Identifying Your Procrastination Habits

Now that you know what procrastination is, it is important to know when you are procrastinating and how to work your way out of it. In order to do that you must be able to identify the signs of procrastination, which you probably are already aware of.

Some common procrastination signs include:

• Daydreaming; becoming sleepy all of a sudden

• Ignoring your daily schedule and working on things that are low priority

• Browsing the Internet and not sure why you are doing it

• Putting a task in front of yourself to work on and staring at it

• Your tasks list has gotten longer and difficult to manage, because you haven’t worked on anything

• Working all day on a task that should have taken a couple of hours

• Allowing others to interrupt you instead of getting back with them later

Eliminating Your Procrastination Habits

In order to kick the procrastination bucket, you must be willing to replace non-productive habits with productive ones. do the following:

Commit to take action. Decide whether or not you will commit to eliminating procrastination from your life. Commitment means that you’ll do whatever it takes to become more proactive in completing your tasks and you’ll recognize when you need to improve upon certain skills to make it happen. If you’re not committed you’ll just procrastinate about ridding yourself of procrastination; that in and of itself is a tangled web you don’t want to experience.

Identify when you have the most energy. Do you know the time of day that you work best? When tackling big tasks that require focus and concentration, it’s best to do it during your peak performance time.

Create consistency. Procrastinators often need structure and consistency. After you identify your peak performance hours block them in your planner and commit to working on tasks that need your maximum attention always during that time.

Break Larger Tasks Down Into Mini-Tasks. Sometimes a quick plan or system has to be developed for larger tasks. For example, if one of your tasks is to create an e-newsletter to send out to your customers you will need to determine the content you want to have, write articles, choose the graphics that you want to use, ensure that you have uploaded the content on your website, so it can be fully read and ensure that you have all of the names and emails you want to send it to. As you can see this one large task has many components that must be broken down. If you were to write “create e-newsletter” in a one-hour time slot in your planner, it would overwhelm you and not get done. Not allotting enough time and breaking tasks down enough is one of the major causes of most procrastination.

Delegate. This is often a hard thing to do for most procrastinators, because they feel that no one can do it better than them. This is the perfectionism talking and this self-talk pattern can wreck havoc on achieving goals. Try delegating tasks such as filing, making copies, correspondence, creating flyers, marketing material and other like tasks to a virtual assistant, part-time secretary or high school student that can work for you after school. The important thing is to know that you don’t have to be alone in getting all of your tasks completed. If you find that you still must do mostly all tasks, make sure you develop a daily operations plan with time slots allotted for tasks that need to be repeated frequently.

Review your things to do lists and projects daily. Keep yourself constantly aware of the tasks that you must complete. Make sure that you have scheduled time in your planner for these tasks to be completed. To be on the safe side always double pad the time you allotted, so you won’t feel rushed to complete your tasks.

Take breaks throughout the day. Believe it or not, people who procrastinate often think that they are overloaded with work and constantly say they can’t find the time to do the things they need to do. This is caused by “mental overload” and not taking breaks throughout the day. Taking at least four 15-minute breaks daily along with a one-hour lunch break and a 30 minute exercise break will go a long way in helping you to feel energized both physically and mentally. Working on tasks all day without eating, taking breaks and exercising is an easy way to procrastinate even more.

Learn to say “NO”. You can’t be everything to everybody. When you say “YES” to things other people ask you to do without weighing your own priorities you are setting yourself up to procrastinate on your own tasks.

Getting rid of procrastination is not an overnight project. It takes approximately 21 days to break a habit, so be patient with yourself. The length of time it will take to break your procrastination habit is dependent upon your commitment and willingness to take action. The most important thing to remember is that once you kick the procrastination habit a whole new world will open up to you full of productivity and accomplishment. You’ll be able to take action on major projects that you’ve been putting off for months!