Don’t procrastinate, just do it. It’s easier than you think

Imagine you went to the doctor complaining of a headache and the first words out of his or her mouth were, “Take aspirin. Have a nice day.” If your headache turned out to be, say, a brain tumor, you’d sue and win in any court in the land. A headache is only the symptom. Its cause will determine the right treatment.

Same is true of procrastination. Only after you’ve identified the root cause(s), should you decide on how to treat it. Here are procrastination’s most common causes and tactics that have helped my clients. They are derived from my new book, Careers for Dummies.

Your life is too bad to make the effort to cure your procrastination. If that’s the case, it’s too early to work on procrastination. Take baby steps to improving your life’s blockers: work, relationship, emotional health, physical health, whatever. Of course, your life needn’t be in perfect shape before moving to addressing your procrastination. It just need be good enough to feel it’s worth controlling.

You tend to lose track of time. For a day or, better, a week, keep a timer in your pocket — Clock app on your phone or a small kitchen timer. Set it for whatever time you think would be helpful to track — as short as a minute, as long as an hour. Each time it chimes, you’re getting a sense of how long that interval is. If you’re ambitious, log what you were doing during that interval. After a few hours, review your log: Want to reallocate your time to be more productive? Less?

Your philosophy of life is centered around the pursuit of happiness. Some procrastinators are helped by recognising that the life well-led usually entails accomplishment. After all, many people could be happy with a life filled with sitcoms, eating, and bubble baths. Yet even a sybarite would agree that such a life is less well-led than one that balanced work and play or even prioritised productivity.

You’re a perfectionist, so tasks are a long, painful struggle. If so, you’ll understandably procrastinate subsequent tasks. It may help to realise you’re in control of a perfectionism pedal. Rather than defaulting to perfectionism all the time, consciously decide whether to press the petal to the metal, that is, do the task perfectly. Or is this a time when the perfect is the enemy of the good and, half-pedal or even less is good enough.

You’re emotionally fragile, so you’re afraid you won’t rebound quickly after a failure or rejection. Even highly successful people fail but they rarely allow themselves to wallow. They quickly, perhaps instantly, derive any lessons learned from the failure and then redirect to some positive activity. That isn’t an inborn trait; it’s an acquirable habit. So, might it help to keep reminding yourself that if you have a reasonable chance of succeeding at a task, it’s worth trying? If you fail, you’ll survive and maybe learned something from the attempt.

You’re afraid that success would swallow up your life. Indeed, success tends to yield more demands on your time, which can eat into work-life balance. It may help to, up-front, decide how much are you willing to work. Perhaps in the short-run or occasionally, you don’t mind long work hours but that you generally want to keep it to 40 hours a week. Should you believe 40 good hours makes you employable, and if that’s not good enough for a given employer, it will be for another?

None of the above. You simply need tactics to manage your time better.

These have helped my clients: Picture the pros and cons: Stay alert to that moment of truth when you’re deciding whether to do the task or get that burrito. At that moment, remind yourself of how your life would be better if you did the task and if you didn’t.

The one-second task: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. So if you’re about to procrastinate a task you’ve decided you should do, ask yourself, “What’s my next one-second task?” One second is a friendly, not-intimidating amount of time. So maybe it’s to turn on your computer or open a book. After that one-second task, do your next one and one more. Often, that’s enough to get the ball rolling. That tactic is also useful in conquering a roadblock. Your first reaction to a tough problem may be overwhelm. Instead, take a deep breath and ask yourself, “Okay, what’s my first one-second task?”

The one-minute struggle: Of course, there are exceptions but usually, if you haven’t made progress on a roadblock within one minute, you’re unlikely to. So struggle for just a minute and then ask yourself whether you should keep struggling, get help, or whether you can do the task without toppling the roadblock. Ritualise: Some people’s procrastination is mitigated by structure, for example, allocating 9am to 10am every Saturday and Sunday to do your taxes until they’re done.

The Pomodoro technique: This is named after those tomato-shaped kitchen timers but any timer will do. Set it for 20 minutes and work until it chimes. Then take five minutes to do whether you want. Repeat that twice more—three comprise a Pomodoro. Or use one of the Pomodoro apps.

The takeaway is it may be overambitious for the inveterate procrastinator to demand cure, but one or more of these tactics might reduce its toll on your life. —

Rather than defaulting to perfectionism all the time, consciously decide whether to press the petal to the metal, that is, do the task perfectly. Or is this a time when the perfect is the enemy of the good and, for that task, half-pedal or even less is good enough