Procrastination is born out of overwhelm, and overwhelm is one of those things that you can’t escape without taking some form of action.
It’s not just a case of wishing life was easier and that there is less overwhelm. It’s about creating and developing ways that enable us to deal with overwhelm better, and thereby deal with procrastination in the process.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
The thing we need to do with any form of procrastination is to take an action, an action that will take us forward.
When we prioritise what’s important and set about doing those important things, this often makes the other 25 things on our list either easier to deal, or some become obsolete. So the list shrinks and already our overwhelm is less which frees up our energy.
Overcoming overwhelm and procrastination is a game of momentum
Everything in life is easy to deal with when you have momentum.
The way we create momentum is by taking a step in a particular direction and that starts to build traction. At first it might be slow, but the more that we move in that direction and the more pace we get and the better we get at moving in a particular direction, the more traction we have. It becomes easier then to deal with those situations and circumstances and therefore overwhelm and procrastination.
If we literally start to train ourselves to take action when we feel procrastination, we take one action right now, and you constantly train yourself to do that – it becomes habitual. Once it becomes habitual, then it becomes autonomous.
Then we literally associate procrastination with taking action, so that when we become aware we’re procrastinating we automatically start taking some form of action.
So the best way to hack procrastination is to create behaviours that move you in the right direction. And remember, this is like anything it takes time. You don’t get fit by going to the gym once and you don’t get slim by eating one salad.
You’ve gotta be willing to do this consistently over and over again to get the rewards that come with that behaviour. Ultimately it’s consequential.
Do the things that create the behaviour that you want, and if you do them consistently in a ritualistic manner that creates habitual behaviour, and that habitual behaviour becomes autonomous.
Then we’re free and we don’t have to think about overcoming procrastination, it’s a natural impulse to take action.
Kerwin Rae
Snapchat: @KerwinRae
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