How To Stop Procrastinating

I recently wrote here about my struggles with how to stop procrastinating. I created this blog to help others who struggle as I did. In this post I will reveal what I discovered during my own battle. If you are ready to know right now and believe that you will avoid getting help if I force you to read this whole article, then please, by all means, click here immediately. Otherwise, I invite you to read along to the end before you go to check it out. Let me show you how to stop procrastinating.

Remember the book and movie called “The Secret“? It taught that you ‘manifest’ your thoughts. Whether you believe in the book or not, there’s no denying that thinking about leaving something undone, or not thinking about it at all, leads to that thing staying undone, is there?. It won’t do itself, now will it?

I read all the self-help literature on procrastination. There are a lot of good suggestions offered. These may help you a little.

• Change your work space to purposefully avoid distractions. No phones. No TV. No video games.
• Break your task into manageable pieces taking no more than 15-20 minutes to complete.
• Set a deadline and make a simple schedule. Have someone help you stick to it.
• Do the easy things first just to get started on something.
• Reward yourself in some way when you complete a piece of the project.
• Don’t give up!
• Ask for help when you get stuck.

Sorry, but this is not how to stop procrastinating.

These tips will certainly help you cope but they are a little like taking a pill every time you have a sniffle. As we all know, the pill doesn’t cure the sniffle. It only makes it bearable. It’s the same with how to stop procrastinating.

People often ask me how to avoid procrastination. Well, you can’t avoid procrastination. You must stop procrastinating. And, while we’re at it, there’s no ‘beating procrastination’ either. You must just stop procrastinating. Procrastination is a habit. You must end procrastination. That’s the only way. That’s how to stop procrastinating.

You don’t need to study the psychology of procrastination to do it either. Reading books and articles on procrastination probably won’t help at all. It will most likely just put you to sleep. All the ‘book learning’ in the world about why we procrastinate simply won’t help you break the habit.

In fact, for most people, reading those books is just another tactic to avoid facing up to the problem. It is another form of procrastination! How insidious is that!?

In case you missed it, PROCRASTINATION IS A HABIT. Period. End of story. Did you hear me?

Change the habit, end the procrastination. Now, that was simple wasn’t it? Just change the habit. That’s how to stop procrastinating. Oh my, I can hear you already. “Just change the habit, right! … but … uh, err… how do I do that?” Now you are starting to see why people have such a problem with overcoming procrastination. Habits, especially lifelong habits are hard to break.

Click here to see what finally showed me how to stop procrastination.

Experts say that changing a habit can take 21 days of focused effort. That can be difficult, or nearly impossible for someone on their own. It certainly was for me, I know. Even though I had the secret, I still struggled to manage my procrastination. I needed help to do the proper things. I needed help to train my mind to change a habit I had lived with most of my life. It’s quite normal, and nothing to be upset or ashamed about. I can now tell you, I found the answer in “Habit Busting Secrets: How to Break Any Habit in 21 Days” .

“Habit Busting Secrets: How to Break Any Habit in 21 Days” is a series of daily tasks that help reprogram your habit. These tasks are simple, reinforcing, and meant to be completed in sequence, one for each day.

This amazing step by step system helped me break the habit that was sabotaging my life — in only 21 days!

Click here for the official’‘ Habit Busting Secrets: How to Break Any Habit in 21 Days’ website to read more about it.

You may not need “Habit Busting Secrets: How to Break Any Habit in 21 Days” to break your habit, but I did, and I’m OK with that. My family suffered too long because of my procrastination and I’m glad I found a better way. So are they.

Check out the rest of my site and please, do leave me your comments. I’d love to hear how you’re doing. I wish you all the best and hope you will ‘kick the habit’ too. Well, that’s it. That’s how to stop procrastinating in a nutshell. That’s how to stop procrastinating.

written by Sue (ex-Procrastinator) \\ tags: how to stop procrastinating, how to stop procrastination, procrastination

Before dealing with procrastination or how to stop procrastinating, let’s attempt to understand what is procrastination. Harold Taylor of ‘Harold Taylor Time Consultants Ltd.‘ defined procrastination as “the intentional and habitual postponement of an important task that should be done now”. So then, naturally we ask, why do people procrastinate even when they know they are delaying important tasks? What possible reasons for procrastination can they offer?

I want to dig into this definition of procrastination a little bit to find some answers about how to stop procrastinating.

First, we notice that procrastination is ‘intentional’. The procrastinator is well aware of the effects of his or her actions and yet fails to act. When offered a choice, one generally chooses in one’s own best self interest. I always thought that completing an important task was in my own best self interest. And yet, the task went undone. There was clearly something unseen going on in my mind. For some unexplained reason(s), I saw more benefit in delaying the task than in completing it. That’s an important observation and one we will want to understand deeper.

Next, we notice that procrastination is ‘habitual’. This is not a one time thing. Statistics on procrastination indicate that 9 out of 10 of us admit to having procrastinated at some time or another. But we are really talking about something much worse here. This is not a discussion about the occasional delayed task. We are talking about people who simply do not have ‘the now habit’. Yes, that’s right, the habit of taking action immediately to ‘just get it done’. The procrastinator simply does not know how to stop procrastinating or is incapable of it in his or her current state of mind.

Another good definition of procrastination is ‘the thief of time’. Time is our most precious asset. I let procrastination steal my time and thereby prevent me from completing important tasks that were a prerequisite to achieving my dreams. We must not allow procrastination to steal our most precious asset.

So, what can be done? The answer lies in changing the game. Changing what needs to be done, or the manner in which it needs to be done in such a way as to help the procrastinator change his or her habits. This is, in principle, a simple concept and actually quite easy to implement. However, without this knowledge, overcoming procrastination is nearly impossible. There is no incentive to do so. And incentive is how we function. The two great motivators are the potential to gain and the fear of loss. Change the game so that you feel better motivated to complete the task rather than put it off indefinitely and you have taken a giant step on the road toward how to stop procrastinating.

written by Sue (ex-Procrastinator) \\ tags: how to stop procrastinating, how to stop procrastination, procrastination

Procrastination. That’s a long word isn’t it? You pretty much don’t even want to take the time to say it. right? Did you know, I read somewhere that 90-95 percent of us admit that we procrastinate? Boy oh boy, I know I did. Procrastinate I mean. Although I never wanted to admit it, I sure knew I did it. And I was completely floored when I learned that something like 75 percent of people are habitual procrastinators. That’s 3 out of every 4 people you meet!

Well, I decided that day that I couldn’t afford the effects of procrastination anymore. The wasted time and wasted dreams had to stop. But I didn’t have a clue how to stop procrastinating because I didn’t know why people procrastinate. I wasn’t aware of the connection between depression and procrastination. All I knew was that I needed a cure for laziness, a cure for procrastination. Yep, laziness and procrastination were my new enemies.

I started looking for books on procrastination. Procrastination self help and the like. Anything I could find about how to overcome laziness or how to fight procrastination. Better yet, how to end procrastination. That’s what I needed. But it was tough.

I struggled, I mean really struggled to stay on task and deal with the problem to the end. It was not easy but I eventually found ways to overcome procrastination, and I started this blog to help anyone such as yourself who may be struggling too. I will share with you some of the things that I tried, what worked, and what didn’t. I hope that I can help someone by writing this, and believe me, it wouldn’t have happened if I still procrastinated. I had to figure out how to stop procrastinating.

written by Sue (ex-Procrastinator) \\ tags: how to stop procrastinating, how to stop procrastination, procrastination