Scott H Young

Think about the last time you put something off even though you knew you should do it? If you are like most people, you probably don’t have to look very far back. Procrastination is a very common problem and it ranges from being a minor nuisance to a complete disruption of your life. This is the final part in a three part series dedicated to solving procrastination in its forms.

Procrastination - Series

Introduction (Understanding Procrastination)
Break It Down
Start Now

In the introduction I outlined how it was important to first understand where your procrastination was coming from. Once you understand what is causing your inaction, the next step is to break down your obstacles into manageable chunks. After breaking down your procrastination into manageable chunks, the next step is simple: Start!

In many cases your efforts to break down the procrastination will give you enough momentum and drive to get started. Other times you will still put off doing anything, even when the steps to start taking action are minute and actionable. When this happens, getting the right push can send you over the wall of inaction.

Before I outline steps to help give yourself more of a push to get started, you need to realize that simply breaking down your procrastination can be a motivator. By planning your action and dissolving a large task into components you usually gain a small boost of momentum. It is because of this that you should always try to start immediately after you break down the obstacle. When you set down that pencil after writing down your plan, you should act right away. If you need to resort to the additional steps posted here, do so, but don’t leave your list and go make a sandwich, watch television or take a nap.

I like to use a wall analogy to describe procrastination. This tendency towards inaction is like a large stone wall in your path. For some psychological or physiological reason you simply run into this barrier when attempting to move to action. Once you understand how the wall works, how tall it is and what properties it has (understanding procrastination), it is time to build some stairs (break it down). Unfortunately, sometimes that first stair is simply too hard to climb up on, in which case you need to get a push.

Use Rewards

The first way you can help defeat procrastination is to use rewards to overcome small steps along the way. These rewards, if they are meaningful and they don’t disrupt the flow of action can be a strong push up those stairs and eventually over the wall of inaction. Finding and using rewards can often be difficult to determine on the spot, so I have a few tips on how to create rewards as a push in the right direction.

Reward Now - All rewards must emphasize that you must take some action immediately in order to achieve them. So if your reward for starting your project is to go out to watch a movie, it must be based on starting your project within a minute or two, otherwise you will continue to procrastinate. Unless there is a sense of urgency connected with the reward it won’t work.

Avoid Interruption Rewards - Although rewards the interrupt the flow of action can sometimes work, they should be avoided. Having a reward for starting being that you can take a break in ten minutes will disrupt the flow of action. If you have built up enough momentum you may be able to put off the reward until later, but otherwise you may find yourself stalling.

Rewards Don’t Need To Be Tangible - A reward doesn’t have to be a physical object or event. Although external rewards can work well, rooting psychological rewards can help as well. It may seem silly to give yourself a pat on the back as a reward, but giving yourself a small emotional reward can be very easy and effective.

Now whenever your attempts to break down procrastination don’t seem like enough, you can use rewards to give yourself a little boost in your way over the wall of procrastination.

Use Leverage

Rewards are a good strategy, but they don’t have the power to overcome the huge obstacles in procrastination. Pain motivates us far more than reward as it is more deeply rooted in our survival. Although it is never as fun to create a punishment based reward system to spur yourself to action, in more severe cases of procrastination, getting serious leverage might be necessary. Here are some tips for using leverage as a motivator:

Don’t Rely on Willpower - If you make a promise saying that you will not get to watch your favorite television show unless you take action immediately, you have to be the one to enforce that decision. When this happens the threat may lose significance if you feel empowered to change it when you want. Self-enforced leverage can be good, but it is far from optimal.

Use People - Using other people is one of the best ways to ensure you stay congruent to your decisions. If you are procrastinating switching careers, giving a letter of resignation to a friend and telling him to promise you will mail it to your boss before a given date if you haven’t already quit will certainly give your complacency a snap.

Emotional Leverage - Although external leverage can be the easiest to maintain, emotional leverage can be effective when you need an easy push. Making yourself feel bad for not acting immediately is a common strategy and it is often the method most people use to naturally overcome procrastination.

Using rewards and leverage you can create a strong push in the right direction so you can start to overcome your procrastinating tendencies. These steps may be unnecessary for cases of minor procrastination but essential for serious ones.

Modify the Activity

Another interesting solution to give yourself a push over the barrier of procrastination is to modify the activity involved. By making the given activity itself less fearful, more exciting or less energy draining it will be easier to overcome. Not all activities can be modified in this way, but it can be an excellent technique for those that can.

A simple example of modifying the activity is to listen to music when exercising. If you’ve been putting off hitting the gym, then bringing out some fast music can often make the activity a lot more exciting and fun. By modifying one element of the activity you can completely eliminate the problem of procrastination.

Another example might be someone who is procrastinating finding a relationship. For this person, instead of going around and approaching people, they may find using an online dating service a less fearful method to meet new people and take the edge off the dating game. This solution certainly isn’t universal, but there are often lots of alternative activities for achieving the same result with less stress, fear or fatigue.

Perhaps instead of cleaning your entire house yourself you hire some people to help. Once again, creativity and critical thinking can overcome procrastination by modifying the elements of the activity that were causing you to put it off. It isn’t always possible to modify the activity, but try it wherever you can.

Procrastination Defeated

Procrastination is a widely complex problem that can be solved in many different ways and caused by many more. Despite this complexity, I have found that the simple solution of understanding, breaking down and starting is the most effective strategy. Here is a summary of that method:

• Understand where the procrastination is coming from:
  • All procrastination is rooted in linking more pain to taking action than inaction
  • Three Major Culprits:
    • Fear
    • Stress
    • Fatigue (Lack of Energy)
• Break down your walls and create stairs to make a large activity manageable
  • Break down by:
    • Steps in Order
    • Components
    • Progressions of Intensity
• With the activity broken down, you might need an extra push, so:
  • Use Rewards
  • Use Leverage
  • Modify the Activity

Don’t let procrastination whittle away the time in your life. Take action right away and banish your tendency towards inaction. Remember that mustering up the focus to work through your procrastination is half the battle, once you decide to take on the steps I’ve outlined you are already halfway done.

Procrastination - Series

Introduction (Understanding Procrastination)
Break It Down
Start Now

Procrastination is a common problem that can range from a minor nuisance to a serious handicap on your life. Due to both how prolific this problem is and how damaging it can become, I am writing a short blog series dedicated to the topic. This series will outline the fundamental three steps for overcoming a procrastination problem. The first article discussed the problem of procrastination and understanding what causes it. This article moves to the next step, breaking down the obstacles so they can be overcome.

Procrastination - Series

Introduction (Understanding Procrastination)
Break It Down
Start Now

The first step of defeating a procrastination problem is to understand exactly why you procrastinate. All procrastination stems from the inevitable truth that your mind, at some level, links more pain to not taking action then it does to going forward. As long as you hold the internal paradox of both wanting and not wanting to do something, you will procrastinate. To win that mental struggle, you first must understand exactly why you are procrastinating.

Break It Down

Once you understand why you are procrastinating, whether it is due to fear, stress or fatigue, you can begin to break down the task ahead until you have enough momentum to overcome it. Imagine procrastination as being a giant stone wall. Although you can occasionally bring yourself to jump or scale it, this requires enormous willpower and if you had enough of that you wouldn’t be procrastinating in the first place. Our task is to take this wall and build some stairs.

Building stairs to overcome the wall of procrastination can allow you to scale incredibly high barriers, assuming you have the determination and desire to climb it. Stair creation is what the step “Break It Down” is all about. Although this step can be time consuming in larger cases of procrastination, it tends to work best in most cases.

The problem with overcoming procrastination is simply that there are so many different ways you could procrastinate, your stairs won’t be the same every time. Similarly there are some smaller cases where you don’t have a lot of room to build stairs and you need a completely different strategy. I’ll cover those cases in the next article, but until then I will focus on how you can build stairs in the three main ways you will face procrastination.

Breaking Down in Steps

Some activities flow in a logical sequence of steps such as writing an essay. You might first have to do research, followed by organization and finally your rough and good drafts of the finished essay. If you are procrastinating writing that big essay, breaking it down into very small component steps should be your first aim.

It would be good to take out a note pad or another writing tool and start breaking it down into steps. So you might write at the top of your paper “Write Essay”. Then you could write down all the major steps involved, “Research”, “Organize”, “Rough Draft”, “Final Draft”. These steps themselves might seem fairly lengthy to get started so you might want to break them down even more into “Research Section A”, “Research Section B”, “Research Section C”. Keep breaking them down until you have reached a manageable scale.

You know you are finished breaking down when looking at one of the mentioned steps feels doable and you feel willing to work on it. If you are still procrastinating, you should try to continue breaking the steps down until they are workable. These are your stairs, by breaking them down and focusing on just one you can take a high wall and make it scalable.

Breaking Down in Components

Other activities don’t require a specific order but are sectioned like components. For example you may need to do your spring cleaning but you have been putting it off. Once you decide that you’re tired of procrastinating, you might want to start splitting off the task into it’s respective components.

For our spring cleaning example, the components could be: “Clean the Garage”, “Clean the Attic”, “Clean Kitchen”. Just like the last example you want to keep breaking down the components until they look non-threatening on their own. Component-based activities are easier to break down because you can start with the easiest step rather than specifically the first one. Remember, once you gain momentum it is much easier to continue going.

Breaking Down in Progression

There are some things that you may have been putting off but there really aren’t any steps associated that you can break it down to. This is often true in procrastination from fear as you will be unwilling to do an activity that simply can’t be broken down into simpler components. Asking your boss for a raise or trying to start a conversation with the attractive woman in the sales department often can’t be specifically broken into components or steps. It would be very awkward to go into your boss’s office, and say, “Hi I would like a –“ and simply walk out of the room.

In these cases the best way to overcome your procrastination is to work on related activities until you have built up the momentum and courage to defeat your procrastination in that area. This involves creating a list of activities that have similar context but with less intensity. So if you are procrastinating setting up your own business, the lowest item on your list could be attending a trade show of your chosen business. The next item on your progression scale might be talking to other entrepreneurs in similar industries.

Tackling Specific Causes of Procrastination

In the last article I identified the three major causes of procrastination as being fear, stress or lack of energy (fatigue). Although the basic process is the same, there are specific techniques you can do to help break down these obstacles and overcome your tendency towards inaction.

Breaking Down Fear

In most cases when you have to break down with the progression method it will be because you fear the thing you are procrastinating. This may not even work in a rational method and you might at first resist the idea that it was fear at work. I know many of my fears I overcame seem absolutely silly to have even had, but through denial I never would have overcome them.

Generally the progression method works good when breaking down fear, but you often have to break it down far more than you originally think to get results. The walls of fear loom large in the mind and when faced with the prospect of overcoming one, even a baby step can seem like a mountain. Try to break down your obstacles as much as possible, into dozens of steps if necessary, so you won’t put them off. If you put off tackling your fear it means you simply didn’t break it down enough.

The next thing is that it is important to put yourself in a positive state when tackling your fear based procrastination. A negative attitude will sabotage your progress, so practice some deep breathing or visualization to get yourself into the proper state before going ahead. I’ve written more about emotional control, here.

Breaking Down Stress

The best way to break down stress is to do the opposite, have fun! Trying to make your boring, or stressful activities fun and enjoyable should always be your first move when breaking down the activity into manageable bites. There are several ways you can do this, but it helps to just ask the question: How could I make this more fun?

If you can’t make the activity itself more fun, then the next best method is to use a reward. Giving yourself a gigantic reward for overcoming a tiny step can give you the momentum you need to go the whole way. Don’t be stingy on the reward part, especially if it won’t interfere with you continuing to work after your baby step is done. Building momentum is your concern not finishing.

Breaking Down Fatigue (Low Energy)

This may seem obvious but the best way to break down procrastination caused by fatigue is simply to recover your energy. Although there are occasions when you must work through an energy deficit, most of the time it is better to simply recover the energy and move forward. If you need a quick burst of energy, exercising for a half-hour is a good method. Moderate to high intensity work outs over a short period always give me a boost.

If you need a longer time to recover, then you may need to get a good nights sleep or a short personal vacation. Your body will tell you when you need energy, so procrastination may be your body telling you that you have to slow down or stop.

These specific techniques for overcoming the main sources of procrastination should always be done with the more general strategy of breaking down the source of the procrastination. Without breaking down it is too hard to gain momentum. Breaking down may be a longer strategy than others would prescribe, but it works most of the time.

Breaking down is the second key step in destroying your pattern of inaction. Once you understand what is causing your procrastination, breaking it down can turn a giant wall into a manageable staircase. Once you understand the procrastination and you have broken it down into chunks, you can work on the next step which is simply to start. In the next article I’ll go over some methods that can allow you to get over the first few steps and build momentum, immediately.

Procrastination - Series

Introduction (Understanding Procrastination)
Break It Down
Start Now