First, realise that procrastination is a means you use to escape a reality that you don’t want to face.
It gives you temporal relief by distracting you from what you otherwise have to focus on.
Think about it. When did you procrastinate the most?
When you say you’d start doing your homework? Washing the dishes? Sleep?
These cues for procrastination– are what you’re running from.
Ask multiple “why”s
Let’s take homework as an example.
Why do you NOT want to do your homework? Because the homework is too difficult for you. Why? Because you don’t understand what the teacher’s saying in class. Why? Because you didn’t pay attention/it’s a consensus that that teacher explains poorly.
Once you come to a point that you can no longer ask “why”, start problem-solving.
You have two paths
You can either completely remove that cue of procrastination from your life, or find a better way to do it.
These are the only two solutions. Others won’t help you “eradicate” procrastination- because if you don’t want to do a thing, you will not do the thing anyways, regardless of how suffered you’ve been due to procrastination, how hard you are trying to force yourself to do it, how bad the consequence would be, whatever. You’re just like a kid saying “no” to whatever offer, refusing to stop his annoying behaviour, and you get pissed off by your own behaviour.
I think everyone who has ever procrastinated (i.e. everyone) gets it.
Yes, trying to better the process requires much more effort than the “conventional” advice (e.g. “oh just ask yourself to do it for 5 minutes” “work outside your home” “put your phone away”), but it’s the only long-term solution.
If you’ve chosen path 2 instead of 1, you must love or need something about it, and is probably something that spans a longer interval of time, say, your bachelor degree.
So if you are doing it anyways, for quite some time, why not do it in a more enjoyable way, and create better life experiences?
You may think that “oh it is impossible to ‘enjoy’ it”, but what’s more probable is that you just have not yet find a way that can allow you to. Afterall, our imagination seldom exceeds our cognition.
Back to our homework example. Perhaps we focus on finding a more enjoyable way to do it. The problem is you couldn’t understand what have been taught in class because the teacher explains poorly. Maybe you could start going to tuition classes which their teachers usually teach much better. Maybe you could buy some online courses. Maybe you could learn from free youtube videos. Maybe you could study with better-scoring students and learn from them.
There are actually loads of options if you would use your creativity to make your way out.
Why stop procrastinating when I can still get it done anyways?
Because you don’t really enjoy the free time you create during procrastination.
The procrastination-activity, say, watching Neflix, does “distract” you, but your inner voice won’t stop saying things like “oh crap I should be doing my homework…”… and that really destroys your experience and diminish your joy.
And everyone understands “if you could get that done on time anyways, why won’t you do it first, then enjoy your time?”. Yet still can’t do it. They just can’t! (If it was that easy, procrastination won’t be such a popular topic, afterall!)
So you will anyways have to work on improving your experience in doing the thing, or you will never be willing to do it.
And the other benefits is that as you improve the process, you also improve the outcome. You did not only end procrastination and get a better life experience, but you actually perform better and get better results.
Make it easy. Make it enjoyable. Make it effortless.
That’s the only way out.
Thanks for reading! Your attention and feedback matters to me.
-Learning How to Live 2.0
If you enjoyed reading the article, could you drop a like, and share it with a friend?
If you would like to read more of my content, you could subscribe to my free newsletter by typing your email in the below subscription box.
If you have any feedback to my writing, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
It means a lot to me. Thanks!
Links:
living 2.0 