How To Bring Meaning Into Your Living By Stopping Procrastination

Many choices in life involve a trade-off or a balance. When there is not enough time, money or energy to accomplish everything you want to do, you will have to choose your priorities carefully, knowing that each pursuit leaves you less time and fewer resources for another goal or interest. However, in the midst of life’s difficult choices, one decision is very simple from an analytical perspective. Whereas many activities have both positive and negative aspects, procrastination is one activity that consumes your time and energy while contributing nothing to your ultimate quality of life. For this reason, even a small amount of consideration should convince you to eliminate procrastination from your life. Yet this habit is not always easy to break, and even the best intentions to stop procrastinating may not be successful. A few hints, and a little bit of effort, can assist breaking the habit of procrastination, allowing you to spend your time with more worthwhile pursuits.

One of the skills that can be extremely helpful in ending procrastination is the ability to prioritize. Not all activities are equally essential, and it is thinkable to waste time while actually appearing to get matters finished. In order to avoid procrastinating on your most important tasks, it may be helpful to make a list of all the things you want to accomplish this week. Without making any distinctions between important and insignificant tasks, brainstorm a list of a week’s worth of goals. Once you think you have everything you need put down, either number the items in order by importance from most crucial to least necessary, or group the items into high-, medium- and low-priority sections. Try to identify your three most important tasks for the week and list on your calendar the things you will need to do in order to successfully complete them. Then you’ll be able to focus on these most significant tasks, keeping the less momentous ones for the time that is left over. Once you have got into the habit of prioritizing your week, move on to prioritizing by month and then by periods of three months.

Another important step in overcoming procrastination is to make sure that you see your ultimate goals in terms of the small steps that you will need to take. By breaking down complicated tasks into manageable stages, each with its own mini-deadline, you will prevent yourself from procrastinating in the belief that your goal is impossible regardless of what you do. In addition, the shorter amounts of time between deadlines will prevent you from procrastinating because a deadline seems so distant that you have all the time in the world. You may find that you are no longer tempted to procrastinate with your important goals when you know what you’ll need to do to accomplish them and exactly how long it will take. Once you have taken these steps to end procrastination, you may find yourself easily accomplishing tasks that once seemed almost impossible.

How Procrastination Can Be Symptomatic Of Deeper Fundamental Troubles

When faced with an unpleasant or daunting task, either in personal or professional activities, many people can be tempted to procrastinate. Some procrastination takes the form of dismissing the unpleasant task as something to be done later and then putting it out of mind. At other times, procrastination occurs by wasting one’s time with meaningless pursuits, games and amusements. To complicate matters, not every form of procrastination can be easily dismissed as purely wasted time. For business people and office workers who handle a variety of related tasks every day, certain types of work can actually function as a tool for procrastination. In some cases, tasks that are smaller, simpler, or that might easily be delegated to an intern are used as a diversion from important, complicated, intimidating tasks.

Implications For Time-Management and Prioritizing Skills

In order to work effectively, people need the ability to budget their time. In the typical professional environment, people are given more work than they can realistically handle within normal working hours. Even people with a reasonable workload could improve their business prospects by taking on additional tasks or taking time to make aspects of their work more efficient. For all of these reasons, it is extremely important to be able to manage one’s time successfully. Effective time management takes the ability to weigh the amount of time free against the tasks that need to be actioned and to decide on a schedule for completing the undertakings. Unfortunately, procrastination interferes with the ability to budget time by inflating the amount of time needed to reach a certain milestone or level of completion. For this reason, repeated procrastination can be seen as a sign that an individual lacks the ability to set his or her own time management goals or lacks the discipline to adhere to those goals.

In situations where multitasking is required, procrastination could also be a sign of failure to properly organize priorities. Allowing trivial tasks to take time and energy away from more important goals indicates either an inability to recognize the most important tasks or a lack of concern about whether the most important goals are accomplished in a timely fashion. However, a failure to prioritize might not be entirely the procrastinator’s fault. An employee who does not have enough information to form an overall picture of his or her employer’s goals might not have the perspective to prioritize effectively and might therefore end up wasting time on trivial goals believing that they are important.

It should be remembered that, while occasional procrastination might signal some sort of underlying problem, it is not necessarily a sign of a character flaw or skill deficit. For example, a lack of motivation due to a real or perceived shortcoming in the reward for good time management could be at the root of procrastination.  One example of this might be a work environment in which an employee receives the same compensation regardless of whether his or her deadlines are met. This could result from a poor performer realizing that procrastination is routinely tolerated, but it could also result from a high performer perceiving that outstanding time management is never rewarded. In a work environment, instances of procrastination can reveal overall communication and employee relations issues as well as the underlying issues of individual employees.

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