Procrastination and How to Kill It!
Most of us are master procrastinators! Let’s celebrate that… tomorrow. We tend to put things off and off until it is nearly the last viable second to do anything about said task. We also all seem to know that we do this, yet we still continue to procrastinate and push deadlines to their limits.
What is it that makes our brains procrastinate? What can we do about it? The most compelling evidence for why we procrastinate is that the task or assignment we have been given (or have given ourselves) is vague and the steps for accomplishing it are not clearly defined or laid out. Imagine knowing that you need to make a strawberry cake for an upcoming party. You pull out a box of cake mix (or pull up a recipe online) and stare at the picture on the front… imagine that there is no recipe or list of ingredients that you need to add… staring at the picture is probably about as far as you will get.
Without a recipe or list of steps many of us wouldn’t be able to create a strawberry cake from scratch, let alone a beautiful one efficiently. That is because our brains thrive on lists and directions. Our brains get overwhelmed when they are faced with a big task that has no visible break-downable steps or parts. Like the old saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Breaking things down into smaller more manageable steps jumpstarts us into not procrastinating.
Break Your Task Down Into a List of Steps To Take
When a list is present, no matter how much we hate step #1, we will likely still do it. In fact, if we read through the list of ingredients and directions we are way more likely to jump right in and create the cake of our dreams without many pauses or breaks in progress.
The same concept applies to anything else we are procrastinating. Once we break down what we are procrastinating into smaller chunks or steps our brain automatically starts preparing to check off those steps. Let’s say we know that we need to give a presentation by a certain deadline and the topic is pretty wide open or spacious… sometimes those tasks with seemingly lots of freedom of choice are the hardest tasks we have because it is hard to narrow down and break things into steps. Once we can sit ourselves down and focus on what all the steps are, we are likely to stop procrastinating and start doing. If you find yourself stuck again then you probably ran into another step or part that is ambiguous or unclear. Focus on what needs to happen to move forward and break it into steps, POOF! You’re back on the road.
I have tried this out many many times in my life. Once you have become aware that you ARE procrastinating, then you can start to work on killing it. By simply sitting with yourself and identifying what exactly you are procrastinating and also look at why you are procrastinating things, the procrastination tends to evaporate. The same even goes for me writing blogs. Once I sit down and start to outline what I will write, I often end up writing the entire blog post even though my intention was not to get it done originally.
There will be times when you start to focus-in on what steps you need to do for a project that are holding you up and you realize that the whole project or task is pointless and not worth doing. In those cases you can often abandon the need to get it done or you can rework whatever the task was into something worth doing. Our brains are really good at knowing when they are being fed vague information and instructions. Without tangible direction forward, they will conserve energy and focus on other important things, like hydrating, hydrating, hydrating!
