light switch on to see the light and stop procrastinating by setting yourself and your thoughts up to be what you want or turning the light off to allowing your bad habits to take over and then you feel bad. Don’t make this a bigger deal by saying it is too hard. It is hard to get rid of your bad habits, but it really is as simple as making the decision and managing your thoughts so you can stay on track. Say something as simple as “I can do this! I got this!”
4. Your physical space, your environment. If you work in an office, a studio, at home or in your car, make it support your emotional well-being. Your space must be supportive so that you feel empowered to do what you need to do. Stuff in your space, piles, clutter, coffee cups and garbage you will take your thoughts away from what you have to do; this stuff will rob your concentration. Take the time to create the best creative empowering work space for you to be a high performer. It may not take that much time and the reward for doing this will be your productivity.
5. Daily reflection. It is really important to reflect on your successes every day. Most people don’t do this, so you don’t understand how valuable this is. Take five to 10 minutes at the end of every day to reflect on how great your day was and what you are grateful for. If for some reason one of your items didn’t get done today, reflect on your priorities, this is where you learn did you schedule stuff too tight, did you get derailed by other business, did you stop following your agenda and allow other stuff in. The only purpose here is to learn and grow, there is no beating yourself up, that doesn’t work, it just makes you feel bad. Learn what works for you and what doesn’t, and every morning write your priority list understanding what will bring the best of you to the world.
These are the beginning baby steps to busting procrastination. Follow these steps to feel more joy and fun in your life, after all that is what we are here for.
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