Righttrack Whispers: Avoiding Procrastination

by Sarah Goodfellow

We all procrastinate for a wide variety of reasons, however, with the volume of work and pressure to achieve ever increasing, we need to be able to master ourselves and stop the desire to put things off until a later date.

Listed below are my top tips to help you avoid procrastination:

1. Get started - beginning is usually the hardest part. Once you have formed the 30-day habit you’re destined to succeed.

2. Do nothing! This tip tricks you into a motivational state to start work. Tell yourself that for fifteen minutes you are going to sit with the tasks and not do anything. If your boredom threshold is as low as mine you’ll find yourself tackling your work in two minutes flat.

3. How do you eat an elephant? The answer is one bite at a time. This old adage also applies to helping you break the desire to procrastinate. Break the task down into manageable chunks. If the problem seems too big and you don’t know where to begin, start with the easiest chunk to give you motivation, then take it one bite at a time.

4. Use your ‘time gaps’ between meetings &/or appointments - even in five minutes you can accomplish a lot. You can often make progress on tasks in these short spells.

5. Importance versus urgency, which wins? Often routine tasks are urgent but not very motivational. So in order to keep up those motivational levels tackle the important tasks first - routine seems easy - so we waste time on it by tackling it first. Schedule the difficult tasks first and then ‘reward’ yourself with the easy tasks.

6. Start in the middle. If the first step seems the hardest, try starting in the middle and work your way outwards.

7. Simplify it. Ask yourself if you could do it differently. Maybe you are making it more complicated than it needs to be.

8. Involve someone else. Often procrastination comes from having to work alone. So don’t work alone, involve someone else. Tell them what you intend to do, and ask them to check on your progress or use them as a sounding board.

9. Reward yourself - if you really don’t want to do it, give yourself something to look forward to. When I’ve done this, I will have a coffee / go for a walk.