To fight the demon of Procrastination

If you are reading this article then probably you already know what procrastination is. But if you are not sure weather you are doing procrastination or not, let me help you with a few symptoms which will help you to understand this disease.

1. Are you always complaining about your current situation?
2. Are you always seeing time and trying to schedule or plan your work after 10 minutes or 15 minutes but never started working on it?
3. Even if you have started working are you lacking focus and trying to check you mobile in every 40 sec for notifications or social media.

4. Do you invest your time more in planning rather than working on it?

5. Do you always feel tired and sleep while working on some task.

6. You tend to waste your time on irrelevant work like facebook, instagram or even sleeping rather than working on the actual work.

7. Are you doing less important work which gives you an illusion of getting busy but you still keep on scheduling your important work later.

8. Are you getting addicted to something toxic like alcohol, tobacco or mobile phones or may be bad relationship?

Photo by Kyle Cleveland on Unsplash

Yes if any or all of these are happening to you, you are in a big trouble. But if you are here I am glad that you take the responsibility of getting infected to this big disease of procrastination and you are here to get it fixed. That’s the first and big step towards curing this disease. Let’s now discuss the treatment so that you are able to focus on your work again.

You must have heard or read a lot of techniques to cure this like rewarding yourself or fixing the time for your work etc. I tried to do all of these. These might have worked for a lot but never worked for me so, I wanted to tell you what worked for me and how can you also do it. So, below are steps to cure procrastination and read inside every point to understand how it helped me.

1. Find the root cause and triggers.

I know you have been doing procrastinating for so many reasons, may be you might not be interested in doing that particular work, may be you feel so frustrated and invested in doing something but that’s not the point of procrastinating. We often manipulate our mind by saying maybe I am not doing the work because I don’t like working on it But trust me there is a different picture in the scenario. Figure out where are you investing most of your time, when you are not doing your work. For me it was my cell phone and I get to know that I am suffering from smartphone addiction. Yes I invest every bit of my time in finding information on internet and scrolling through social media apps. That’s when I figured out that it’s getting worse and it needs to be stopped.

2. Make an environment to stop/kill the root cause

Now since I had figured out it’s my mobile phone and I really need to stop it. I read every bit of information about it (yes, again on my mobile phone😋). What is smartphone addiction and how to cure it. I researched everything like what chemicals secret in my brain when I am using my phone. What levels are for addiction in the case and so on. All when I had figured out why and what problem I am facing. The next thing I have done is to how to cure this addiction. What are the treatments. In my case, It was uninstalling all social media apps, turning off notifications, changing the phone’s display in grayscale mode and fixing the time to use the phone app.

3. Self Control is the only method

Till now, you have recognised the main factors due to which you were not able to focus and keep on procrastinating on your major goals and you have already removed them. But that’s not necessary. Things which gives you happiness and distraction secrets dopamine in brain that is responsible for rewarding experience. You are going to get nervous, angry and a lot of it when the dopamine level gets lower due to not doing distracting things. But to get stable at lower dopamine levels give yourself some time. For me I have given 8 days to me. You can also give yourself the same time frame and you will see wonders in your focus and your concentration levels. In between if you feel the craving to get distracted, please endure it at least for the assigned time frame. Only then you will love the challenging experience of self control.

This is what worked for me and I am pretty sure it will work for you too, only thing is required is understanding and persistence. If you want to talk about it, I am always up for a meaningful conversation. You can get in touch with me on Instagram or LinkedIn.