How to Stop Procrastination

Procrastination is the behavior and habit to do things that are of low value instead of doing things that are of high valuable for ourselves. For example a valid case of procrastination is when someone is checking emails and news readers multiple times per day instead of doing his actual work. The problem with procrastination is that it is almost always what’s holding us back from achieving success, happiness and fulfillment.

Once we realize how much time we waste procrastinating, we start asking ourselves if it is possible to stop it, and in this article I will try to share with you what’s currently working for me. This method is a combination of motivation techniques and GTD methodologies.

Motivation

Do you remember that time when someone called you in the middle of the night asking for  immediate action and you suddenly woke up and act like if you were full of energy? Or probably you had a time when you were near to a truly wanted result and you kept working on that project for the entire day and night without being tired but full of determination. That emotion is called motivation and it is determined by your burning desire of achieving something. Motivation is one of the most important skill to learn in life, and fortunately we are already very skilled on that.

How to be motivated

Being motivated is simple, you can achieve this emotion by the proper use of self-talk and by asking yourself this question: do I really want to do this? or is it better for me to act like a loser? Now I can assure you that this will give you a load of motivation, however, the more anger you put in your words, the more motivation you’ll gain. I recommend you to start using this technique right now, and in the firsts days to use it as many times as possible, so that it will become an habit. You can change the phrase if you want to, just experiment and keep what’s working for you.

How to organize

Unfortunately, being able to be motivated is not enough until you know what’s the most important thing to do right now. I’m a big fan of the GTD system, which I use to keep track of all my goals, tasks and projects. Every week, at the end of my weekly review, I scroll down each element on my lists and I ask myself: How badly do I want this to happen? I’ve found that this question helps me deciding what are the most important things to do and in what order. Note that this time the question is slightly different from the previous one because I’m using the word badly to emotionally consider what’s truly important for me.

I urge you to try out this method and I’ll be glad to know if it helped you in some way.

Resources

• GTD book – Amazon link.


• GTD planning, written by Steve Pavlina. This is what I currently use for scheduling my goals.


• A great article about motivation using the same technique as discussed before.

Posted on June 19 2009

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