5 Steps to Overcome Procrastination

“Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.” – Napolean Hill

We’re all busy right now, but are we doing what needs to be done?

This question came to me when reviewing the work of Tim Ferriss and how he thinks about productivity. If you don’t know of Tim, he’s the author of best-sellers such as “The 4 Hour Work Week” and “Tools of Titans”. In each book, he explores productivity hacks used by the world’s most successful people.

On procrastination, Tim believes that all people, successful and unsuccessful, work just as hard as one another. What then separates a Conor McGregor from a similar kid who grew up with nothing in the same neighborhood? According to Tim Ferriss, based on his interviews with hundreds of industry titans, the only difference is that successful people tend to choose their actions more wisely. They tend to think bigger and have their priorities acutely tuned to meet an outcome.

How can you overcome procrastination right now?

Step 1: Change your mindset.

Successful people don’t do more than you do.

We may want to organize our email inbox and message inflow. We may want to put up productivity boards in the office. We want to install a visual management system. But why do we do this to ourselves?

The modern office has this illusion that productivity will increase if only we can measure input and measure output and all the metrics will skyrocket as a result. This simply isn’t true. I’ve worked with dozens of companies to make their processes more efficient, so I know it isn’t true.

These are examples of decisions made on instinct, and instinct is often wrong. The problem with instinct is that it’s only as wise as the individual who’s speaking. Sometimes we talk about instinct as if it’s more, as if it’s related to intuition and it’s mystical, but it’s not. It’s very much limited by the individual, and if you look at the individual’s history, you will see that they repeat the same errors over and over. That’s what people do when they rely heavily on instinct.

Unless they’re well scouted and analyzed beforehand, these new initiatives will go on to mean nothing. Getting them done might make us feel important. Leading this project might get the boss’s attention and earn us a promotion. But if it’s not well scouted, what does it really accomplish?

Nothing. When we look back a year from now, when we’re discussing replacing the system with a newer one, we’re going to see this period in our life for what it was: months wasted being busy, but not being productive.

What then do the world’s most successful people do? They only work on meaningful things. They look at themselves in the mirror each day and ask themselves if what they’re doing is important. They take on projects that they will look back on in two years with pride, not regret.

The world’s most successful people are very willing to say no. They don’t take it at face value when a boss says: “I have a great idea, let’s do it.” The most important thing for them is whether this idea passes through their own internal sanity check. If it does, they will do it with gusto. And if it doesn’t, the world’s most successful people aren’t afraid to say no and walk away if necessary.

Once we leave school and the years start flashing by, we begin to realize that our time here is short. None of us want to look back in two years and see that we’ve wasted our time working on a project that we didn’t believe in. Make certain your next project passes through your own internal sanity check, and make sure your actions today do as well.

Step 2: Make a List of Priorities

When you feel like you’re procrastinating, stop and write a list of all the thoughts that are occupying your mind.

Are you thinking about the ten things you need to do at work before you can leave? Write them down. Have your thoughts gone a mile off topic and you’re thinking about your home life? Write down what you’re thinking about for home too. If it’s on our mind at all, we should add it to our list.

What was Einstein’s definition for insanity again? “Doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result.”

When you think about it, this is what we do to ourselves every day. We take in stimuli from customers and bosses. We commit it to memory, a sheet of lined paper or a tool like Evernote. Then we plan to get to it soon. If we’re feeling especially organized, we might even tell ourselves when we plan to get to it by entering it into our daily planner or calendar. How do you think this affects you?

By writing all thoughts and priorities at once, we’re disrupting our normal thought processes and forcing ourselves to be proactive. We’re letting our memory off the hook. We’re getting the information into a format where the logic center of our brain can now get to work.

Step 3: Find Your Focus

On our list of priorities, add a column for importance (from 1 to 10) and another for duration (in hours). Then go through each item and label its importance to you right now and how many hours it should take to complete.

Your most important priorities will become obvious as you get to the bottom of the list. For example, any item that’s a 10 for importance and has a short duration should become our focus. If there’s a tie, let’s let our logic center break the tie, just so long as we end up with a single focus that we can circle or underline on the page.

There are three reasons why we can’t focus right now (and none of them are “I don’t feel like it.”):

1.     We’re too tired.

2.     We’re emotionally stuck.

3.     We don’t know what to do next, either we haven’t planned or there are too many options.

All, even tiredness, can be solved by writing down our thoughts and letting our logic center find our focus.

Step 4: Make an Action Plan

Now we’re in a much better position because we have a singular objective that we’re focused on.

But perhaps this still isn’t enough to cut our procrastination habit because, when we think about it, we might not know where to start. If, let’s say, our focus is to generate a sale from a prospective client, how do we make that happen? Where do we start?

To get started, we need to make an action plan. This action plan needs to be a series of steps that get us from our current position to our future objective. The steps should be as clear as possible and, most important, begin with the easiest step.

In this case, to generate a sale from a prospective client, we could have four steps that together work toward generating the sale. Here are our four example steps:

1. Prepare a case study for the customer.
2. Share the case study and offer a free demo.
3. Meet for the demo and show the customer the value of our product line.
4. Send the customer a quote that’s an easy yes.

Here, we’ve taken the overwhelming goal of getting a new sale and we’ve broken it into four easy steps. Each step should take no longer than one or two hours.

For writing articles, I break down my goal into the following action plan:

• Take notes of the problem and what value the reader will take from the article.
• Take notes of the article’s sections, in this case the steps that need to be taken to overcome procrastination.
• Open a Word document and type out the title and section headers.
• Add bullet points to each section with some thoughts or quotes.
• Where applicable, expand each point.
• Write the intro and conclusion tying it into key points from the body.
• Take some time off to let the article sit.
• With fresh eyes, come back to proofread and take notes. Based on the notes, write a second draft.
• Publish the article.

The most important part of this step is to make sure your action plan is easy to get started. Once you get started, the motion of your actions will propel you to continue.

Step 5: Get Started and Don’t Stop

Always finish what you’ve begun.

The keys to overcoming procrastination are to choose your priorities wisely and then never stop what you’ve started.

Many people spend years wanting something but never starting. Others stop what they start, over and over, and never reach their goals. These two conditions are very similar. Think of all the wasted energy and learn from past failure, because failure is just that: a valuable lesson.

“Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.” ―  Neil Gaiman