Posted by Procrastination: What Is It?
We are all familiar with procrastination, the age-old tendency to put off doing something until later even knowing doing so would result in longer hours and increased stress. And while procrastination can be a big issue for us, leading to a lot of pain and missed productivity, its opponent, procrastination, can be just as damaging.
It is described as:
Procrastination is the propensity to complete activities as soon as possible, even if doing so requires more labour or costs more money.
While the procrastinator puts off vital work for too long, the procrastinator rushes through less crucial tasks.
Why does someone procrastinate?
Ironically, avoiding unpleasant feelings is the root cause of both procrastination and procrastination.
If you pay close attention, the impulse to put off doing something always comes with a strong, uneasy feeling. It can be worry, boredom, or humiliation at different moments. We don’t like that feeling, though, whatever it may be. Furthermore, delaying our task till later is a terrific method to momentarily let that uneasy feeling fade or disappear entirely. In other words, when we delay, we make a choice based on how it feels right now rather than what would be in our best interests overall over the long run.
Procrastination involves a procedure that is quite similar. Procrastination is the same as procrastination in that it entails making decisions based on how they make us feel at the time rather than what is best for us in the long run.
Therefore, short-term, emotionally-driven decisions that compromise our long-term values and objectives are the root of procrastination.
Other reasons people procrastinate
There are a few other frequent causes of procrastination in addition to this core psychological dynamic:
• Low-cost satisfaction
According to research, doing short, simple tasks with set deadlines tends to make us feel happier than completing larger but ambiguous chores. In other words, we feel immediate satisfaction when we cross off small tasks from our to-do list.
• Survival mechanism
Going after the simple, low-hanging fruit in life probably made more sense over the majority of our species’ history than delaying actions in order to reap rewards in the long run. When the threat to one’s safety was constant: Is there a sabre-toothed tiger in that cave? Going for the fast victories undoubtedly made sense since what if our hunting expeditions are unsuccessful and we go without food for a few days? Delaying the simple little things goes against the biological grain since our brains evolved over hundreds of thousands of years under those conditions and have only had a few hundred years to do so in the relatively safe conditions of modern life.
• Energy management against time management
Most of us are taught to view productivity and work in terms of effective time management. Start with the simple questions on a test if you barely have an hour to finish it, then work your way up. However, in the complicated world of serious work, it is frequently wiser to control your energy than your time.
• Conscientiousness
Procrastination frequently affects diligent, watchful, and hard-working people more than procrastination does. If your overall guideline is to complete activities promptly, it’s simple to begin crossing them off without pausing to assess whether some tasks are worth your time and effort more than others. Being diligent and finishing your work is, thus, typically a good quality, but if left unregulated and unstudied, it can become problematic.
How to work more effectively and avoid procrastinating
Here are some tips for battling procrastination and the propensity to obsess over minute details of your work if you believe you are one of such people.
• Increase your understanding of how you operate
The first step in changing any behaviour is always raising awareness. If you aren’t conscious that you are doing something, it can be challenging to stop. So ideally just reading this blog and knowing that this issue has a name will help you start noticing it and become more conscious of it in your life.
I advise merely keeping track of and making notes about the places in your life where procrastination tends to occur initially, before you even start trying to alter anything and does it frequently occur on particular projects or while dealing with particular people? Or does it typically manifest more in your private life? Maybe in terms of parenting or housework, for instance?
Make a “Procrastination” note on your phone and attempt to be mindful of your propensity to procrastinate for a few weeks, briefly writing what occurred and where in your note.
You’ll be in a lot better position to truly address your procrastination problem once you’ve completed this and have a better understanding of the “laid of the land.”
Develop emotional resiliency
Despite the fact that procrastination can take many various forms, emotion is ultimately at its core. Procrastination is always motivated by emotion, whether it’s the desire for a fleeting feeling of satisfaction from checking something off a little to-do list or the reduction of intense anxiety.
Therefore, overcoming procrastination will always require confronting challenging feelings. The best approach to achieve this is to gradually but consistently focus on raising our emotional tolerance.
Our capacity for physical exertion isn’t particularly high when we initially return to the gym and begin lifting weights or using the treadmill.
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