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I planned to start writing at 11 a.m. and complete out a few sections of this article before lunch today. It’s now 4:40 p.m.–and I’m finally getting started. What happened?

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Procrastination is a voluntary delay of an intended act despite the knowledge that this delay may harm us,” Pychyl explains in his book Solving the Procrastination Puzzle.



Specifically, procrastination is an “emotion-focused coping strategy to deal with negative emotions,”

These are some of the common steps

We sit down to do a task.

We think about the amount of work we’ll have to do to complete the task, and how difficult it will be.

Because we think the task is difficult we predict that the task will not feel good (e.g., will stress us out, make us feel bad, etc.).

Our emotional coping strategy kicks in to keep us away from this bad feeling.

We avoid the task.

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The main psychological mechanism behind our procrastination is as follows:

When we need to get something done, we rely primarily on our self-control in order to bring ourself to do it.

Our self-control often receives support from our motivation, which helps us get things done in a timely manner.

In some cases, we experience certain demotivating factors, such as anxiety or fear of failure, which have an opposite effect than our motivation.

In addition, we sometimes experience certain hindering factors, such as mental exhaustion or rewards that are far in the future, which interfere with our self-control and motivation.

When demotivating and hindering factors outweigh our self-control and motivation, we end up procrastinating, either indefinitely, or until we reach a point in time when the balance between them shifts in our favor.

PROCRASTINATION has NOTHING to do with your work, Procrastination is a form of stress relief, whenever you are stressed, and you want to avoid to be stressed more, thus you choose to avoid doing it for instant gratification ( watching videos on YouTube) etc

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You will never get rid of stress in your life, but you can 100% change your way of tackling stress or avoiding work.





Acknowledge stress, know that you’re stressed and that is the reason you’re spending so much time away from wor k

k After you’ve done that , work for 5 min, only 5 minutes, because your problem isn’t working it’s avoiding to start work because you feel it’ll add to your stress load.

, Thus if you start working for 5 min , you’ll break that pattern of avoiding work

Strategies for overcoming procrastination will vary depending on why it happens in the first place.

The first step is to introspect and figure out what’s going on. Identify your own habits,Once you have a clearer picture of your own work or study habits, you will have a better chance of fixing them.

Here, some common reasons you may be procrastinating, as well as strategies for combatting them.

If timing is the issue

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Many people are inherently more productive at certain times of day, thus working around your natural Working hours can be very productive, rather than working at times when you’re already tired or mentally stressed out

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Many people procrastinate because they’re anxious about the outcome of a project, don’t think they can complete it well or fear failure.

If that’s the case, it may help to break it into smaller sub-tasks. “If you don’t believe in yourself enough to actually conduct a particular task, you can try to do it in smaller and more manageable parts to increase your self-efficacy

( Look into self esteem and self efficacy for further understanding)

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Some people have a hard time working without getting mental or maybe physical rewards. They cannot stay motivated for long either (extrinsic or intrinsic)

Thus they choose instantly rewarding Options such as social media over work(that will reward after certain amount of efforts and time)

In this case, too, breaking a long-term assignment into multiple smaller ones may help , as you’ll get gratification everytime a small task will be completed, given you’re not already multitasking.

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As mentioned in the ending of the third point, Optimize your environment accordingly for example :

Put your cell phone away, turn off notifications or don’t have 10 tabs open at the same time

Another option is to minimise multitasking. Many of us fall into the trap of doing two or three tasks at the same time, so you finish one, but you’re still in the middle of the other, This multiple thread of tasks may make it feel like you’re never actually completing anything, at the same time exhausting your energy, which deprives you of the satisfaction of being done.

Take the time to completely finish one task at a time, take a breath, walk around for a minute and stretch before you step into the next task.

Procrastination is internally troubling, it can lead to problems such as insomnia, stress, anxiety, poor performance and it erodes personal relationships and teamwork in the workplace. As multiple studies have shown, most people procrastinate at least some of the time. When properly managed, procrastination doesn’t need to be viewed as a problem. The real problem isn’t procrastination but our failure to keep it in check.

Thankyou for reading ,

I hope I’ve helped you, for any queries

DM me on Instagram or Quora I’ll be more than happy to help

The backyard psychologist

(This blog isn’t monetized so whatever efforts are , they’re purely to help people in need , make your part by sharing this information so it can reach someone in need)

References

https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/5322514/stop-procrastinating-tips/%3famp=true

https://www-psychologytoday-com.cdn.ampproject/

https://www.verywellmind.com/the-psychology-of-procrastination-2795944

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/procrastination%3famp

https://thriveglobal-com.cdn.ampproject.org/