25 ways to overcome Procrastination used by high achievers
23 min readJul 3, 2024
Procrastination is the habit of continually putting off or postponing an activity that is beneficial to you. It could be for your health such as exercising, your career such as working on an important project or your relationships such as asking out that cute girl next door. In most cases we procrastinate because the things that are beneficial to us often bring returns in the long term but require more effort and inflict pain in the short term. We therefore choose instantly gratifying activities like junk food, social media and long naps in place of long term satisfying activities because our brains are wired to follow the path of least resistance so as to protect us from pain in the present. Our less evolved limbic brain region that is controlled subconsciously does not have the capacity to think beyond the present moment, it acts on impulsive biological drives that are conditioned by our primitive past. Therefore we can only overcome it by being more conscious of whatever we are doing as we let our more evolved intellectual thinking cortex brain region take control.
You will usually find that project that has potential to turn your career around has been put off for days but days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months and months turn into years as you wait for that perfect moment to get it done. That moment when you are perfectly ready and everything is in place to start because the stars are aligned. However sooner or later when the perfect moment does not arrive you realise you will never be able to fulfill your dream because your time has run out. Its not just that every year we waste gives us a year less to achieve the life of our dreams, but every month, every week, every day, every minute and every second we waste is a second we shall never be able to get back.
We therefore have to create a sense of urgency in our lives in order to overcome procrastination and realise there is no better time to begin working on our life’s goals than the present moment. Having been a victim of procrastination myself, there are various strategies i have employed to try to overcome it. It is up to you to choose which approaches may best suite your situation given your own unique challenges with procrastination.
- Find your passion
When choosing what to do find something you are passionate about. For instance if you are trying to choose a career, a course or a subject for research find something that sparks your interest. If you are doing an activity that you are not personally interested in, it will always appear boring and you will require so much more effort to sustain your attention. If the activity is interesting for instance like i always loved math at school, then working on it will appear effortless and even when it proves to be difficult or challenging you will not give up easily. If something feels extremely dreadful or forced, giving you a sense of regret every time you have to attend to it, then may be its not what you should be doing. Once you have figured out what you are truly interested in its time for the next step. - Visualise your success
This involves taking a moment by yourself to imagine what the best case scenario would look like if you succeeded in your endavour. Picture in great detail for instance you receiving that degree certificate, being called for that promotion or building that house of your dreams. Picture the implication of your success in its depth, how this will change the various aspects of your life, your financial, social and personal wellbeing. Also picture the hardships you will have to go through in order to achieve your dream, the obstacles you will overcome until they are part of your dream. I always do my visualisations on Sunday mornings before i get out of bed, but you can continue to do them for brief moments in the course of your week when you feel down or any other time that works best for you. Visualisation provides a pulling factor, a motivation that drives you to reach a particular goal so that you will find yourself feeling the desire to complete even the most difficult tasks because you are in love with the end results. Visualisation builds within you a sense of anticipation and passion that fuels your desire to keep moving towards your goal. - Contemplate your failure
Contemplating your failure is equally if not more important than visualising your success. If visualising your success gives the pulling factor to move towards your dreams then contemplating your failure provides the pushing factor to push you towards them. Despite this we often ignore this aspect because we want to avoid negative thoughts, however science shows our brains are driven more by fear than by pleasure. For instance if your doctor told you, you would become healthier and stronger if you run a 10km marathon every day for a month chances are you wouldn’t be able to do it. However if he told you, you have a chronic disease that will kill you in one month if you do not lose weight by running 10km everyday you will probably do it. This is the power of negative thinking though it is often ignored. It involves visualising not achieving your objectives because you either did nothing or did not work hard enough in your endavour for instance at your career. It involves imagining the depth of the implication this will have on your life, your social aspect — people will look at you as a failure, your financial aspect — you will become broke and your personal aspect — you will become depressed and sick or even die. You can imagine how all these aspects connect together and make you feel in totality relative to what you could have become if you had not procrastinated. You can also think of your successful friends to provide some comparative context and how they are doing so much better. The easiest way to contemplate your failure is to imagine what would happen if you did nothing because everything positive in life requires conscious effort. I usually contemplate my failure on Saturday mornings before i get out of bed. It puts the fear in me as to why i need to pursue my goals and motivates me to stay on course. You can choose any other time to contemplate your failure and continue to do so for brief moments in your day most especially when you catch yourself feeling tempted to procrastinate. - Make a plan
The planning process needs to be made in advance before embarking on what you need to do. One of the major causes of procrastination is not having a clear plan on how you intend to achieve your goal. You therefore drift around unsure of what you should be doing and waste precious time rethinking your actions. I always say the more the time you spend meticulously planning what you need to do the easier it will be to implement your plan. So for instance if your end goal is to build a career as an online freelancer, you can plan to create social media channels, network with other freelancers, showcase your projects to various companies and build your skillsets. You can breakdown your goals into small steps so that you can achieve one at a time as you move towards your end goal and carefully consider how you will deal with possible challenges. This will drastically reduce your chances of procrastination because you will clearly know what you ought to be doing with your time such that even when you do not feel prepared to achieve your big goals you can chip away at the small steps in the large plan you have prepared. - Make a schedule
A plan without a schedule is useless because you have decided what ought to be done but you have not set a place and a time to do it. While making a schedule it is better to divide up the things you need to do into the finite time you have so that no thing is left unattended, this is called blocking. Every activity that is within your plan must have a specific time block in your day that is assigned to it that should not exceed a specific number of minutes. You can make a daily, weekly, monthly or even annual timetable for implementing your plans. This makes it easier to catch yourself procrastinating because all you have to do is take a look at your schedule and know what you are supposed to do and for how long. I have a structured schedule in which i block my day into time i spend learning, working, doing physicals, updating social media, resting and doing creative tasks. This way everything i need to do has a piece of my time during the day. - Create rules
Rules are important to prevent you succumbing to your impulsive mind that is drawn to the easiest path of least resistance. Rules are meant to keep you on course by making a commitment to do what you are supposed to be doing. They say the greatest enemy you have to deal with is yourself and yet there are rules about how you are supposed to behave towards others but no rules about how we should treat ourselves. You can create a rule when you find a point of weakness that you know you will be tempted to do such as cutting out sugar from your diet for one month, or not looking at your social media during working hours, going to bed at 10pm everyday and waking up at 6, or doing 30 squats everyday. Rules are meant to create a guiding structure to follow so as to avoid you going unconscious and falling back to your old habits. It is important to know that the rules you make should be aligned with your goals therefore every attempt to break them will only pull you backwards taking you further away from achieving the life of your dreams. - Discipline
This simply means doing what you are supposed to be doing and not doing what you are not supposed to be doing. Once you have made a schedule and a set of rules to abide by, discipline means building the will power to follow the schedule and obey the rules with no excuses. Once in a while you will feel your impulsive mind tempting you to go astray and grab a bite of that juicy cheese burger but always remind yourself that you are a strong disciplined person who is committed to his word. By giving in you would be breaking a pact you made with your past self in the same way you would break a sacred pact with a close friend. This would be highly dishonest of you and ungrateful for everything your past self has done, effectively destroying the happiness of your future self. Discipline means having faith in your plan and following it through without compromise because you are confident it will get you to where you need to be. - Limit distractions
Distractions use much of our finite energy which is spent doing less productive tasks like gossip or social media until we have little left to do the truly important tasks. Distractions can come in form of noise at work, chit chat at home, popup notifications on your phone or even intrusive thoughts. They divert much needed attention from the task at hand and sometimes you can even find yourself spending endless hours following a trail of irrelevant content because you were distracted for a few seconds. The best way to avoid distractions is to keep them out of reach, turn off notifications on your phone, move into a quiet space and try to spend some time by yourself. You can also practice mindfulness meditation to counter intrusive thoughts by simply watching them instead of getting carried away by them and bringing yourself back to the present task. Sometimes i listen to classical soothing music to drown out intrusive thoughts while am at work and this helps me focus and tap into my flow state. If a distraction is unavoidable I have found that it also helps to postpone it to a different time and place, in this way you are not discarding some important distractions such as a call to your mum or a drink with friends, you are scheduling them for later. - Tap into flow
The flow state is a state of effortless action where every activity seems to seamlessly flow from the previous one. It is a state in which we are completely absorbed into whatever we are doing and perform at our peak. The flow state is achieved by athletes, artists, scientists and programmers when they are busy at work losing all sense of time and self. It is a state of high performance where work seems easy or flows naturally from the inside but from the outside it seems superhuman. Its like watching a pianist play a Beethoven symphony with absolute speed or an artist draw a Picasso with breathtaking accuracy or a writer produce Shakespeare with flawless ease. Flow state has been said to increase people’s level of happiness and fulfillment therefore while in it you will have no reason to procrastinate because you will find ease in what you are doing. One of the ways you can induce the flow state is to make sure the challenge level of what you are doing balances with your skill level in other words it is not too easy that it becomes boring and not too difficult that it will become stressing. Finding that sweet spot is key to tapping into flow and gradually increasing the challenge as your skillset improves just like in a video game. - Build momentum
In physics momentum is defined as a product of mass and acceleration. There are therefore two factors involved, the weight and the motion of the task. If the task is too heavy you have to create that initial push so as to build up enough momentum for the wheels of motion to continue turning on their own. Its like pulling the recoil cord of a generator in order to get the engine to start running. Knowing this makes you realise that the starting point of any endeavor is always difficult but things always get easier as you get along. It may not necessary be physical effort that is required but even concentrated focused mental effort can help build up momentum and engage flow. If the task you are about to do seems unimaginably large, try breaking it down into small steps and find the easiest step you can do given your current situation. Then focus all of your effort on this small step which once successful will give you a rush of dopamine from your achievement and build up confidence to face the challenge of the next step and the next and the next. - Create gaps
You cannot be on go go go all the time, once in a while it is necessary to take breaks. To avoid being overwhelmed by work in flow state due to loss of sense of time and fatigue i always schedule time for breaks in order to rest and recuperate. Time for breaks is always after long stretch of work at least two hours in order to fully harness the power of momentum. The gaps should be for a brief moment often not exceeding 20 minutes and could be for a quick meal, short nap, brief meditation or physical activity. It is important not to use these gaps to do mentally stressing activities like browsing social media or making heated arguments because this will only make you feel more exhausted instead of resting and recuperating. The gaps also help provide a change in perspective for instance if you were stuck with a difficult coding problem to approach it from a different angle. They also provide time to reflect on your life, how far you are from completing your goals and give a much needed boost by making a short reminder of your visualisation. After spending a few moments to myself i tend to feel more invigorated and energised to continue at my task and feel less desire to procrastinate because i have overcome my fatigue. Sometimes i take the gap after finishing a sub-task before attending to the next or when am stuck. I find that even if i spend a few moments not focused or thinking about anything, the stress that has built up from working on the previous sub-task calms down and i create more space for new ideas to flow in to solve the next problem. I sometimes find that creative solutions to problems always tend to pop out of nowhere after these short breaks. - Balance your life
There 3 major aspects to life and that is work, self and relationships. If either of these is out of balance with the rest you will not feel motivated to pursue it however successful it might seem. For instance if you are spending so much time working at the expense of sustaining your relationships with your friends and family this may create a sense of unfulfillment with work that may manifest in form of procrastination. Contrary to your problem having anything to do with your work place, it may have more to do with what you do after work and you may remain unaware of this causing more frustration at work. The same will apply if you spend too much time at work at the expense of your personal health and wellbeing, denying yourself rest and leisure time because you want to beat a deadline until you reach burnout. Take time to yourself, taking care of yourself, spoiling yourself and living in the moment otherwise what is the whole point of work. If your job is too demanding that it has caused you to lose your entire sense of identity and worthiness to it you need to ask yourself if it is really worth it. A good work life balance is important in order to remain motivated and stay on course. - Consult and Compare
You know what you want but you don’t know how to get it, you dont even know how to go about starting it. You will continue to procrastinate because all you have is a vague idea of what you want to achieve with no concrete picture of the steps you need to take to achieve it. In this case it would do you good to look at what others are doing, no great idea was built from scratch, most great inventors built upon the preexisting inventions of others. Therefore you do not have to reinvent the wheel, don’t have too much pride that you are afraid to ask questions and get free advice. Visit people who have already made it in your field and find out what steps they took to get there. If you are building a product, study the competitions product first and see what good ideas you can get inspiration from without necessarily copying it. When you have a good role model, it gives you a standard, a concrete target to aim at and can help you overcome procrastination. If others can do it so can you, and our brains naturally mirror the characters of those we admire the most. So visit as many resourceful people as possible and aquire as much knowledge as you can get about a specific journey you want to embark on. This will help you avoid making the same mistakes that have already been made a thousand times before you and therefore help you build the confidence to avoid procrastination because you will know what you are doing. - Make it fun
The most successful people are not motivated by the end goal, they are motivated by the process. This means if you do not have a lot of passion for what you are doing or its extremely tedious, you can still find a way of making the process of doing it fun and interesting. For instance you can combine it with another activity that you like but that is not distracting like listening to your favorite music when you are working on your projects or working out. Combining a fun activity with a tedious one tricks your brain into thinking the difficult task is also producing instant satisfaction and therefore is more motivated to do it. You can also have a healthy snack while working at your desk or have an interesting conversation with a friend while doing your gardening. This takes your mind off the tension and helps you relax as you work, so long as it does not turn into a distraction. You can also make the actual activity you are doing fun by doing it in a fun and interesting way like being pleasant and friendly at work or making your tasks more challenging by setting higher targets or doing them faster. Some people do their housework while dancing, what an interesting way to make a tedious activity fun while trying to follow the beat. - Take action
Newtons third law of motion says that action and reaction are equal and opposite. Therefore in order to overcome procrastination you need to have an action mindset and to know that for any result to occur, an equal action is required. Instead of sitting down and over-intellectualising what needs to done, you need to get your hands dirty and get involved if any progress is to be made. The thing is to always keep moving, even when you do not have the strength or stamina to go very far, make minuscule motion and the momentum will eventually build up. The results you get will always largely depend on the amount of effort you put into any endavor, so the more the effort the bigger the results. Sometimes it helps not to be too focused on the results because you might find it demoralizing due to slow progress. In such cases it would be best to simply apply as much attention and effort upon your action and have faith in the law of motion to produce the positive end results in the long run. - Throw yourself a bone
Once in a while reward yourself for a good job well done, even if it’s a small achievement in comparison to your larger goal. We often wait for others to appreciate our efforts but this may prove to be futile and in such instances its important that we recognize and appreciate our own endavours. Even when we are unsuccessful, ultimately it’s the effort that counts and so you can reward yourself after a long day of work by putting your feet up and having a glass of wine, browsing social media, going for a movie or spending time with family. Your brain soon recognizes the association between the hard work and the reward and begins to enjoy the tasks it previously dreaded doing. Its important not to over indulge in your reward or your brain will soon lose interest in work but maintain a minimum three to one ratio of time spent working verses time spent indulging in your guilty pleasure. - Stay conscious
At every moment at work its important to keep your prefrontal cortex engaged so as to avoid getting off course from your goals. Your prefrontal cortex is the conscious part of your brain that makes intellectual decisions located at the front part of your brain. The longer you can keep it engaged the less likely you are to be carried away by impulses that will veer you off the path to reach your goals. Our brains often fall victim to conflicting forces demanding for our attention such as when you feel the urge to eat, open social media or go to bed instead of working, you have to ask yourself from moment to moment: Is this what you had planned to do with your time? Is this the most productive use of your time and is there nothing else that you can do or that needs to be done that is more important than this? Your time should be fully utilised because its the only limited resource. I have found that constantly asking myself these questions keeps me engaged in activity because I will always find something worthwhile to do that is better than being idol or distracted. - Follow your mood
Its important when deciding what to do with your time to follow the mood. The mood could be driven internally from within or externally from the environment. For instance sometimes you have been working on the computer all day and in the evening you have to attend to another video call on the computer. After you have spent so much time staring at your screen its more likely that you would rather perform different kinds of tasks that require physical activity like gardening or house chores to avoid eye strain or burn out. I make sure during such time I do not attend to any screen time because my mood has changed. If the environment am in is noisy for instance like if am watching the kids then rather than conflict with them I would rather find an activity I can do simultaneously like reading rather than listening to audio recordings. Your work schedule therefore has to be flexible according to your internal and external environment so as not to conflict with it. If you are tired and exhausted from doing one activity like concentrated focused coding or creative writing, rather than stop working altogether, you can pay attention to more diffuse work activities like replying emails and making phone calls. This will reduce on your chances of procrastination because you will not be working against the natural flow of things while maintaining steady progress towards your goals. - Have faith
A lot of modern day thinkers think faith is overrated and would rather be left for the gullible religious fanatics who prefer to be driven by fairy tales. However there is a reason why the most successful people in life are also very spiritual and the reason is faith. Even with modern science and understanding there are a lot of things in life we cannot predict and that are outside our control which would drive a person mad if they wanted to know everything. Recognising this limit to our knowledge and ability is where faith starts. There is a quote that I love from Bob Proctor which says, Fear and faith both occur because of belief in something we cannot see so why do we choose fear over faith. In such a situation therefore the most logical option is faith because we have no evidence to support that either premise is true. Have faith in your goals, have faith in your plans, have faith in your abilities because ultimately they are all you have to depend on and if they do not succeed at least you will have given them your best. When you have a clearly laid out plan of what you ought to be doing, faith in your success is an inevitable consequence because everything that you can create with your mind, you can also manifest in reality. It is this faith that will keep you motivated not to procrastinate even during truly challenging times. - Self reliance
One of the causes of procrastination is our compulsive reliance on others. This is because the actions of others are not within our control, only our actions are within our control. Therefore if you find that you cannot finish an important activity you need to do because somebody else has not played their part it would be better to structure your activity in such a way that you do not have to rely on that particular individual. Try to be as self reliant as possible so as to do everything yourself or if not possible then delegate tasks to people who are closer to your locus of control and who you trust to deliver. The more self reliant you are the less excuses you will give yourself to procrastinate and the more in control you will feel to fulfill your goals. - Team work
Sometimes you will not be able to do everything due to limitation of your skills, time or interests. In this case it would be important to build a team of reliable, devoted and capable individuals to fill the gaps where you fall short. Looking at your plan not as an individually driven system but as a structured system with different team players, each having their role to play will move things along faster. You will take longer to procrastinate if you know that other team members always have your back and that your role is part of a much larger function that others have an equal stake in because they are counting on you to do your part. As a team leader its your role to find the most suitable individual to perform each task, give them freedom to maneuver on their own and make regular evaluation of their performance with positive guidance. It is you who has to ascertain that the member’s activities remain in line with your larger vision of which only you have the clearest picture. It’s important to share your vision with the team time and time again not only so that they are on the same page but also so they can contribute to the shaping and improvement of that vision, only then can they feel like they are truly apart of the plan. - Sharpen your saw
There is an ancient analogy of a wood cutter who spent all his effort and time cutting wood but could never cut as much wood as his friend who seemed to work much less time. When he asked his friend how he was doing it he said he was spending much of his time sharpening his saw. This means in order to simplify our work we have to spend as much time as possible preparing for it. If we ignore the preparatory activities and simply rush into the actual activity we may have greater difficulty achieving our objectives. This is like the person who wants to do a specialized job without obtaining all the necessary background training and practice for it. Or the surgeon who wants to begin cutting the patient before administering anesthesia. Or the chef who wants to start making the dish without preparing all the necessary ingredients. In general the better prepared you make yourself for a particular activity, the easier it will become and therefore the less likely you are to procrastinate. Preparation may occur in terms of acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills, acquiring resources, getting equipment ready and assembling a capable team. It is important if you do not feel ready, to not begin your task until you feel completely prepared so as not to waste time and resources. You would rather spend more time sharpening your saw than cutting wood. - Eliminate
It is said that the most successful people are those who specialize on one or just a few things. This helps them concentrate their finite energy, resources and time on the things that matter the most and therefore are more likely to move them. If we distribute our resources amongst many things then we will have less energy reserved for each activity and will be less likely to achieve our objectives. That is why it is said that, It is better to be a master of one than a jack of all trades. The only way we can have few things to attend to is to eliminate as much as possible things that are not of utmost importance to us. Its not that we cannot benefit from them but according to the hierarchy of importance we set they are not at the top. This means even giving up things you might consider dear to you for the sake of saving the things that are of absolute importance such as social gatherings with old friends, jobs that do not pay well or hobbies that consume a lot of your time. Some of these things may seem important but not as important for instance as the million dollar project that’s going to turn your life and your family’s life around. - Simplify
Once you have eliminated the things that are of less importance, you may have to simplify the things you have left. This is because the most important goals are also more likely to be the most difficult and therefore approaching them head on without simplifying them may prove to be complicated and illusive. Simplifying means breaking down what you have left into smaller parts which can be attended to separately. If the smaller tasks still seem complicated you can break them down further until the tasks are simple enough to understand and do with ease. I always use this approach when I have a difficult coding problem I have to deal with and I have found that breaking down the problem into smaller and smaller components until it is so simple that even a child could figure it out helps. I have found that no problem is too difficult to solve with this approach because at its core every problem is an aggregation of simple units. In life you can use this principle by breaking down any complicated problem to its core fundamentals and try to solve it from that level before building it up to its usual level of complexity. - No-self mindset
Finally the noself mindset is a mental approach that is taught in Buddhism and various other eastern spiritual traditions but also aligns with modern neuroscience that is based on the belief that the self is an illusion. This mindset is quite powerful because in ordinary thinking we assume at our core we are real, unchanging and unified agents that carry on all the burdens of our lives and enjoy the benefits. But in the noself mindset there is no self that carries these burdens because there is nothing to identify with, there is simply activity of the human mind and body which must perform its duties in order to sustain existence. The self also carries with it a set of limitations, fears and beliefs that keep us from achieving our full potential. A simplified way to understand the power of this mindset is to look at the mountain of tasks that you have to perform before you and instead of thinking that you cannot achieve them, think this body-mind will do the best it can and if it succeeds the body-mind will achieve bigger things and you will not be there to tie it down but if it fails then it will learn and the you will not be there to regret. This is a mindset of action without questioning ones goals, limitations and abilities using the tools that Mother nature has provided so as to keep the wheels of nature flowing towards achieving something greater than ourselves. Find something to live for that is much greater than you and your individual materialistic pursuits and you will be capable of anything. As Jeff Bezos said, You can choose a life of ease and comfort, or you can choose a life of service and adventure.
