The one thing that all fools have in common is that they’re always delaying to live – Seneca
You have to assemble your life yourself — action by action – Marcus Aurelius
Are you finding it challenging to stay productive?
If so you’re in the right place. In this post, you’re going to learn 7 effective strategies to help you overcome procrastination.
Why do we procrastinate?
The biggest reasons why we wait to work on the most important things is that we’re:
- Focused on perfection
- Fear of failure or success
- Overestimate how much time we have available
- Self-doubt and negative thoughts
- Focus on making small daily incremental changes
- Break down a project into actionable steps
- Create an environment that reduces resistance
- Do the most important task in the morning
- Focus on shipping, not perfection
- Invest in the right tools to get work done
- Focus on self-care (stress management techniques, quality sleep, exercise and nutrition)
Our goal should be to reduce as much resistance as possible.
Making progress and achieve goals is difficult enough. There’s no point trying to make it more difficult by setting ourselves.
It’s like trying to run a marathon with a weighted vest and ankle weights. Sure, you can finish the marathon, but at what cost? It’ll take much more energy, training and motivation to complete it. How about completing the marathon without all the distractions and resistance first?
So in order to beat procrastination, we need to first eliminate or reduce any forms of resistance — inner and outer. This means creating environments that are conducive to work, using tools and techniques to block distractions and mindfulness training to help us clear negative thought patterns.
The more you’re able to clear both inner and outer resistances, the easier it will be for you to achieve your goals and stop procrastinating.
Setup your environment for success
https://miadanielle.com/psychological-effects-of-clutter/
https://philosophycommunication.com/branding/albert-einstein-wrong
As they say, a cluttered environment leads to a cluttered mind.
It’s been proven that clutter leads to greater stress levels and elevated cortisol.
When you live in a cluttered space, you’ll feel much more stressed, unfocused and get distracted easily. A clean and uncluttered environment allows us to be more creative, productive, focused and alert.
That’s why it’s important to take some time to clear your space so that you can feel much more
Take some time to observe your work environment. What’s on your desk? Is everything neatly organized or papers and folders scattered all over? Is your bin full or empty?
Do an environmental audit. Make a note of all the things in your room or den, and see what you can eliminate.
Eliminate anything from your room that doesn’t serve a purpose and is distraction.
Invest in the right tools
Which tools you use to complete your work can make it easier to get the work done — quicker and more accurately.
For example, if your computer is slow and laggy, or your internet connection is slow, then spend time fixing it so that it works more smoothly.
If your computer is slow, then consider upgrading the memory, hard drive or even buying another computer. There’s nothing worse than spending 30 minutes fighting against your browser, when that time you could be completing that blog post or Youtube video.
Focus on shipping, not perfection
As a digital entrepreneur it’s easy to get caught up in paralysis by analysis.
Perfection = paralysis.
When you’re trying to be perfect — writing a perfect blog post, perfect sales letter, perfect ad, and you’re not actually publishing things and testing things, then you’re going to find it challenging to get things started.
Instead, focus on completion — the minimum viable product, sales letter or blog post. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or not. A finished product is better than a “perfect” non-finished product.
Then you can spend some time editing and polishing your work. But then you have to just hit publish. Whether it’s an ad, blog post, Youtube video, or online course. Don’t think too much about it. It’s not as bad as you think. And people aren’t going to scrutinize your work as much as you believe it will.
Don’t let paralysis determine the success of your online business. Simply do your best each and every day, and move onto the next most important thing.
Focus on Self-Care
When you’re building an online business, it can be easy to get consumed in the process. You forget about taking care of yourself — health and well-being. Instead, you end up spending 60 hour weeks consuming content, writing, working on a product and other activities.
But if you don’t take the time each day and week to rest and renew, you’re eventually going to burn out and lose all motivation. If not now, then soon.
Building an online business is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to pace yourself.
By self-care, I mean focusing on nourishing your body, mind and spirit each day.
Mind – meditation, journalling, tapping.
Body – exercise, workouts, nutrition, sleep.
When you focus on improving your mental health, nutrition and sleep, you’re going to feel and perform much better.
Doing a morning and night time ritual which includes these aspects of your being will enhance all areas of your life and well-being. You’ll no longer feel depleted of energy, de-motivated and burnt out. You’ll be able to sustain the long journey of building an online business.
Focus on making small daily incremental changes
The path to wisdom is just acquiring one quote, one insight, making one bit of progress every day. – Seneca
Focusing too much on the big picture can make you feel overwhelmed. For example, if you want to write a non-fiction book, then it’s best to break it down chapter by chapter. Writing 500 words per day, you can write the book within 60 days.
If you were to make 1% improvements every day, in one year see a 37X (3700%) improvement, because of compound interest.
So that’s why it’s better to make small daily improvements over time, then to try to make everything happen in a short period. When it comes to compound interest, time is your friend as long you continue to focus on completing one new thing each day — whether it’s writing 500 words of a blog post, novel, or sales letter.
Pick the most important project you want to complete within the next 90 days and make small steps towards it each day. Within a year, you can accomplish a lot more than you thought.
Energy depletion
When you charge your laptop battery to 100% each day, it’ll slowly drain each day. But as you start to use more resources — multiple browser tabs, applications, increasing screen brightness, streaming videos — it will deplete the battery much faster.
Similarly, if you start with 100 units of energy each day, the more background stuff or resources you use, the faster you’ll deplete your energy throughout the day.
If you’re still thinking about someone who criticized you yesterday, thoughts about tomorrow, scrolling through social media feeds and watching Youtube videos, then you’re going to lose energy much faster.
If you want to be as productive as possible throughout the day and reserve your energy for doing the most important tasks and activities then you’re going to have to focus on energy conservation.
Do an energy audit.
