Though you may believe that procrastination only has immediate ramifications—that marked-down grade on your late term paper, the fee added to your overdue credit card payment—it actually has long-term consequences that touch almost every area of your life. Procrastinators have poorer health, greater risk for mental health conditions, lower self-esteem, …
When we procrastinate, we actually get stuck in a spiral, where one bout of procrastinating leads to another. One day of that turns into one week, which turns into one month, and before you know it, you’ve been procrastinating your life away for years. Understanding how that cycle works is …
Whether your procrastination comes from a mental health condition or just exists all on its own, it is caused by a combination of psychological factors, including how your brain works and how you think, feel, and behave, as well as how well you estimate time and whether you’re able to …
The first step in overcoming procrastination is deciding on a task to work on. This sounds simple but is surprisingly tricky. By definition, everything on your to-do list needs to get done, and there’s actually a lot of brain processing involved in deciding what to prioritize. Our brains do some …
One of the biggest concerns I hear from my clients is, “I just can’t find the motivation to [insert task they’ve previously said they want to do].” We spend much of our lives trying to motivate ourselves to do unpleasant but important tasks, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy …
In this article, we will tackle the hurdle: staying focused. This can be a surprisingly difficult part of the journey. Even after you put all that effort into feeling motivated and getting started, it’s still easy to get distracted from your target. Certain people are more prone to distractibility than …
You need two sets of skills to get started on a task: behavioural skills that help you take actions and emotional skills that help you manage the feelings that come up when you start something new. These emotional skills help you overcome avoidance, which is one of the biggest issues …
Once you’ve started a task, your next challenge is to follow it through to completion. Many factors can derail you, from distractibility to forgetfulness to difficulty recovering from setbacks. This is especially true for longer-term projects or multi-step tasks, which come with multiple opportunities to get off task. To maximize …
Procrastination is as much about finishing tasks as it is about starting them. You have to learn how to manage the emotions and thoughts interfering with your ultimate success. By the time you’ve gotten to the end of a project, you’ve done a lot of hard work and proved how …