A Great Trick for Overcoming Procrastination
I wanted to share with you a little trick that I’ve started using to stop procrastination.
You know the feeling. You have a project or task that you know you have to do but the thought of sitting down and doing it is just too much to bear. It’s either too overwhelming, exceedingly boring or just plain unpleasant. We’ve talked before about how to deal with procrastination, but here is another string to your bow.
Sometimes when procrastination has set in, our mental resistance to getting started can seem out of proportion to the difficulty of the task. You’ll know this is the case if you find yourself saying
“I just can’t get started. I don’t even know why because it’s not that bad, but I just can’t.”
The task has become so associated with procrastination and pain that you can’t go near it. So it’s time to take the pressure off. If it seems too hard to get started on the task, then do the best job you can of preparing to start the task. This may sound a little strange, but bear with me.
When you give yourself permission to NOT do the task but do related activities, the dread and resistance melts away and you can see the task for what it is. Let me explain using an example:
Let’s say you have to reorganise your filing cabinet. It’s a task that a lot of people put off because it’s fiddly, tedious and often seems like it could take a few years. But actually when you think about it, it’s not that difficult. The mental resistance to the task is greater than it should be.
So in this case, what you can do is give yourself permission to NOT start reorganising. You tell yourself it’s ok that you don’t want to do it and in fact you don’t have to. Instead you give yourself a task of preparing to do the filing. And when I say prepare, I mean it in the loosest sense of the word. It can be anything even slightly related to your reorganising task.
In this case, it may include heading to the stationery store to buy some filing folders. It may mean looking up some articles on the internet about reorganising and personal efficiency. You might want to read a book on personal organisation like Getting Things Done. You could even have a look at office makeovers on Lifehacker. In short, you do anything and everything related to filing, that isn’t filing.
What you will find, quite surprisingly, is that after doing some of these activities (which to the untrained eye appear to be time-wasting) you will at some point feel compelled to stop procrastinating and just get on with the task. And for some reason it won’t feel anywhere near as unpleasant as before. This burst of motivation can be enough to get started. And often, getting started is enough. The rest gets easier after that.
Try it, it really works!
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