I have a dark secret and it is that more often than naught, I tend to procrastinate. However, having an insight into my behavior and trigger points have helped me get myself back on the track majority of the times. That’s why I have never missed my deadlines. In today’s WorthWorkn4Wednesday blog post, I am going to share 5 strategies that are guaranteed to help you stop procrastination, renew your focus, get the sh*t done and multiply your productivity.

How many times has it happened that you have an important task, a project or assignments and you have spent your time avoiding the task or staring at the blank paper or screen? How many times you have ended up scrolling the social media, playing with your dog, or watching a web series instead of doing that. All of us have days when we are not at our productive best. But if this delay and avoidance has become your trademark then you have the tendency to procrastinate. Consequently, we delay or miss deadlines, waste our time and energy, lose our productivity, disappoint others and more than that, we

Banish Self-Doubt

Self-doubt is a common experience that many people face, especially when working on challenging tasks. Many a times, you procrastinate because you don’t have enough confidence and trust in your abilities to do something successfully.  So your hesitant brain deliberately creates confusion, make up the bizarre ‘what if…” scenarios to create self-doubt into your mind. You would deliberately think things like:

“But I am not good at this….”

“If I fail at this, everyone would make fun of me.”

Thus, your inhibitions create self-sabotage your success. 

What you need to realize is that having fears and doubts is completely normal.

Whenever self-doubt creeps in, challenge your negative thoughts by examining the evidence for and against them. Remind yourself of your past successes and strengths.  Ask yourself if there’s any real basis for your doubts or if they’re simply unhelpful beliefs holding you back. Reflect on times when you’ve overcome challenges or achieved your goals, and use these positive experiences to counteract self-doubt.

Do understand that despite doubt and fear you need to keep yourself moving, as progress and success are not possible without motion.

Break Things Down

 One effective way to overcome procrastinate is to stop obsessing about the entirety of a project and just take the next step, then the next and the one after it. Breaking things down in small chunks and executing them step-wise cut down the ambiguity of the tasks as well as their enormity. Moreover, successfully completing one step raises your confidence level and motivates you to move on to the next level confidently.

Break larger tasks into smaller, more manageable steps to prevent feeling overwhelmed. Focus on completing each step to the best of your ability without worrying about the outcome.

Photo credit: Antoni Shkraba @Pexels

Reduce Distractions

In today’s digital age, distractions like social media, entertainment, and other activities compete for our attention. It’s easy to procrastinate by engaging in these distractions instead of focusing on tasks. It is not unusual for many of us to get drawn to activities that provide us immediate pleasure or relief, even when you are aware that you should be working on more important tasks.

If you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through social media when you should be working, consider putting away your phone while working. Alternatively, you can put your phone in the aero plane mode.

Become more aware of your social media habits by practicing mindfulness techniques. When you feel the urge to check social media, pause and ask yourself if it’s truly necessary or if you’re just seeking a distraction.

Stop Mindlessly Consuming Information

A part of executing a task is to have enough information at hand, whether you are doing an assignment, creating a social media post, even trying out a new recipe. We need this information to understand what exactly we are required to do and how it is to be done.

Consequently, we try to gather as much information about a task as we can. We try to learn from different sources to have more clarity about what we are required to tackle. Unfortunately, too much information from different sources can be conflicting. It can even be confusing. So instead of getting clarity and direction, we end up getting more confused. Too much information can be overwhelming for the brain. It’s because you need time to process this information to make sense of it, synthesize and organize it, before being able to use it. Thus, this information overwhelm eventually leads to procrastination.

It’s just like you are gathering all the information about how to build a boat. But you never get around to the stage of actually building it and then taking it to the waters to test. That’s why many great ideas never get to see the light of the day.

To stop yourself from falling into the information saturation trap. Difficulty in managing time effectively can lead to procrastination. Therefor, you need to plan your time properly, dedicate comparatively lesser time to information gathering and brain storming and more to execution, fine tuning and finalizing.     

Let Go of Perfectionism

Most of the time, we want to do a task or project not only correctly, but we also want to do a thorough and impressive job. This need to do an impressive job stems from the perfectionist mindset. Being a perfectionist means setting unrealistic standards for yourself and others. This  makes us hang on to a job longer than needed. We keep up fine tuning the details, excessively editing emails and drafts, tearing down and re-building things because we want the end result to be perfect. So, we keep delaying task completion and submission. That’s why, having a perfectionist mindset can be paralyzing and frustrating for your boss, supervisor, team member, even  your family and friend.

Shift your focus from achieving flawless results to making progress and learning from your experiences. Avoid getting caught up in endless cycles of revision and refinement by setting time limits for tasks. Settle for “satisfactory” and “good enough” and move on to the next task rather than obsessing over perfection.

Furthermore, mindfulness practices such as meditation can help you stay present and grounded in the here and now, thus, reducing the tendency to fixate on perfection. More importantly, celebrate small victories and acknowledge your efforts, regardless of the outcome.

To Conclude

The human mind has the tendency to lose its focus and get distracted. However, in an age of digital clutter and overwhelm, the increasing responsibilities and limited time, it is natural to lose our focus and end up procrastinating. However, practices like having faith in ourselves, making conscious efforts to simplify tasks, reducing distractions, power planning, resisting perfectionism can reduce your tendency to procrastinate and help you make considerable progress.