Ten Lesser-Known Ways To Avoid Chronic Procrastination

Procrastination makes you feel guilty, it makes you feel “not good enough,” stressed, even angry, and it can make you lose your job, or worse, it can be a killer! Think procrastinating on health checkups.

Procrastinating is also easy. It’s the ‘can’t’ that holds you back, and once you start procrastinating, you can’t stop.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for procrastination, especially if you have been a habitual procrastinator for long. In other words, if you indulge in chronic procrastination. 

But, not all is lost; I have ten techniques that you can try; just read on.  

1. Engage in assertiveness training

The most common reason people procrastinate is a lack of assertiveness. Upbringing is frequently the source of a lack of assertiveness.

Put another way; unassertive people develop mistrust, shame, guilt, uncertainty, or inferiority instead of trust, autonomy, initiative, and competence.

Assertiveness, or lack of, is not monolithic. For example, you can be very unassertive at work but find it challenging to be assertive with family members. Thus when it comes to family-related tasks, you procrastinate. 

Luckily, assertiveness is a skill that you can learn. There are several ways you can do this. 

• Mimic your behaviors in the less assertive areas of your life from the more assertive areas of your life. 
• Join a self-help assertiveness training course
• Join support groups or group therapy
• Get a coach, mentor, or therapist who can help you become more assertive

2. Overcome the fear of failure and also the fear of success

The fear of failure and the fear of success are the two most common fears associated with procrastination that could be holding you back. But realize that the difference between being hurt by failure, recovering, thinking about what you learned, and then trying again, and being paralyzed by fear, is distinct. Nonetheless, failure is a necessary component of success.

Success can be defined as moving on from one setback to the next without giving up until you achieve your goal. As a result, if you want to succeed faster, you must fail more often. You must learn to tolerate failure and to learn from it regularly.

It may be difficult to believe, but another fear – the fear of success – may be holding you back and forcing you to procrastinate.

Fame, financial wealth, being the focus of attention, positive sentiments about yourself, and so on are all benefits of success. However, you will constantly self-sabotage if you don’t believe you deserve success and everything that comes with it. Thus you end up procrastinating. 

Strategies to overcome fears are similar to those used in assertiveness training. Expose yourself to smaller problems, join a group or individual therapy session to investigate the underlying causes, and experiment with visualization, affirmations.

3. Have realistic goals and expectations

Yes, we will all have big dreams. But life has its constraints, and we must be careful not to become engulfed in narcissistic grandiosity, motivated by entirely unreasonable expectations of how quickly we can achieve something. What follows is that unrealistic expectations lead to disappointment, and significant setbacks in life frequently lead to procrastination or giving up.

Here’s how it goes down. First, when you set unrealistic goals and discover that achieving them would be considerably more complicated than you anticipated, you may begin to avoid the tasks. This, over time, becomes habitual and chronic procrastination. 

This state is called Valley of Despair. It is a component of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You may begin to doubt yourself and wonder if you have what it takes to reach your ambitions. As a result, you struggle with procrastination for a time and eventually give up.

Here are some options available to you:

• Concentrate on the effort rather than the result; nothing great comes quickly.
• Have big dreams, but start small; break down your goals into small stages.
• Use goal-setting frameworks like SMART to keep you on track. 

4. Change your label from a lazy person to a procrastinator

Yes, you may have been called “lazy” often and have come to call yourself that as well, BUT if you are reading this, then the chances are that you are a procrastinator rather than a lazy person. Allow me to explain. A lazy person is driven by his comfort; they don’t want to do the tasks, and wanting comfort comes first. They don’t want to do their tasks. On the other hand, the procrastinator is driven by discomfort, to be more accurate by avoidance of discomfort. Procrastinators wish to do their job, but they cannot tolerate the discomfort the task brings them. Procrastination is often a symptom of anxiety or fear, low self-esteem, or even depression. It can also result from a skill deficit. They do not know how to do the tasks at hand and are afraid to ask. (I will talk more about this later)

 Recognize yourself as a “procrastinator” rather than a “lazy” person. Then identify the gaps in your learning which you need to fill to complete the tasks at hand. If your procrastination is a symptom of your other mental issues, seek help for those first. Procrastination often abates once the underlying problems are adequately addressed.

5. Change your lifestyle to have more energy for your tasks

It’s natural to procrastinate on a task if you don’t have the energy to do it.

Overworking, burnout, and acute tiredness can all contribute to a lack of energy, but so can an unhealthy lifestyle.  For example, minor modifications can significantly impact your productivity if you tweak your diet a bit and exercise for just 7 minutes a day.

Here are a few suggestions to help you live a healthier lifestyle:

• Get enough sleep (7–8 hours) and make it good.
• Consume a balanced diet rich in green vegetables, good fats, and low sugar levels.
• Consume a few smaller meals to keep your insulin levels stable throughout the day.
• Avoid eating unhealthy snacks.
• You can help yourself by taking a few essential nutritional supplements.
• Do a light workout at least three times per week.
• Drink 2 liters of water
• Make sure you are not ruining your health with addictions. 

I don’t just mean smoking, alcohol, or drugs when I say addictions. Keep an eye out for too much chocolate, binge-watching TV shows, Sleeping too much, scrolling social media are all time-consuming and cause you to be in the vicious cycle of procrastination. 

There is no grandiose concept here; simply do it. Sleep early, include vegetables in every meal, keep nutritious snacks on hand, go for a walk or exercise every day, drink water, and so on.

Introduce one of those things into your life every month, and you’ll be a very different person in six months. 

6. Acquire new skills 

If you have a high skill level for a particular work and it is not even slightly demanding to you, you will become bored and may procrastinate.

Similarly, if a task is far too difficult and you lack the necessary skills, your activities will be hampered by concern, anxiety, and you will procrastinate.

To put it another way, there are three zones in psychology: the comfort zone, the learning zone, and the panic zone. When a task is far too complicated for your current skill level, you enter the panic zone. In the panic zone, you experience such intense negative feelings that it becomes much more challenging to push yourself beyond your comfort zone for the following effort, resulting in chronic procrastination.

There are two options available to you. The first is to bite off only as much as you can chew at any given time. We covered this above in setting realistic goals.

Another thing you can do is to learn new skills. You can enroll in an online course, find a mentor, or pursue formal schooling.

We all want to show the world our new skills, which may be a powerful motivator to overcome procrastination.

7. Align your goals, efforts, skills, and values 

We are often pushed to “follow your passion,” but that is rarely good advice. Let me borrow the words of Mark Cuban. 

“Don’t follow your passion; follow your effort. Become a master at something the market needs and passion will follow.” 

Mark Cuban, Author and speaker

To be highly motivated and avoid chronic procrastination, you need to ensure that your goals align correctly with your life vision, talents, competencies, and values. This is the source of intrinsic motivation. If your goals aren’t genuine to your inner self, you won’t be motivated to reach them since they won’t be your true passion.

There is rarely a situation where you have a passion for something (such as a hobby), and that passion also becomes a profession that pays your bills.

It does happen, and honestly, it has happened with me, but it is usually the exception rather than the rule. In my case, whenever it did happen, I ultimately lost my passion for it.

Following your effort is a far better strategy (advice by Mark Cuban). 

Find out what you’re good at and what the market wants. Then, develop mastery in that area, and passion will follow. The bottom line is that you must supply value to the market, and value is defined as what other people are ready to pay for; regrettably, these may not be your hobbies or what you are currently passionate about. 

8. Break the perfectionism-procrastination loop

Perfectionism procrastination loop is a vicious cycle of dysfunctional thinking which catches many chronic procrastinators. The cognitive distortion or thinking error is known as “All or nothing thinking.” is at the heart of it. It goes something like – If I can’t do it perfectly, I won’t do it at all, or I did it last time, and it was not up to the mark; hence I won’t do it. 

The following is the most straightforward visual representation of the perfectionism procrastination loop. 

Overcoming perfectionism usually helps procrastination in these cases. Learn the principle of “Good enough.” Strive for excellence rather than perfection. The difference is – in excellence, the standards you set are contextually higher, whereas, in perfectionism, the standards are relentlessly higher. I have an online course that helps overcome perfectionism if need be seek professional help. 

9. Tell someone, seek accountability 

Another suggestion is to inform someone you trust that you intend to achieve specific chores or goals. There are three objectives to telling someone. To begin with, telling others indicates a more serious commitment to follow through on things than doing them in secret. Second, having someone else check in on how you’re doing can be motivating since it forces you to be accountable to someone other than yourself. Finally, if you are struggling, that individual maybe someone you can lean on in difficult times. A caveat to this is don’t tell too many people of your goals; it has been shown that congratulatory encouragement that you get from some may lead to premature slacking off. 

10. Don’t beat yourself up for procrastinating 

Things need to be done, and I need to beat myself up to get it done. Many people fear that if they aren’t harsh with themselves, they will become complacent, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. A lack of faith and trust in yourself leads to this belief. As you learn to trust yourself and practice self-compassion, you will discover that your motivation will increase, and you will be able to accomplish more. Yes, it is possible. 

We are harsher on ourselves than we are on anyone else. We beat ourselves up over and over for “failures” that are really nothing but “learning experiences.” If you are struggling with this one, ask yourself the question, “If a good friend came to me with the same situation, what would I tell them?” Would I be just as hard on them as I am on you? 

If not, you may be holding yourself back from great things.

So there. Does it ring true for you? How about all of it? Did it bring back memories for you of your harsh self-judgment?

Instead of beating yourself up, have space for some self-compassion. Allow yourself to be human. Encourage yourself rather than criticize. If the previous self-talk was “Suck it up, loser, get going,” change it to “I know this task is important, and I know I can get it done if I focus one thing at a time.” If need be, build a library of alternate self-compassionate statements and keep them handy.

Conclusion  

By now, you would have a really good understanding of what you can do to overcome chronic procrastination. I know it is always easier to understand than to do but trust me, it can be done with practice, practice, and more practice. If you need more help, I offer one-to-one sessions based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to overcome procrastination and have an online course too. If you want to know more, I invite you to have a virtual coffee with me, and we will talk about you.