Five Handy Hints on Procrastination

Congratulations! If you’ve been putting things off then you have discovered one of the better kept secrets of finding enough time for the things that are important – stop doing those that are of lesser importance.

Some things yield a huge payoff for the time you invest.  Others yield virtually nothing. The best way to distinguish between them is to extend your time horizon by 5 or 10 years.  Looking back from that perspective you will very quickly sense the long-term significance of any choice. 

If you’re honest, you’ll see there won’t be enough time to do what’s most important to you if you squander your time doing things that have a low long-term yield.

Even with that useful insight we can still find ourselves putting things off. We want the thing to be perfect. It needs a block of time larger than we have. The task seems hard. We know the end, but not how to begin. We know what to do, but not when.

Curiously, procrastination is not constant or continuous. It does not affect us all the time and it does not affect everything we do. If it did, we would never get out of bed in the morning, nor get into bed at night. The nature of procrastination is that it is only a sometime thing. Work out why that is for you.

If procrastination does strike, here some suggestions:

1. Modify your environment – stand up, work elsewhere, open a window. It is easier for us to break a behaviour pattern using physical movement than by silently cursing our own ‘weakness’.
2. Work on the thing you want to get done for just five minutes. At the end of five minutes, switch to something else if you want. Chances are, you'll get involved enough to keep going.
3. Phone a good friend and try to convince them you have good reasons for the continued delay.
4. Write out how procrastination makes you feel, e.g. weak, useless and helpless. Burn that. Then write out how taking even a small action will make you feel e.g. strength, purpose and in charge.
5. Pay someone else to do what you really cannot bring yourself to.

George Bernard Shaw observed that reasonable people accept the world, while unreasonable people demand that it change. Therefore, he concluded, all progress depends on unreasonable people. Be unreasonable with your life.

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Many people set out to look for the forest and get lost in the trees. In your dreams coaching gives you the space, time and tools to break out of this self-perpetuating cycle, get a clear picture of what you want and helps you design a suitable route map to your chosen destination.

Your first success has been recognising the need for assistance.

Your second is having the good sense to call for it.

Call Paul Hayward on 01234 831631

"The biggest thing is to have a mind-set and a belief you can win every tournament going in." ~ Tiger Woods