Focus on Having a Good Time to Beat Your Procrastination
By: Sammy Jones
Tags: Management, Life Lessons, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Business

Focus on Having a Good Time to Beat Your Procrastination

Focusing on micro-managing our time, just creates more boring chores to procrastinate over!

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Procrastination has been my archenemy for at least 2 decades, and it has led to problems in work, in my relationships, and in life in general. It took me years of research and trying different approaches to eventually solve my procrastination problem.

Most people find focusing on micro-managing their time is an important element in beating their procrastination. However, it does present two additional problems to the serial procrastinator. First, you have to beat your procrastination long enough to put the methods into action. Second, these methods are extra chores that your brain will procrastinate over.

After spending years trying to manage my procrastination, I looked at the root causes of my procrastination and the reasoning behind them. By addressing what I found and managing my periods of procrastination, I could master my procrastination.

Why Do We Procrastinate?

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Most of us procrastinate because our subconscious brain is rebelling in some form or another. Your brain could be rebelling against;

Deadlines, including ones you have set yourself. (Your brain doesn’t like anything that holds authority over it or limits its choices).

Things it doesn’t enjoy doing.

Things it does not find stimulating enough.

Not doing something it enjoys, or it thinks is more important.

Other people will have other reasons for their brain rebelling and procrastinating but rarely is procrastination just laziness.

The one common thing that runs through all the reasons is that your brain craves a better quality of life for itself. So, it simply rebels against anything that gets in its way of a better quality of life. It rebels against meeting that deadline. It rebels against doing things it doesn’t like. It rebels against anything that stops it from getting an instant hit of fun.

Your brain is sulking like a naughty toddler who doesn’t get its way. For a more in-depth look at this phenomenon, I recommend reading the Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters.

In short, your brain is simply seeking a better quality of life and wants to ignore anything that gets in its way.

The Endless Procrastination Cycle

Procrastination can become an endless cycle that gets harder to break the longer it goes on.

Now a lot of us are working from home, we find procrastination is an easy trap to fall into. After all, no one can see if you are working or not. So, to make up for our procrastination, we work a bit longer than normal. Then we spend our evenings stressing about what we didn’t achieve during the day and how we will catch up in the morning. Eventually, the worry will start keeping you up at night.

Before you know it, all of your quality time has been eaten up by work and stress.

The tasks you procrastinated over now occupy your mind when you should be spending quality time with your friends and family. It keeps you awake at night and your brain’s quality of life declines further and further.

The more your brain’s quality of life declines, the more it will find things to procrastinate over while it seeks a better quality of life. And so, the cycle continues downwards.

Play Hard, Then Work Hard

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So, I looked for ways of improving my brain’s quality of life and immediately ran into a problem.

My brain is conditioned to believe that rewards come after hard work, and not before. So, my first plan was to promise myself treats if I completed a task. For the brains of non-procrastinators, this works really well. Unfortunately, the brains of procrastinators don’t normally work that way. They want the rewards now.

My mind instantly rebelled against working for treats and started procrastinating again. It didn’t care what the size of my promised reward was, my brain kept on procrastinating because it wanted a better quality of life now, not later.

So, I flipped things on their head and just took all the rewards I promised myself, regardless of any tasks I had completed or not.

I made a conscious effort to fill my spare time with quality activities including;

Spending quality time with my family and grandchildren

Playing video games (something I have loved since the 80s)

Country walks

DIY / Gardening projects

Learning to cook

Blasting out my favorite tunes

Binge-watching TV shows and films

I also made other quality of life adjustments, such as removing my works email and messaging software off my phone. And I banned my phone from the bedroom and replaced it with a traditional alarm clock. This greatly limited how much my work life invaded my spare time and my quality of life.

By filling my spare time with these quality activities, I achieved two things. First, I improved my brain’s quality of life by giving it what it craved. Second, I starved my brain of time to stress over my procrastination stopping the endless procrastination cycle.

The first two weeks were hard, as I had to overcome decades of unhealthy habits. The biggest of which was a tendency to think work always came above and before everything else in life.

The results were amazing. After the initial two weeks of setting up better habits, it only took a week or two for my procrastination at work to drop. Then my ability to study improved, and finally my relationships improved.

6 months later my procrastination is all but gone. Like most people, I still have tasks I hate doing and I drag my feet over them, but now they are manageable with simple time management techniques.

With my brain experiencing a better quality of life, my time micro-management techniques stop being an extra chore to procrastinate over. Instead, they became more powerful and easier to implement and maintain.

The Takeaways

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For most people, there is a lot to be said for the phrase “Work hard, play hard”, however, for procrastinators it is backward. We need to play hard and then work hard.

If you use techniques to micro-manage your procrastination periods, hold on to them — they will play an even bigger role in the future. Improving your brain’s quality of life will make them as powerful as you initially hoped they would be.

By improving your brain’s quality of life, you remove the primary reason for your brain to procrastinate over chores. Time micro-management techniques will still help make more effective use of your time and get through those times when your brain sulks for no apparent reason.