14 Sep Tired of putting things off until “tomorrow”? 5 ways to beat the procrastination trap!
Happiness is now.
Happiness is achieving meaningful goals.
However you define it, happiness will be harder to enjoy if you’re constantly putting off those things which are important.
Does this sound like you? Keep reading for some solutions…
via the Ladders by Benjamin P Hardy
You’ve probably heard something similar to the following phrase:
It’s better to spend 5 minutes per day learning a new language than 5 hours once per month.
It’s better to do anything daily than sporadically. If you do something daily, your chances of mastering it are very high.
The challenge (and the hidden benefit) is that there are only 24 hours in a single day. This 24-hour constraint will force you to decide what really matters to you.
What are you serious about?
What are you working on?
When it comes to your own goals or dreams:
- Are you like the person who studies a new language 5–10 minutes per day?
- Or are you like the person who “studies” a new language for an hour or two here and there?
If you’re like most people, you’re the latter. And if you’re like most people, that means you’re not making very much progress.
Life is extremely busy. It can be tough strategically fitting other things into your daily schedule when you have a job, family, and other responsibilities. However, if you don’t fit your big dreams into your daily schedule, you probably won’t achieve them. Or in the least, you won’t achieve them in a timely fashion.
This article is not for people who are fine achieving big things once or twice in their lifetimes. Instead, this article is for people who want to achieve several big things every single year.
If you learn to prioritize your life and your time, then you can do several big things on an annual basis. When you develop consistency, you also develop momentum. With momentum comes confidence and increased motivation. With confidence and increased motivation comes inspiration and bold ideas. If you’re not consistent, then you’re missing out on all of the psychological benefits that ripple into a life of success.
Your daily routine is the clearest indicator of where you’re going.
The trap of believing you need big chunks of time
When it comes to big goals or projects — such as starting a business, writing a book, cleaning the garage, etc. — it’s easy falling into the trap of only working on it when you have a 3+ hour chunk of time.
I myself fell into this trap. I’m nearing the completion of my PhD in Organizational Psychology and only have my dissertation to complete. But a dissertation is a really big, complex, and challenging project. It felt so big that I didn’t feel I could work on it for just 10–20 minutes at a time. I felt like it took an hour just to “get into” it.
That premise resulted in me regularly going weeks (sometimes months!) without touching it. It’s taken far longer than it has needed to complete. I have learned from sad experience the truth of Meredith Willson’s words, “You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.”
Once I made working on my dissertation a part of my daily schedule, and worked on it like I was learning a new language — just 15–30 minutes per day — I started making huge progress. I began caring about it more. I got more motivated and excited to do well. I went from push motivation, where it took willpower to work on it, to pull motivation, where I intrinsically wanted to do it. I began finding more pockets of time to squeeze it in.
Here’s the 5-step process and how it works:
- Establish clear priorities of what you truly want to do (it must fit into your daily schedule, or it’s probably not a huge priority)
- Design your daily routine to ensure you get it done optimally
- Use the Pomodoro Technique — where you work for a set period of time without any distractions
- Report your progress immediately after you’ve completed your session
- Have a weekly reflection where you assess your progress and make future plans
…keep reading the full & original article HERE