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Stacks of works are waiting for you to be completed. But you are simply reluctant to draw out any passion or intention to finish the pending tasks. This reaction has clearly informed you – You Are Procrastinating! How to get rid of this morbid virus of procrastination? You may feel tedious for overcoming procrastination since it is with you for so long. I personally think I am a rather diligent person but I have ever afflicted with procrastination too. After searching for remedies, I got to discover that we need to understand our reasons of procrastination before we can fully eliminate it.  Please allow me to figure out 6 reasons here.

1) Overwhelmed with Works

Most of the time, when our works have been accumulated to an overwhelming proportion, we may tend to avoid it instead of completing it. The reason you try to escape from it is because you feel you are not able to manage it anymore. When this scenario happens, you may consider simplifying your tasks. Set aside sufficient blocks of time to allow you to immerse into the assigned task without feeling pressured. You can divide your task into manageable and consistent stages. For example, if you wish to finish reading a book, you may consider setting an easier goal like ‘read 10 pages per day’. After completing the first 1o pages, then proceed to another 1o pages for the next day. By implementing this method, you will find yourself accomplishing ’something’ every day, thus you will have the momentum to continue this habit until you fully finish your task, which is reading the whole book. Imagine you are setting your goal as ‘finish reading the book of 200 pages’ at the outset, then you may find it hard to achieve in a short period and subsequently postpone it.

Another approach is progressive working schedule. For example, you have registered yourself in a marathon, but you procrastinate in practising and training. In this case, you may start with a short distance run, let’s say 1 km, and then progressively train up to longer and longer distance as your stamina grows. You will realize running 10km doesn’t seem to be tough when you have already gained the experience of running 9km. The gradual progression you perform here is assisting you to see your next step as a mild challenge for you but you feel fairly confident to achieve.

2) Lack of Motivation

People like to be rewarded. When you incline to dilly-dallying in performing a task, you may consider of rewarding yourself with something after completing your task. For example you may reward yourself like watching your favorite TV show, enjoying a meal or snack, pampering yourself in spa, or anything you find pleasurable, after completing a scheduled task of let’s say 30 minutes. Due to the period of time you’ll be working on the task is reasonably short, you will be stimulated by the impending pleasure of the reward instead of focusing on the difficulty of the task.

Sometimes we procrastinate because we fail to see the importance of doing a particular job. In this case, creating urgency of doing that particular job will motivate you to proceed to completing the task. You may ask yourself a simple question “Why do you want to perform this task?” Then list down all the positive reasons of doing it. Let me provide you a very simple example, there is quite some time you do not clean your water filter cartridge. You tend to procrastinate as you don’t realize the importance and urgency of doing it. In this case, the beneficial point of doing it is you get to enjoy cleaner water supply, and the negative part of not doing it is you will be drinking polluted water which is going to impair your health for long term. After having a clear vision of the results, you will find yourself eager to begin because you have found a valid reason to execute the task.

Besides, have you ever been bogged down in the mid of a task and started asking yourself “Am I proceeding to the right path?” Finding your real intention is a powerful way of overcoming procrastination because you will never delay on what you love to do. Acute procrastination is actually an alarming sign, “You have gone to the wrong way. Change your direction!” Try to think about it.

3) Lack of Skill

Most people like to do things which they are well-versed in. Sometimes you may find certain tasks so prohibitive when you are lacking of proper skills to accomplish them at a satisfactory level. You tend to be skeptical about your own ability and subsequently lead you to avoidance of completing the tasks. This is also a type of fear, which is the fear of unknown. In this case, you can throw yourself with three options: educate, delegate, or eliminate.

a) Educate

You may need to acquire additional knowledge and skills for overcoming procrastination due to ignorance. This fear of unknown can be diminished or eradicated with education and training. For example, if you are in a dilemma of quitting your job and starting your own business, even though you really want to be your own boss, then you may start equipping yourself with knowledge concerning business by reading more related books or attending seminars to learn from successful entrepreneurs. Solicit the help of a coach or mentor if you want. Getting yourself a coach is not only useful in deriving related knowledge but he or she also serves as a discipline teacher to hinder you from procrastination. After obtaining the related knowledge and skills, you will become more confident in doing what you need to do.

b) Delegate

If you are stumped with certain tasks which are not in the scope of your expertise, then you may opt for delegating it to someone else. Getting a professional to complete the task for you will definitely be much faster. None of us in this world is fully independent. You depend on farmer to plant vegetables for you. You depend on mechanic to serve or repair your car. You depend on tailor to sew clothes for you. So that’s nothing wrong to delegate tasks that you may not be familiar with.

c) Eliminate

Filter your tasks and eliminate when you find them unnecessary or not important at all. Instead of embracing all items to your to-do list than you can reasonably handle, why not remove some tasks which you think do not carry any value. Shortly speaking, review your priorities.

4) Fear of Failure

Some people will refrain themselves from performing a particular task due to the fear of failure. Those procrastinators may opine that if they don’t do, they won’t be rejected; if they don’t do, people around will not know their incompetency. They procrastinate because they want things to be done flawlessly. In this case, we have to understand, nothing is perfect in this world, so just do it! Even you have attempted very hard to present your product to your customers, your customers may still say ‘no’ to you. Rather than expecting rejection, criticism or failure, try envisioning the sense of accomplishment and the joyful elation you’ll obtain from completing the task. The fear of failure will be dispelled gently after you have started your journey of a thousand miles with the very first step. For instance, if you want to produce a full-blown blog post, you can’t procrastinate by telling yourself, “Now is not the best time to write, as my writing skill is not good enough.” Improvement will come gradually. You may need to write a first draft, before you can better your writing by going through few rounds of review on it. Never expect to complete your writing without the first draft. Learn how to overcome your inner fear, get P.E.P.S.I today!

5) Fail to Handle Distractions and Interruptions

Handling distractions and interruptions needs self-discipline. Having a focused mind to keep reminding you about your task list is a way to ensure you are not susceptible to peers’ influence, especially when they ask you to go out for entertainment even though you haven’t finished your scheduled tasks. You may tell them sincerely that you need to perform certain tasks, enlist their understanding on your situation. True friends will respect your decision and intention.

If you find that you procrastinate due to the environmental problems, try to solve them. If your house is full of noise, close the door to have your room insulated from unnecessary noise. Turn your mobile phone into the silent mode or switch it off if there are too many incoming calls. All these subtle details can enormously help you to channel your concentration back to your works.

6) Get Rid of Stress

Working under stress can lead to low productivity and also procrastination. When you feel stressed of encountering certain task, you may be gravitated to stop doing it in order to keep off your tension. Benjamin Franklin quoted, the optimal strategy for high productivity is to split your days into one third work, one third play, and one third rest. Manage your leisure and working time equally to avoid encroaching upon the other. Having reasonable playing and exercising time will lead you to a more balanced life, so that you won’t be easily toppled at the slightest oppression. For more information related to stress and anger management, you may visit this flash video, 7 Tips of Dealing with Anger.

If you think it is too tedious to discover your own reasons of procrastination and try to seek  the remedies, please allow me to grant you these 3 simple words again, ‘Just Do It!’

*Additional tip: You can be the expert of overcoming procrastination if you know the techiniques of prioritizing tasks.