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There’s 3 main ‘P’ words that all relate to success. The first two are productivity and perseverance, the last one is procrastination. Productivity and Perseverance both lead to success whereas procrastination slows us down, not really helping at all. In simple words – we don’t need it!
I recently finished reading ‘The Compound Effect‘ by Darren Hardy (which I wrote a review of here). Darren touches on the idea of being conscious about how the decisions you make now affect your future. I’ll let you know that being conscious about decisions is hard, very hard. It’s not one of those habits that will carry their momentum; you have to push it, every step of the way.
Why is it so good for combating procrastination?
A year from now you may wish you had started today – Karen Lamb
Everyone procrastinates, some just have it worse than others. I’ve talked about productive procrastination before, but it’s definitely one of those things you should only use when you ‘need’ to.
Basing your decisions on future thought is, in my opinion, the best way to beat the evil wrath of procrastination. Think about it this way, you can finish that blog post or that assignment now – when you’re full of energy and ideas. OR, you can watch T.V. - The latter can be much more attractive for the non-conscious decision maker.
What you should do in this case, is think about how your choice will affect you down the road. Think about how it will affect you long-term, and short-term.
Telling yourself you’re only going to watch 30 minutes of T.V and then write a blog post is dangerous, why? Because the thing with T.V is that they have ADS, some of which advertise the next program after the one you’re watching. No doubt you’ll be telling yourself “I suppose another half-hour wouldn’t hurt”.
T.V does wonders for my productivity – No One
Thinking about how your decisions affect you short-term is taking into account that possible extra hour of T.V, it’s taking into account the calories that you’ll have to burn off later if you eat that cake.
Long-term results are harder to vision, but can be more convincing. Sometimes it’s good to think outside of the square; I’ll go back to the T.V example for this: You watch that second program that was advertised during the one before, you find that you really like it, and decide that you’ll continue to watch it as the series had just started.
Here’s the problem – an episode is one hour long, there’s 10 episodes in a season. If you choose to watch T.V instead of writing that blog post, there is a possibility of wasting 10 hours watching some show.
It’s hard to bring across to you via text, this is one of those things you have to try yourself. Start now, try your best to be conscious with all the choices presented to you. It can be little things, like not wearing shoes outside on a rainy day. Make it your goal to track yourself making conscious decisions, keep a tally – whatever works for you.
