Do you procrastinate? Of course you do — we all do to one degree or another. Procrastination makes it very difficult to manage our time effectively, and for that reason alone, I wanted to spend some time exploring it this week. It’s almost never brought on by not wanting to work, but instead it usually occurs when we ask too much of ourselves and have too much on our plates. Ambition is great when you’re building your business, but that same ambition can leave us with impossibly long to-do lists every day; and when that happens, procrastination becomes a necessity (more on optimizing your to-do list, here). So, why does it happen and what can we do about it? I have some ideas:
Don’t Insist on Perfection
Perfection is an admirable goal, and we should always want to do things to the best of our abilities. When we insist on being perfect, though, some of our activities and tasks can feel unpleasant and unrewarding; and that’s when we begin to procrastinate. If we don’t think we can execute something perfectly, then we’re not going to want to do it. Set your standards high, sure — but often, ‘good enough’ is better than perfect.
Avoid Distractions
Some distractions are easy to spot, and that makes them easy to avoid. Other distractions are so ingrained in our daily lives that we can’t really identify them as distractions — things like our email inboxes, our phones, social media, or talkative colleagues. We need to know what’s stealing our attention, so we can get reduce or get rid of those things and maximize our time. When we lose time to distractions, we can begin to feel like there’s not enough time in the day; and that’s when we begin moving things to tomorrow. Removing distractions lets us operate with higher efficiency and makes us less likely to procrastinate.
Set Realistic Goals
Ambitious, challenging goals are often the thing that spurs us on to reach new heights. But we need to be careful to not set goals that are too challenging or too ambitious. When we set those unrealistic goals, rather than motivating us to move forward, it can begin to feel like they’re impossible to reach. A good method I’ve found is to break each of my larger goals down into a series of smaller goals. That keeps me from feeling like I’m not making enough progress, and it makes every goal seem like something that can and will be accomplished. Those small, actionable steps allow us to always be seeing progress. Running the Boston Marathon can be daunting, but running a mile or two at a time to go that same distance is much more achievable. Even if your steps are small, you’re still going to get there.
The better we understand why we procrastinate, the easier it is to keep it to an absolute minimum.
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