Beating Procrastination: Hijacking Laziness

Procrastination sucks… particularly if you’re the over-achiever type. If you’re the “everything will work out because life is wonderful, and I love this Earth and its inhabitants” type, then procrastination is the purpose of your life and you could die happy right now.

Procrastination is that evil little robot that accidentally got a soul and now wants to rule the world by plugging into every mainframe and electronic system all because it has the power to. He tends to rule over my world in very long bursts. Those are those days when people just tell you that you’re in a rut. The laziness sinks in and everything becomes pointless. You start questioning the reasons why you wanted to do certain things.

Procrastination is very much emotional. It becomes that, “I don’t feel like doing it” archetype. Lack of motivation, low energy, and depression are some characteristics that procrastination associates with. Over-analyzing and over-thinking could also play a role. Sometimes I’m too lazy to go over to my computer and press the power button just because I have to “think” about doing it; making it a huge task, to get off the couch, walk upstairs, open the door to the room, sit down at my chair, reach down to my pc tower situated on the floor, and give a gentle push on the silvery button with the logo for power imprinted on it, then wait for the OS to boot up which in my mind takes for-fucking-ever. Crap, I just talked myself out of all the energy it takes to do it.

Then the day goes by, where the things I’ve listed on my list of tasks suddenly got bigger and yet no movement done to even whittle down that list. I was so full of promise when I thought of the idea and the potential joy it would bring me if it were ever completed.

Things look so much better when they’re in your head.

Now there are many tips and techniques to maybe move past this shift of nothingness and trick ourselves into doing the things that we know we should do. But as an achiever type, this type of thinking is short-lived, unless we get to the root, the base, the foundation— a way of thinking and an overall mindset.

This mindset will have to deal with the beliefs you have about procrastination as well as the rules you bound yourself to when dealing with it.

ANALYZING PROCRASTINATION

Like many things in life, one of the best way to tackle situations is to break it down logically. Let’s see if we can objectify procrastination. So our question is: Why does procrastination happen?

• No sense of urgency. Apparently, whatever “it” is, is unimportant. Its priority is either really low, or the time allotted to finish is really long. Therefore, its ability to be put on hold is greater than say, paying your cell phone bill coming up in three days. By that time there’s a grace period and a charge if not paid promptly, which leads us into the next point…

• No sense of consequence. Really, what’s gonna happen if we don’t get anything done? The world still moves right? We’ll still have annoying people in the world, and I still gotta figure out what to eat for breakfast tomorrow morning.

• You’re already in a state of “non-doing.” Ever hear of the phrase “Success Breeds Success?” Well, I think procrastination breeds more procrastination. That snowball effect seems to run rampant when we’re on a roll. This could also be labeled as creating momentum, whether it’d be for good or dumb-ass purposes. This is when whatever it is we’ve been doing (or NOT DOING) for a period of time becomes a habit. I’ve heard that if you do anything for about twenty-one days it becomes a habit. That’s a long ass time of sitting on your ass “thinking” about doing something. So sad.

• You’re an EMO. It’s usually hard to do mid-terms and college exams while writing a poem about emptiness, whilst being apathetic. Emotional people usually have a harder time concentrating their efforts on tasks. Focus becomes blurry. “I don’t feel like it,” becomes a common theme when you’re in an emotional state.

• The task seems too overwhelming. As humans we have a brain. As intelligent humans we know how to use parts of it. As intelligent and emotional humans WE’RE A FUCKING TRAIN WRECK! Damn us and our pathetic human brains. Psyching ourselves out is a human tendency we do with no thought. It’s ingrained in our being. Uh oh, I got a 300 page essay to write before Saturday and I got a date on Friday, gotta remember the condoms, but oh shit, I haven’t read those three books on astral projection yet…crap! Fuck it, I won’t do it.

• No reason or purpose. When there isn’t a reason why we do things, we forget our motivation to doing them in the first place. Unless something was forced on you, then we just become rebellious. One of the biggest motivators is having a reason why you’re doing something. Even though it becomes tedious at times, I exercise and watch my nutrition because I have a goal to look like Daniel Craig in Casino Royale… and I’ve never seen what a six pack looks like on me.
  

Now there are probably more points, but those tend to crop up the majority of the time. Let’s get into how to combat these points as well as procrastination in general.

GIVING PROCRASTINATION A KICK IN THE ASS

So let’s first start out by getting our head right. Time to implant some beliefs.

• I have all the time in the world. Even if you think you don’t, assume you do. Just the act of pretending to have a luxury of time can help to alleviate stress and put you in a less paranoid state to actually sit down and get something going.

• As long as I do SOMETHING, a little bit makes progress. Didn’t Vin Diesel say if you win by a mile or an inch, you still win, or something along those lines. What’s the downside? You still accomplish more than not doing.

• I do things because I WANT to, not because I HAVE to. That’s right, I CHOOSE to do these things because they benefit me. I want to because it is my decision.

• Realize life is short and there are only 1,460 minutes in a day. Once it is gone you can never get it back, and that’s the truth. Why spend life just floating through it? If that’s what you want to do, why are you reading this? Go back to hittin’ that bong and watch more anime.

• Get clear about what you want to do. When you can visualize clearly what it is you want to do or accomplish, it becomes very motivating. This is also the reason why dreams seem so enticing. When you “lose yourself” (Thanks Eminem) and submerge in your own visions it seems doable.

• Remember WHY. What is the reason you want to do this thing or things? What do you benefit from doing it? Then ask yourself, what do you lose if you don’t do it? (Notice how I’m forming these questions to stop you from making excuses.)

• There’s no such thing as perfect. I used to have a problem with this one. I went through most of my adult life thinking I evolve and better myself in the goal of becoming a perfect human being and every teenage girl will flock to me and create cute little screen names on their instant messenger accounts that all somehow associates themselves as my wife. And if I put up a cam show I could finally quit my job. Sorry, wandering again.

But I kept getting disappointed when things didn’t always go the way I wanted, in the order I wanted. It stressed me out so much that I just got frustrated and dropped everything or stopped putting effort in. The point is, aiming for perfection creates stress on your psyche because we are all our own worst enemy, and stress will always interfere with your productivity. So relax, and believe things will always work out in the end anyway.

Let’s get to some actionable things we can do shall we.

• A little bit everyday, makes it all go away. I think I made that one up, I’m not sure. It’s something I go by whenever a project happens on me. Break down your big tasks into reasonable chunks. People don’t usually process enormous, complicated deals very easily, so break things down into manageable chunks. Spend a little bit of time jotting down how you plan to handle a task. Remember, baby steps. You didn’t learn to walk in one day did you?

• Get rid of distractions. Or at best minimize things that could potentially distract you. This forces you to focus on the task at hand, also making you more efficient. Wouldn’t it feel great to be completed in 20 minutes and have more time to do other things that are possibly more enjoyable such as… absolutely nothing? Of course if you enjoy what you’re doing already then time seems to fly. (That goes for absolutely nothing too!)

• Enjoy the process. How about this, if there is something you feel you MUST do, then what would have to happen in order for you to take joy in doing it? What would make it a pleasing experience? You could listen to music while typing papers (it’s been said classical or instrumental music helps to focus your thoughts), or if you have to call people back, do it while taking a bath or hitting the spa. Suffice it to say when you enjoy something, then you’re going to want to do it.

• Time yourself. Giving yourself a pseudo deadline. This could either take a few minutes or a few days to complete tasks; anything longer would be considered a project and you may need to break that project down into manageable tasks. A generic amount of time I use is about 10 minutes per tasks of 5 or so and keep cycling through until completed. TIP: Keep a HUGE digital stopwatch close by or if you’re on a computer use a program such as PC Chrono to keep on your desktop. I say huge because it’s very in-your-face and it helps to keep you focused on how much time goes by.

• Stop multi-tasking. For guys, multi-tasking is significantly inefficient all because of the way guys are. We’re pretty much goal-oriented and to the point. When we shop we don’t have to try on every pair of pants to see if it looks good, just get in and get out. Women on the other hand seem to be able to take care of a baby, make calls, cook dinner, balance a checkbook, while entertaining guest in an uncanny way. The corpus callosum is responsible for the communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Women’s are smaller in size but have 10-33% more nerve fibers in it, so the communication between both halves is significantly higher than us barbaric males. This can be compared to adding more RAM to your PC to handle more programs running simultaneously. (Sorry, didn’t mean to go nerd herd right there).

In either case, focus drops and efficiency isn’t as high so more time is spent doing other less important things for the sake of just “doing.”

*I know a lot of people that like to listen to music while they do their work, personally I can’t do that, I just get too into it and then my A.D.D. kicks in and well, you know the rest.

EXTERNAL SOURCES

I found a few ways to deal with procrastination. The first way deals with jumpstarting the art of just doing something in what they call “dashes” of 10 minute intervals. This is kind of like doing circuit training when working out, moving from one exercise to the next.

(10+2)*5 found on 43folders.com

http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/11/procrastination-hack-1025

Lifehack.org has some good methods of dealing with procrastination. Check it out:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/tag/procrastination

So these are just my thoughts on procrastination. Now I also had a second agenda with writing this and it was to stop my ass from procrastinating any longer. What better way to stop procrastinating than by writing about how to stop procrastinating. What sucks is knowing how to do something but not doing it. That’s just plain laziness.

There’s also another issue I’d like to bring to light. When you’re just random and creative, you tend to have a brain with an antenna, or in my case, a big-ass satellite dish metaphorically strapped to my head. The problem with being creative, as well as a mild case of A.D.D. is you get easily distracted and things just pop in your head that could be useful ideas in the future.

It all impedes on whatever task you may be attempting to complete because it takes up a bit of psychic RAM (Thanks David Allen for that term). To stay focused, I keep with me a blank piece of paper or a stack of post its and whenever something pops up that I know will stick in my brain, I dump it out on that paper, this way I don’t have to remember it. I know some people like knowing everything and keeping things in their head, but my head gets cluttered with the onslaught of media from this Information Age we live in. Plus, I like being lazy whenever I get a chance, but that’s just me.

Now my creativity stems a lot from my randomness so this method of getting rid of distractions (i.e. my own brain) works to a point. I’m eventually gonna have to come up with a way of collecting and archiving my thoughts, but that’s a different article altogether and I just don’t feel like writing it right now.