Procrastination

Procrastination.

We all struggle with it, but why is it such a struggle sometimes, sometimes more than others?

I found for myself when I struggle, it's often because either the task I'm trying to complete is a huge, significant task and it in itself is overwhelming me, or I have so many little tasks to do that I'm overwhelmed and don't know where to start.

In both cases, I find breaking them down into steps to reach those goals goes a long way in helping me overcome procrastination. 

For example, I've just moved into a new home.  Currently my home is filled with boxes that I'm just living around. The mountain of a task is unpacking and settling into this house. Every time I think of doing that, I just shut down and end up falling asleep because I'm overwhelmed and exhausted by the thought of the job ahead of me.

But what if instead I focused on one room, or even if one room is too much, what if I focused on one box. One box today, unpack it, figure out where things go, and put them away and stop there. That sounds easy enough. Then tomorrow, try to do a little better than I did today. Maybe tomorrow all I can do is another box.  That’s good enough. But what if I'm able to do two boxes -  that's twice as much as I did the day before.  That's a huge increase. Maybe the day after I can do three.

Even if I can't do more and more boxes each day, if I just did one box a day, I would start to see progress.

I don't know about you, but once I start to see progress, I get excited to see more, and actually tackling the job no longer overwhelms me. Instead, it excites me to see progress towards reaching my goals.

What do you find causes you to procrastinate in your life?

How do you overcome this?

Are you able to identify the barriers that are causing you to procrastinate?

If not, a good way to do it is to find out is to pay attention to things that are frustrating you.

For example, I know I've been planning on blogging on this site for a long time, and I just haven't been able to sit down and do it. I love writing things out and getting it out of my head, but for some reason with everything else I've got going on I just can't seem to make myself take the time to sit and write. So I keep putting them off until tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. Suddenly, a year has gone past and I’ve made absolutely no progress.

So instead of letting time continually pass me by, I found an app that I can dictate to. It changes what I say into text, and then I can edit it to create the blog. So I've overcome this particular barrier in regards to procrastinating. At least when it comes to blogging.

What are your barriers to getting things done?

How are you able to overcome them?