JOHANNESBURG – Procrastination – the art of literally doing anything else. In our daily routine, we constantly delay every task, from going to gym, avoiding work for the day or attending family events to tasks like studying. No seriously, one time I spring cleaned the house just to avoid studying for a test that I was writing the very next day.
Procrastination can get out of hand, but the reason people continue to procrastinate might be because they are thinking: “Hey I’ve gotten away with it this for so long, so why stop now? It’s not like it’s affecting me or anything, right?”
Wrong!
Little do we know that procrastinating is affecting us. It literally comes between you and your goals, but you don’t have to let it. Here are things you need to realise about procrastinating in order to kick this self-destructive habit:
Stop chasing perfection, it doesn’t exist
Most people procrastinate because they are afraid of failure, and perfectionism is associated with the fear of failing. If you don’t put 100% into a task because you feel too pressured or too lazy to do the task, you’ll never reap the rewards if you did put enough effort into a task. It doesn’t count as failure if you didn’t give it your all right?
Procrastinators are prone to stress
Trying to complete a task in one day that was meant to be completed over a week has stress written all over it, as if that’s not enough, all that time you spend thinking about the task that you should be doing, causes more stress, then your tasks pile up and causes you more stress on top of stress. All that time that you wasted on something as tiresome as stress.
You’re getting in your own way
Procrastination comes with a lack of discipline, you know what you want and are constantly planning to get it, you start working on it for a bit then you stop and the postponing begins. Stop planning and start doing, action, action, action and more action. Stop preventing yourself from being amazing.
Alright, alright you rebellious child
According to a report published by the Kansas State University, delaying tactics can be a form of rebellion against imposed schedules, standards, and expectations. You might be procrastinating because you’re afraid to fail. Perhaps you have been forced into doing something you are not necessarily interested in. If that’s the case don’t be passive-aggressive, speak up.
If you are a procrastinator, you are not alone, however, if you want to be prosperous, understand that prosperity requires discipline, determination, consistency and whole lot of other things, just not procrastination.
