by Sophie Hutchings

Procrastination, what is it? The definition stands as “the action of delaying or postponing something”. How many times do you sit in bed the night before, planning your day ahead. Analysing what you need to do, setting goals in which you need to meet and tasks you must accomplish. Now, how many of those tasks and goals you have set yourself, do you complete? How many times have you said to yourself, “this isn’t important right now” or “I can do this later”.

This is procrastination. You are physically delaying yourself from elevating, expanding and success. The result is you have less time to do what is really important. With less time to complete assessment tasks, the accuracy of your work and quality of the content are likely to suffer.

Understanding procrastination

This isn’t deemed as a ‘one time event’, procrastination tends to become an ongoing cycle or pattern a person has become accustomed to. The sense of routine is ‘comforting’, it’s familiar and safe. It’s you not putting yourself out there and breaking “the routine” but being able to, to some extent, control what may happen and how you feel about it.

Why do we procrastinate? Procrastination comes hand in hand with the fear of failure, doubt, insecurities or simply being disorganised in life. This is when we tell ourselves, this can wait a day, week, month and then enviably, never. The fear comes with the ‘setting ourselves up to fail’, the assumption that this will never work, I’m not good enough or my contribution won’t be listened to or appreciated.

How can I manage this? As a procrastinator myself, I am aware we thrive on routine and planning. Ironically, managing tasks and setting goals (rather than just thinking about them) more efficiently can help manage this. What we tend to do is make big lists, simply rating tasks in the order of importance, acknowledging the time frame in which needs to be completed or taking importance in the more daunting tasks. By doing this, it makes it easier to determine what needs to be done and then making this ‘big list’ into small, manageable and a clear set amount of tasks each day.

I make it sound easy, but Rome was not built in a day. Imagine we’re building a house, a procrastinator would see the end result, the finished house. What we’re trying to accomplish here is breaking this down into manageable bits, “brick by brick”.

The biggest hurdle we must face is, time management, it’s taking a moment and analysing what needs to be done and setting a deadline. You’ve heard this before but honestly, having a paper diary/online calendar makes so much of a difference, staying organised can help keep you on track and enable you to set deadlines and keep to them.

Procrastination can be hard to over-come but it’s not impossible

There are a number of strategies that can help overcome procrastination and enable you to unlock success:

• Break down large goals into smaller milestones.
• Stay organised.
• Take regular breaks.
• Finish challenging tasks when you are the most productive.
• Give yourself a reward when you complete a task/goal.