Set priorities in life. When procrastination interferes with decision-making, then you should figure out your goals in life. The following ways to do this will help.
You need to arrange their aspirations for their implementation time: long, medium, and short. Set goals for the next 5-10 years. Based on them, create specific goals for the next year, month, week. To make it easier to navigate, create your schedule of tasks.
Determine which goals or areas of your life are the most important. Focus on what’s most important at the moment (work, education, children, self-development, etc.) Each goal should be thought through in detail, what you want to achieve in a year, two years, or ten years.
To correctly prioritize will take time, but it’s worth it. Pretty soon you’ll realize that decision-making now depends on your goals.
Reject the useless. Think about the things you put off for later. Perhaps these are just unnecessary tasks? Do you need to do another essay or you can just use essay helper or ask your good friend to do it? Is it worth going to stretching for the company of a friend if you have a yoga class three times a week? Analyze again your life goals, it is better to remove from your life something useless, to concentrate on one more important task, thus overcome procrastination.
Sort out tasks. Distribute things, learn how to organize your time, make plans and schedules – all this will help to achieve your goals. Study the rules of time management, there are detailed instructions on how to apply to sort in life situations. The most famous way is the Eisenhower matrix. It categorizes all tasks according to the principle: important/urgent, important/term, unimportant/urgent, unimportant/term. The highest priority, of course, is important/urgent.
Another way of distributing things is to schedule them according to the urgency of the task. In this method, it is very important to pay attention to small tasks. It is better not to put them off for later, but to perform them immediately, especially if they take 5-10 minutes to complete.
Allocate resources. It is important to be able to allocate your energy wisely. Athletes cope well with this: the winners are not those who start first, but those who correctly calculate their strength and save them until the final spurt. There’s no need to rush into battle and try to do everything in one day, allocate your resources wisely and evenly.
Train your willpower. There are times when the schedule of tasks is perfectly timetable, but to start their implementation is still hard, unpleasant, and does not want to. In that case, you need to learn to force yourself to do any task. To do this, you need to develop habits.
For example, to do daily morning exercises, or go for a run, or regularly do wet cleaning, but many tasks need to force yourself to do. These small and sometimes unpleasant tasks teach you discipline and fulfillment. After a while, you will notice that the fear of more complicated tasks disappears.
Systematize tasks. For a student, the most important and urgent task is to write an essay or term paper. But usually to sit down at the table and write at least a page seems an impossible task, hindered by laziness and procrastination. In general, the work seems huge, boring, and time-consuming.
It is worth dividing it into several stages – and the fear diminishes. When the task is performed in stages, in small steps, the final goal becomes much closer and more accessible. A great way to combat procrastination is to divide a large task into smaller steps and perform them sequentially.
Motivation. For any action, you need a mandatory incentive! To perform any work, you need to keep in mind not only the time of its completion but also the purpose of this work, what it is done for, what to expect as a result of its implementation. You can think of a reward for performance and strive for the goal.
Visualization. Another way to combat procrastination is through visualization. For a few moments, mentally imagine how you’ve already completed the task, how your mood has risen, how you are praised by everyone, feel like a winner! And be sure not to forget to reward yourself for the work you’ve done.
Promise. Promise the person from your environment that the work will be done by a certain date. You will have a sense of responsibility to the stranger, this will help meet the deadline, otherwise, you will fail not only yourself but also the other person. You can make a promise to a close friend, a relative, or your supervisor, who will support and encourage you in the process of implementing the goal.
Forgiveness. There is no need to strive to be superhuman. There is no such thing as a person who does everything 100% and perfectly! It is physically impossible to do absolutely everything on time, or never feel lazy.
You need to know how to forgive yourself, it is good to fight procrastination. It takes a lot of time to overcome this phenomenon, and many people struggle with it throughout their lives. Nevertheless, fighting and taking action is a better option than staying put with a bunch of stuff put off for “someday later.”
Gather your will in your fist, take the first step, and it will all work out for you!