From the course: Time Management Tips

Fight negative procrastination

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Fight negative procrastination

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- There are many reasons why people don't follow through. Why they procrastinate. Now, I talk about the difference between negative procrastination and positive procrastination. Positive procrastination is when you schedule something in your calendar and give yourself a lot of time to complete it in an appropriate way. That's a good thing. But, negative procrastination is when you have something scheduled or you know you're supposed to do something and you keep pushing it off. This is the kind of procrastination I want to confront in this video. First, understand that the reason behind procrastination most often has to do with some kind of emotion that you're feeling. Often it's fear of how hard it's going to be or discomfort that you don't want to do that kind of activity. Perhaps you wish you were doing something else. In this situation, we need to utilize a few tricks to get yourself to follow through, even if you don't want to. The first trick is to ignore the emotion that you're feeling. At least the emotion just before doing it. Our brains are hard-wired to fight or flight. And often we resist change. Now this isn't a negative thing. Resisting change helps our brains and helps us be more productive. For instance, if I had to think every single time about how to brush my teeth, well that would take a lot of time that's unnecessary. But, there are moments when that resisting of change is a negative. And usually that happens when we have something scheduled on our calendar and we don't want to follow through with it. So, pay attention to the emotion that you feel when scheduling it. Most often, we feel good about the idea of completing something. And, pay attention to the emotion you feel after completing it. Validate the fact that, wow, that was a good thing. And that emotion is positive. But the emotion that you feel just before doing something, ignore it. Jump over it and get right into the action. That will help you follow through. The second tip is precrastinating. Now, that's a clever little play on words, and what I mean is that you focus in advance on just the first minute of activity. I had a client once who said if it weren't for the last minute, I'd never get anything done. Well that's negative procrastination in a nutshell. Instead, we want to flip that around and say if it weren't for the first minute, we'd never get anything done. Think about some big project that you have to do. Perhaps creating a training program for an employee. Now that's a big, messy, hard thing to do. Doesn't feel very good, right? So now, let's ask what's the first minute of activity to accomplish that thing? Typically, it's going to be something very simple, like opening up a file on a computer. You can do that, that's easy. There's no emotion tied to that. So, I recommend that if you have a hard time with negative procrastination, in your calendar when scheduling it, put a note about the first minute of activity. The first minute is opening up the file. That will trick yourself into focusing on just that first minute, rather than the hours worth of activity that you're going to do at some point. And then finally, answer a why question in the description. As why am I spending my time doing this? You can put a little note in the description or in the notes of the task, of why you're doing this. This gives your mind a justification for the effort that you're about to put. So using that example before of creating a training program, the reason why is it's going to save you lots of time and headache in the future. By using these three tips, you'll fool your mind and your body into taking action. And the more often you take action and fight that negative procrastination, you'll experience the benefits of improved time management.

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