Overcoming Procrastination

Overcoming procrastination boosts your personal time management skills, reduces stress, and allows you to get things done.

These strategies can streamline your effectiveness and create a sense of urgency so that you get things done.

Everybody puts things off!

However, when you are putting things off that are important to you then it can become a time-waster.

This increases your stress and robs you of your potential.

Why do people procrastinate and why is it such a problem?

Psychologists suggest that people put things off for a number of reasons.

Some causes of procrastination include putting off doing unpleasant or difficult tasks, having unclear goals and priorities, or a fear of failure or change.

But possibly the most important reason for putting things off is not having specific goals.

Specific goals are the spark that ignite motivation and get things done

Here we examine some of the causes of procrastination and solutions to getting things done.

Twin issues of procrastination: Not starting and task completion

"If you wait until all the lights are "green" before you leave home, you'll never get started on your trip to the top."

Zig Ziglar

Do you lack specific goals?

Do you have a plan for what you want to do and how you are going to do it?

If not, then you may be suffering from the twin issues of:

• not being able to get started on tasks

• not finishing tasks.

Does this sound familiar?

If so, then you are not alone.

These three activities allow you to bring about necessary change. These include having:

1. clear measurable goals
2. a priority system that keeps you focused
3. strategies to refocus when you distracted or interrupted.

Setting goals to start and complete tasks

Are you having trouble completing tasks?

Do you have a habit of putting things off till tomorrow?

These are twin habits that usually go hand-in-hand and sap your productivity and effectiveness.

Having a set of clearly defined goals that YOU want to achieve is important.

These goals have to be meaningful and desirable to you to give you the motivation to get started and keep going.

In short, these goals have to be energizing.

By setting SMART goals and developing a goal setting plan, you create clearly defined targets to aim for.

How does this help?

It creates a sense of urgency to do the task.

A sense of urgency is the opposite to delaying tasks until tomorrow.

This can be done by setting meaningful and worthwhile goals, creating clear deadlines, rewarding yourself for achieving deadlines, and practicing imagery and positive affirmations.

I talk more about developing a sense of urgency with these strategies.

Develop you own priority system

You would have to be living on an island without Internet or TV not be awash with information.

In fact, many people suffer from information overload - email, cell, and keeping up with journals and news.

It is not unusual to have a dozen things that need to be done now!

This is why we need a priority system.

A priority system allows you distinguish between what is important and what is urgent.

It has to be able to hold your focus on those tasks that are important to you.

Priorities can be set a number of ways but it is likely that your company/personal priorities will be aligned with your company/personal goals.

The advantage of setting priorities is that it harnesses your focus.

The best time-managers have a priority system that ensures they focus single-mindedly on their top priority.

Having a clear priority system allows you to make decisions on what to do and ensures that you are doing those tasks of value to you or your organization.

So, how can you set up a clear priority system and get things done? Check out these tips for getting things done through setting priorities.

Strategies to refocus or remain focused

Your single, most important task is the task that you should be doing now.

However, email, phone and other distractions work to pull us from this.

As Basex research states, "knowledge workers lose 28% of their time due to interruptions and the recovery time associated with interruptions."

What exactly does this mean?

The average person loses about a week every month due to ineffective use of his/her or her time.

There are a number of things you can do to bring your focus back but initially an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Focusing single-mindedly on a task until it is done is much quicker than starting and stopping repeatedly.

This may include following these email etiquette tips to take control of your Inbox.

Another strategy may be to batch all similar tasks together (such as making and receiving phone calls or replying to email).

These are two simple strategies that you can use to ensure that you stay with your highest value task and stay with it until it is done.

Time Management Activity Stay on the right side of the 80-20 rule by focusing your energy on that critical 20% which gives you 80% of your results. These time management activities give you strategies to boost effectiveness and remain focused on your top priorities.

Related time management articles

Putting Things Off: Strategies to Beat Procrastination