Ah yes, the joys of procrastination… putting off all the hard or unpleasant work that you need to get done until later. Then, when it all piles up until it’s over your head, you feel overwhelmed, wondering how you managed to end up so deep in a mess and how to escape.
Some people seem to have a natural tendency toward procrastination, always putting off until tomorrow what could be done today. Others don’t seem to have that issue. They don’t seem to have any problem just getting right to work on something, even when it’s very unpleasant to even think about. Those of us who fall into the first category can, however, take steps to deal with our “problem”.
So, since you have a tendency to procrastinate (otherwise, why are you reading this article?), why not put it to work against itself? Here’s some ways you can put off procrastinating until tomorrow.
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Write A Daily Task List (DTL)
This one is relatively obvious, and you’ve probably heard it until you’re sick of it… but any list of ways to help put off procrastination would be incomplete without it. All this requires is that each night you make a short list of things that need done (or worked on) the next day. Once you have your list, there are many other things that you can do with it.
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Prioritize Your DTL By Importance
The first thing you can do is prioritize the list you created in #1 by importance. That way you can be sure that you will at least get the most important things accomplished, and you are likely to find that you get more than the first few things done, because you feel like you’ve gotten the important stuff out of the way and gotten something accomplished for the day. You may even find yourself on a roll, getting things done left and right.
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Prioritize Your DTL By Difficulty
Your next choice is to prioritize your list by difficulty, putting the most difficult tasks first. This makes it so that you have the hardest work out of the way early, so that when you are more tired later in the day, you have only the easier tasks left, thus decreasing the chances that you will put a task off until tomorrow because it’s too hard to finish in the time that you have left. Also, this particular method of prioritizing is even more likely to make you feel like you’re “on a roll” than #2.
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Prioritize Your DTL By Unpleasantness
This may be very heavily related to #3, as difficulty is a major factor in how unpleasant a task is… but it’s not the ONLY factor. This means of prioritization has the advantage that as you complete your tasks, the remaining tasks are more and more things that you actually want to do, not things that you have to do. Also, like #3, you’re less likely to have that really unpleasant task at the end of the day that you put off until the next day because you don’t want to start it late.
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Reward Yourself When You Complete Tasks Early
People have known for thousands of years that you train people, including yourself, through rewards and punishment. You reward behavior which you want to increase, and punish behavior you want to decrease. Since most procrastination has punishments built right in (like putting off paying your bills… not good for your credit, people come and shut off power, etc.), you are free to concentrate on the rewards side of the equation. The three easiest ways to do that are trewarding yourself for completing unusually difficult tasks, rewarding yourself for completing a longer-term task early (ie something that you expect to take a week and you finish in three days), and rewarding yourself for completing your DTL. Don’t make the rewards too easy, or out of proportion, though, or they won’t help you to train yourself… you have to feel like you earned whatever it is.
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Post Your DTL Where You Will See It Regularly
This is especially good if you cross tasks off as you go, since it allows you to see your progress. It can be motivational to see a list of ten tasks with seven of them already crossed off, especially if it’s still relatively early. Even if you don’t have anything crossed off yet, having the list in a place where you see it can remind you of what you decided to do for the day if you get distracted.
Just as a note, the phrasing in that last sentence is important… always look at your list as what you decided to do, not what you “should” do. What you “should” do takes the element, the feeling, of choice out of it, which can leave you feeling resentful even if you made the list yourself. It’s a list of tasks that you decided to do, not something forced on you by others.
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Be Accountable To Someone Else For Your DTL
Just about everyone hates to feel stupid in front of someone else. If you let someone else read your DTL, and share your progress on that list with them at the end of the day, it provides a little more pressure to actually get things done, so that you don’t feel like you have to stand there in front of them and tell them that you screwed around all day and didn’t get anything on your DTL done. Don’t let doing this make you feel like you have to put more things on your DTL just to impress them, though… the list is still for you, and you don’t want to exhaust yourself trying to impress someone.
If you’re in a relationship, your significant other is probably a good choice for this.
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Do Things Instantly When Possible
This is really simple, and the thing that has helped me the most with my natural tendency to procrastination. This is completing tasks as soon as you can when you become aware that they need done. For example, you can pay your bills as soon as you get them in the mail. Or you can fix that chair with the wobbly leg NOW instead of waiting until the weekend (by which time you’ve probably become accustomed to procrastinating that task, which makes it easier and easier to continue doing so, while other tasks pile up behind it).
Your mental list of what needs done (not the same as your DTL) can become overwhelming when things pile up, making you want to hide behind one distraction after another. Completing tasks as soon as possible after you become aware of them keeps your mental list all cleared out, making you far less likely to feel overwhelmed, helping you to put off procrastinating.
Procrastination tendencies are incurable. They will be with you for the rest of your life (at least from what I have observed in other, and felt personally). Using the methods above, however, you can put procrastination off until tomorrow, and get things done today.
