Deon Du Plessis asked:


How do you define procrastination? For many people procrastination is something that they associate and identify themselves with far too easily. The challenge is that once you identify with a behavior (positive and negative) it becomes part of who you are and your experiences and actions are filtered through this identity.

We can define procrastination as “task aversion” which is the irrational delay of an intended course of action. Translated from the original Latin meaning, procrastination quite literally means ‘in favor of tomorrow’. As human beings we are always pursuing ways of being better off – everything we do, we do with a positive intent. Although procrastination seems to contradict this fact, it actually illustrates a very important point. What we do, or fail to do, is not purely the result of our conscious choices, but often the result of factors we are not aware of consciously. When you procrastinate, at some level of your unconscious thinking, you believe that taking the action will leave you worse off than actually taking the action.

To change this negative tendency, you need to do two things. Firstly you must remove the association and ‘attachments’ that you might have with procrastination. Realize that you are NOT a procrastinator. Although you might procrastinate at times, you cannot afford to limit yourself by defining yourself by your behavior. Secondly, you must redefine procrastination in such a way that it will motivate and empower you instead of limiting you.

The way we define things for ourselves will determine the way we interact with it. If you see procrastination as a chronic problem that you were born with, then it is likely that you will struggle with it all your life. If you define procrastination as a bad habit that you need to deal with at some point in the future, then it will control you. If you see procrastination as something you cannot overcome then you will probably be right.

If you define procrastination as a negative tendency that you choose to put aside, then you will be empowered to take action despite procrastinating. Whether you CAN do something is rarely the result of your ability. It’s almost always a case of motivation. Motivation is nothing but an inner drive that compels you to action, and gaining leverage on yourself is a powerful way to find the necessary motivation.

There is a definition of procrastination that can do just that. I choose to define procrastination as the thief of time. When you think about it you will realize just how true it is because procrastination is what keeps you immobilized and stuck in inaction. Time is your most valuable and your most precious asset. People go to extreme measures to protect their money and their possessions, but do very little to ‘protect’ their time – the one thing that money can never buy. Learning to value your time, is a powerful strategy for overcoming procrastination and getting the most out of your life. When you value something you will look after it and protect it.

Your time is limited. Have you ever wondered how many days you have in your lifetime? At first blush you might guess that it is a hundred thousand or even a million. In fact, if you grow to be 70 years old your entire lifetime will only have 25 550 days. If you are 30 now, then you’ve only got another 260 000 hours left – and a third of this will be spent sleeping.

You have just as much time as Bill Gates, Mother Theresa, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey or any other person on this planet. The only difference is in the way you use your time. Don’t allow procrastination to steal your most precious asset.

Instead, see procrastination as a call to action. It is likely that what you are procrastinating about is something that you ‘must’ do. See, what we don’t do and what we don’t face controls us. But when you face it and you do it, you liberate yourself and it no longer has any control over you. If you have this sense of urgency and awareness that your time is precious, then you won’t allow the thief of time to hold you down. What you get out of yourself does not rely on your ability. It relies on how much of your resources you can get access to and this is almost exclusively a psychological exercise. By changing how you define procrastination for yourself you can start to change this internal conversation and empower yourself to take action and make things happen.



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Michael Lee asked:


This article contains some fantastic tips to deal with procrastination. Are you ready to take immediate action towards the fulfillment of your goals, or are you still making the same lame excuses to do it tomorrow or some other time? Procrastination can be a serious issue, and these tips to deal with procrastination can really come in handy.

I have come up with two ways to deal with procrastination: the stop-gap way, and the overhaul way. This collection of tips to overcome procrastination deals with the overhaul: finding the roots of your procrastination habits and learning how to deal with them.

Number 1 Tip to Deal With Procrastination: Know the Root Cause.



What triggers your procrastination? Is it because your boss is nasty and is a slave-driver? Is it because your wife is nagging you? Or is it because you are just so swamped?



When you react to challenges and stress by being passive-aggressive and then procrastinating, then you need to correct your attitudes. Some people retaliate on others by procrastinating on delivering their requests. But if you are just procrastinating because you are so busy at the moment, then you have to organize and prioritize. Weed out the root of your procrastination: understand yourself. Only then can you make the steps to stop it.

Number 2 Tip to Deal With Procrastination: Correct Your Thoughts.



When you catch yourself thinking like a victim and being passive-aggressive, correct yourself. Passive-aggressiveness is not a good way to deal with stress and challenges. You have to own up to your anger, your irritation, and be honest with yourself and with your “adversary” about it.

Honesty dispels a lot of negativity by flashing the light of truth on it. There is something refreshing when you are honest with yourself. If you notice, when you are honest about your emotions and about everything in your life, you feel light. If you have been in denial or have been lying for so long, then you finally decide to make a clean ****** out of things through honesty, then chances are, you’ll feel lighter upon your moment of honest revelation.



Thus, when you deal with stress through procrastination, stop yourself. Admit what you feel. Confront your “enemy” in as civil or even gentle manner as possible. Try to arrive at a solution or at least a compromise. Then move on and finish what you have to do.



Do not succumb to thoughts that tell you that you are a victim. Face it; life is not exactly a good model for equality. But you can actually choose to deal with its unfair moments in a constructive manner. Let it spur you on instead of breaking your back.

Number 3 Tip to Deal With Procrastination: Practical Tips.



If your root cause for procrastination is not an unhealthy attitude, you can deal with things in a more systematic, objective way: through prioritization and organization. Rank your tasks from the most important and urgent to the least, and tick them off as they are done. Stick to the goal of finishing the list. And don’t make room for excuses. Just go and do it.



Procrastination has cost more hours and money than anything else. Procrastination has delayed projects and grounded programs to a halt. It is time to stop it dead in its tracks. May these tips to deal with procrastination help you accomplish whatever needs to be done.



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Deon Du Plessis asked:


How do you make an easy task difficult? Simple. You put it off and you keep postponing it until it eventually becomes a big deal. It’s one thing to procrastinate on the small things, but it’s quite another to procrastinate on the big issues in life. You can trace almost all your personal problems back to the failure to take effective and timely action.

The effects of procrastination are mostly indirect and often far reaching. One of the most devastating effects of procrastination is fatigue. In fact, procrastination and fatigue goes hand in hand. Procrastination is not only the result, but also the cause of fatigue. Because of procrastination you keep postponing important tasks and because you postpone it you become fatigued. There is a big difference between being tired and being fatigued. Fatigue is emotional and mental while tiredness is mostly physical. Getting enough rest can solve the problem of being tired, but it won’t really do much for fatigue.

We all have a mental capacity which determines how much we can comfortably deal with in our lives. Everything that’s ‘on your mind’ is something that you have to deal with on a mental and emotional level. When you deal with it you feel a sense of accomplishment and you feel like a load has been taken off your proverbial shoulders. In reality, this sense of relief is the result of offloading some of your emotional load by dealing, and completing some task that was on your mind.

Everything that you feel like you have to do has got some value to you. We only procrastinate about the things we care about – otherwise it’s won’t concern us whether we do it or not. It’s only when we fail to take action that procrastination sets in. Every time you fail to take action and complete a task you fail to offload what’s on your mind. This tends to add to your ‘emotional load’ and since we all have a limited capacity, we tend to feel fatigued.

Fatigue can lead to more serious issues, ranging from depression to sleeplessness to a loss of self confidence. When you procrastinate you can easily turn the simplest task into a mountain and the more you think about it the harder it gets. Now you have to climb a mountain in your mind every time you think about doing it and every time you fail to act on it your mountain gets bigger and your fatigue get worse. Although procrastination and fatigue

The most important things to remember when you suffer from fatigue due to procrastination is that a sense of accomplishment is self reinforcing. Every time you finish a task you feel good and it’s this feeling good that motivates you to do more and to be more effective. It’s one of the most effective ways to conquer procrastination. More than anything, procrastination is an emotion – it’s a feeling and by taking charge of your emotional state you can take back control and empower yourself to take action and complete what you know you ‘must’ do. Unfortunately this fact is also responsible for fatigue. When you fail to complete a task, or worse, when you fail to even start, you create the opposite effect. You feel bad and you tend to act on this feeling which is what keeps you from approaching the task in the future.

Procrastination and fatigue is a cycle and the one tends to lead to the next and because it’s so self reinforcing it tends to keep many people tied up in an immobilized state of mind where they can’t seem to make any real progress. One of the simplest ways to snap out of this patterns is to design some simple task that you can easily complete and to gradually build your emotional strength. If you are procrastinating on something, break it up into three or four simpler tasks and then focus only on one at a time – forget about the rest. Each time you complete one you will ‘offload’ a bit of emotional baggage, your load will feel lighter and your sense of accomplishment will motivate you to do more.

Procrastination is like running on an emotional treadmill – you keep running but you are not going anywhere. It only leads to an emotional tiredness or fatigue that can greatly jeopardize your sense of well being, your level of motivation and your personal happiness. We all have a desire to progress with our lives and we at the back of our minds we all know what we can do to move forward and make our lives better, When we don’t act on these ideas we feel a certain strain which comes from the knowing that we are not advancing. This strain contributes to fatigue and adds to your emotional load that you have to carry around with you. We all carry a little ‘to-do list’ around in the back of our minds. Ever time something comes along that you ‘have to do’ it automatically gets added. As a general rule, the longer your list, the more fatigue you will experience.

To effectively deal with fatigue you simply need to off-load your ‘emotional load’. You have to deal with everything that’s on your mind. And the most effective way to do it is to deal with it one by one. Start with the tasks you are procrastinating most about as they will give you the greatest sense of accomplishment. Procrastination makes an easy task hard, but action makes a hard task easy. Just do it. Break it up into smaller simpler tasks and just do it piece by piece. It’s ironic, but the more you do the more you can do. The more you do the less emotional baggage you have – the lighter your load, the more you can carry. The wonderful fact about procrastination and fatigue is that when you eliminate the procrastination, you can eliminate the fatigue. Be kind to yourself. Free yourself from procrastination. Free Yourself from fatigue!



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Deon Du Plessis asked:


Procrastination, like all of your behaviours carries consequences. Whether your behaviour is conscious or unconscious, you will eventually have to deal with the effects. The effects of procrastination are something that we all have to confront and deal with from time to time. It’s only natural to procrastinate at times but, the way you deal with your procrastination patterns will determine what effects procrastination has on your life.

One of the most obvious effects of procrastination is the failure to reap the rewards that would come from taking action. When you procrastinate you simple fail to take action on the very things you know will bring you the rewards that you desire. Although you know what you want and even what you need to do to get it, you still have to take action and it’s usually at this point where procrastination sets in.

Because the results that you desire are often something bigger and better than what you currently have, you must step outside your comfort zone to get it. You might have to take actions that you are not comfortable with to which your unconscious mind reacts by “protecting” you against that which is uncomfortable. Although the short term effects of procrastination might seem as “positive” the long term effects are almost always negative.

Failing to reap the rewards of taking action can have many knock on effects. Taking action on your ideas and desires is one of your most empowering gifts. It is the process by which you can make the intangible tangible. Through your actions and your behaviour you create or un-create your life. It’s not only the direct results of your actions that creates you outcomes, but often the very fact that you are actually consciously affecting the conditions of your life. It not just your actions, but rather your failure to take action that will have a greater effect on the rewards you reap from life. From this point of view the effects of procrastination is not just a direct but also an indirect loss of rewards. Every action is a cause set in motion that affects and build on past and future events to the point where we can never really determine the actual effect of one specific action. More than anything else, action opens you up to opportunity.

Opportunity is rarely the result of you waiting for it. When you put yourself in line with what you want most through your conscious action you expose yourself to opportunity. It’s never a case of whether you have opportunities but rather are you noticing the opportunities? But even more importantly, are you using the opportunities or are you procrastinating? One thing is for certain and that is when procrastination becomes a habit you won’t even notice all the opportunities on your doorstep. You will live your life in distraction, constantly looking for short term “pleasures” to avoid the real challenges that will cause you to reap the real results. You will always “turn a blind eye” to the real opportunities. Thos who succeed are rarely the people with the most or the most splendid opportunities. They are the people who saw an opportunity where no one else saw it and then they took action to realize it.

Out of all the negative effects of procrastination and indecision the failure to spot and act on opportunity is probably the saddest. So many people with so much talent fail to live up to their true potential because of procrastination. The rewards you reap from life will be either a direct or an indirect result of your actions or your inactions. Not only will procrastination prevent you from reaping the rewards but your inaction will prevent you from even being exposed to opportunity. Opportunity is knocking but you have to take action and at least open the door. Don’t let the effects of procrastination stand between what you are and what you can become. As the famous entrepreneur and businessman Victor Kiam once said: “Procrastination is opportunity’s assassin.”



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