I’ll get it done tomorrow! I swear, I’ll do it tomorrow! Tomorrow is a brand new day!
How many times have you told yourself that you will lose 5 pounds? Fast forward 2 months, you still haven’t got to it. You’re probably now afraid to step on the scale because you think you have gained a few more pounds.
How many times have you told yourself that you will de-clutter your desk but then you put it off for a day and then it becomes two days and then the paperwork piles up to a mountain and the mere sight of it gives you anxiety?
Have you ever wanted to start a blog about wellness but kept putting it off? Now it’s been six months and your dream hasn’t become a reality!
Procrastination is the avoidance of doing a task that needs to be accomplished by a certain deadline. And chances are that if you procrastinate sometimes or if you are an actual procrastinator that you have asked yourself the million dollar question: “why do I procrastinate so much?” or “why do I procrastinate even if I know that it is so bad for me?”
I know I have! This blog post is evidence of my procrastination, it should have been posted a week ago.
Here are a few psychological reasons behind the reasons why we procrastinate and I will explain how you can overcome them with a little logic based philosophy.
- I just lack self control or motivation.
When we need to get something done, what we primarily rely on is our self control to bring us to complete our task on time. But self control can only work if it receive the necessary support from self-motivation. Without help from self-motivation things do not get done according to the deadline.
Aristotle said that moral virtue can be developed. We learn to be virtuous primarily through practice rather than reasoning and instruction. In order to be a person with self control one must practice self control until it becomes a habit.
You will not wake up one morning and magically have self-control, self-control is a quality that you exhibit once you have deliberated on the right course of action, chosen the right thing to do which is to resist temptation (to procrastinate in this instance) and execute the action. Will power can be strengthened through practice. Like a muscle, the more you exercise this “muscle” called will power the more you can build it up to help you in more difficult tasks.
How to practice self control? Well…start small. It’s all about baby steps.
Congratulations! You’ve already laid your yoga mat down with the intent to exercise. So resist looking at the new notification that has appeared on your phone which will cause you to delay or even cancel your workout session. The notification isn’t going anywhere and you know it and it’s not even that important. Practice self control. Little by little you will build up resistance to temptation and a ping! or ringing phone will not bother you because you will have no desire to interrupt your daily workout routine. And once you begin achieving your little goals, you will develop immunity to distractions because you know what is important to life that is your personal wellness.
Trust me this works. At first I could not bring myself to finish 5 push ups because I would always check my messages but now I don’t go to bed without finishing 25!
2. The reward is too far into the future.
It is easy to procrastinate on tasks when the reward for finishing a task is not immediate. We tend to want immediate gratification and therefore tend to discount the value of the reward that is in the far future. This is called temporal discounting.
Let us use the example of eating healthy with the intention to lose weight. You want to lose 10 pounds before summer and it begins with changing your diet. You have 6 months to go down a dress size. Your frustration tolerance increases because you have been eating well for 1 month but you are not being rewarded, you still cannot fit into a size 6 so you consider reaching for a brownie.
Philosopher Jeremy Bentham encourages the application of the hedonic calculus toward your long term happiness. Hedonism is the philosophy that the value or something depends on the amount of pleasure it could yield. The hedonic calculus says to engage in the action that yields the maximum amount of pleasure.
Eating clean for 6 months and dropping a dress size might may give you short term displeasure (it takes time to develop a taste for kale!) *but* it will yield infinite happiness when you achieve your goal, so much so that the displeasure you experience from eating healthy will be worth the future pleasure of looking great! Therefore succumbing to temptation to experience 10 minutes of pleasure and possibility of regret is not worth the long term pleasure you will experience in the future when you go down a dress size.
When you are tempted to procrastinate and the reward is no where in sight, just ask yourself if the instant gratification really worth the long term unhappiness of being further away from your goal. If you have any real desire to fit into a size 6 in six months, the instant pleasure will not be worth it!
3. I’m just waiting for the perfect time! I just want everything to be perfect!
Believe it or not but people procrastinate because they have a desire to be perfect. Perfectionism can lead to procrastination in a number of ways. A desire for perfection may cause someone to either delay starting their project or not beginning it at all because they are afraid of making a mistake.
For example: some people desire to write a book but want every single line to be perfect from the beginning that they don’t even begin the book. While some people may start a project, they have anxiety about completing the project because they want it to be absolutely free of flaws which causes them to end up working on their project it indefinitely and never actually finishing it.
Although it is completely reasonable to want to create high quality work, making it absolutely flawless becomes an excuse not to start it and finish it.
How does one stop this self-defeating behavior of procrastinating that stems from perfectionism which is preventing you from either starting or completing a project?
“Dedicate yourself, but amidst all your dedication, be still human” said David Hume.
Perfectionism is not the reason why people prosper. Anyone who has achieved their fitness goal, wrote a bestselling book, achieved their dream of becoming a doctor, lost 50 pounds, ran a marathon did not do it by dedicating their time to being “perfect”, otherwise they would have neither started their goal nor have completed it! They dedicated their time to their work to do a job well done, a job that they are proud of and can improve on.
Successful people accomplish their goal by setting out a goal and striving to be the best that they can be. By learning, making mistakes, chipping away, working hard and not giving up you can reach your goals. It’s very rare that people get their desired results the first time they set out to do something. So take it step by step. Start by doing what you desire and then work on it, don’t get tied up with being perfect.
Trying to be perfect can actually make success difficult to achieve as it causes emotional stress and tends to thwart creative thinking. Therefore you just have to do it! If you want to do something, just do it! You know that story you’ve always been waiting to write? Begin writing! Are you still thinking about running that marathon in the spring? Begin training! Have you always wanted to knit a blanket? Well go buy some yarn and google a YouTube video. Anything that is worth doing will not be easy but it will be worth it at the end.
Sure there are some in the batch of successful people that use perfection as a motivator to achieve their dreams and goals but it is not true that those who demand perfection live happily. No doubt, you need to dedicate yourself to your goal but while you do that you must enjoy the process that leads to your accomplishment. You must understand that everything is a work in progress and that with time your talents will develop and improve.
Often with perfectionists it becomes hard to tell between a healthy devotion to a cause or unhealthy addiction. Therefore it is important to lead a balanced life where you work towards your goals and have a good work ethic but not to the point of being a workaholic who forgets about the other important things in life like family and friends.
I hope you liked my blog post and it helps you in your life 🙂
