All about procrastination
By: Gourav Jamwal
Tags: Procrastinate, Mindset, Selfhelpguidetohappiness, Procrastination, Self Help

All about procrastination

Why do we procrastinate and how can we overcome it ? Let’s start decoding it. Gourav Jamwal Jun 26·12 min read

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Imagine! Today is the product release and the clock is ticking. Your boss is calling you again and again to get an update on the release while you are busy doing some final changes that you had put-off earlier thinking that you will take care of those later.

You are working furiously to complete a task before the deadline which is in next 2 hours, while silently cursing yourself for not starting it sooner.

How did this happen ? It should have been completed days before the deadline and by now you would have been free of this unnecessary chaos. What went wrong ? How and why did you lose your focus?

Well! You wasted hours taking coffee-breaks, concentrating on other unimportant tasks and checking your social media. You should have focused on the product keeping in mind it’s release date rather than wasting your time there.

Now you wish if there was a way of going back in time and changing the timeline which you can’t. So, now you are feeling sorry for yourself.

Sounds familiar ? If so, you are not alone! This is Procrastination.

Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

In simple words, delaying of starting or finishing a task despite knowing it might have negative consequences.

Procrastination is a trap that many of us fall into. In fact according to researcher and speaker Piers Steel , 95% of us procrastinate to some degree. While it may be comforting to know that you’re not alone, it can be sobering to realise just how much it can hold you back.

Procrastination is a common part of our lives and it’s not hard to understand why.

For years, there have been debate around why so many of us procrastinate – 20% of the people have a chronic procrastination issue.

The chronic procrastinator, the person who does this as a lifestyle, would rather have other people think that they lack effort than lacking ability.

According to Association of Psychological Science - Joseph R Ferrari, PHD, the leading researcher — and thinkers in the past have come up with few reasons.

The first assumption is that we’re all lazy. You knew you had tons of work to do and you still knowingly evaded that responsibility. In some respects, this could be true. Procrastinators say they lack the necessary motivation to do a task even though they know it’s important. So perhaps they are lazy. The next reason is that procrastinators have no self-control and cannot implement the needed structure in their lives to complete tasks on time. Indeed, the absence of structure can negatively affect one’s productivity. But procrastination isn’t about laziness or bad time management.

Lazy people, simply don’t do anything and are just fine with it. Procrastinators, on the other hand, have the desire to actually do something but can’t force themselves to start.

Procrastination is a form of self-harm that’s why we always feel so bad when we do it. The more we put of the important tasks, the more negative feelings we have. Procrastination can also be stated as an emotional problem, and we procrastinate to help deal with these emotions.

So procrastination is more than just laziness or poor time management.

W hen it comes to procrastination telling someone to “Just do it!” doesn’t work. It would be like telling someone with clinical depression to “Cheer up!”.

So, you can stop feeling bad about your tendency to put things off. It’s a deeper problem, but something you can definitely overcome.