How to deal with Procrastination?

It’s the last day to submit the report, but you have so much left to do and your friends are waiting in the café for you to arrive.

You have your exam tomorrow, its night already and you have done just one chapter.

Can you relate to such a situation? Do you start doing an important task and get up in between to eat or drink. Sounds familiar? This habit is called procrastination. And you are not alone in this.

Majority of people procrastinate their tasks. You may enjoy the time you spend lazing around, but this habit really hinders your progress and achievement in all aspects of life.

Here are some tips that you could use to deal with procrastination:

Acknowledge

The very first thing that you could do is to accept and acknowledge that you procrastinate. Unless you do that, you cannot move forward. There could be a scenario where you are postponing a task for a genuine reason. But if you find yourself doing the same for every other task, this is a problem.

Make a schedule

You can make a constructive action plan for the day and assign yourself time for the tasks. Follow this schedule religiously and you can feel the change in your way of working.

Prioritizing the tasks

You need to be clear and quick about designating the tasks on the basis of their exigency. It is better to finish the more important tasks first so that you are left with less important tasks for later in the day.

Difficult tasks first

You should always do the difficult tasks first; so that you are left with the lighter work post that. This would reduce your stress level and make your work more qualitative.

Keep a to-do-list

You can either create a soft copy for a to-do-list or keep a diary where you can write down the schedule. As you progress with the completion of tasks, you can mark those that you complete. This will give you a visual input of how much work you have completed and how much is left. This way you can see how efficient you are at your work.

Reward system

To begin with, while trying to curb this habit, you can always keep a reward that you will give yourself, only after you complete an assigned task. This is a way to contrive motivation to perform. This practice will give you that push you require to develop a structured way of doing a task. Also, rewarding yourself will make you happy about yourself, providing further encouragement.

Take help

Ask a friend to keep a check on you so that you do not go out of track. This is how the self-help groups work. You can also plan it out with a fellow procrastinator so that you both can motivate each other to be better.

Avoid distractors

When you sit to do a task, turn off social media, emails, etc. Avoid sitting amongst people or anywhere near a television.

Just to keep an important point in mind, procrastination could be because the person is suffering from a mental health illness. It could be anxiety, depression, OCD. When you notice other symptoms apart from procrastination the problem could be serious. In such scenarios, you would require to seek professional help.