Entrepreneurs are individuals with many ideas, concept, projects, tasks… If they dallying the implementation they can’t expect success for themselves and their business generally. The procrastination is one of the biggest entrepreneurial enemies.
Some of the activities, tasks, and projects are important, but some of them are not so much important. Many of them are extremely interesting, but some of them are really boring.
Some tasks entrepreneurs want to accomplish, and they are doing them immediately, but some of them they are simple putting off, waiting for the future.
Many people, if not anyone procrastinates or finds themselves in а situation when procrastinate.
A housewife could procrastinate when she puts off carrying out the laundry washing until finally she gets five loads! Students might delay doing things, patiently waiting before the final possible second to accomplish a school project. An entrepreneur might choose the last possible second to finish a speech preparation for the next sales meeting.
Despite who the person who procrastinate is, the outcome is exactly the same – more stressful situations in doing things. When you wait such a long time to complete projects, your level of stress will grow and will disrupt your enjoyment and often the desired results.
In this post I will try to explore what procrastination is, why it occurs, and what you can make in your battle with procrastination.
Putting things off isn’t an issue of time management skills or of planning and preparing for the future action steps. It’s a more personal problem that rise form our own habits and behaviors based on that habits.
Related: 9 Self-Management Skills and How to Improve Them
Logically, time management systems can be here only to help us to overcome bad behavior, but good or bad time management systems are not and can’t be the reasons for procrastination.
Procrastination can be a strong habit that stopping our progress and results in numerous unfavorable emotional baggage including stress and anxiety. It simply places inside yourself with the stop sign on your own speed to the success.
The topic of procrastination continues to be researched carefully by many social researchers. It’s strongly associated with impatience. It is absolutely nothing but limited thinking.
Although procrastination could be good at the moment, it always acts to produce much more stress over time.
Why We Procrastinate?
We learn how to delay doing things in the family, at school, at work, through our own everyday living. Also, it can be a result of subconscious issues like self-doubt, the fear of success, or any other fears that make us put things off instead acting on them.
This type of behavior helps you to prevent achievements, simply because you sometimes fear to be successful. Whenever we discuss this type of our behavior, we don’t talk about our fear of not doing things because of perfect performing. We discuss about the fear of our own success.
Success at something essential for you, usually means transformation, or change, or becoming someone else, and all that is absolutely very difficult and unpleasant for you.
Often, procrastination is associated with perfectionism from the psychologist viewpoint. You simply procrastinate because you want everything to be perfect. But, entrepreneurship is not about perfectionism, it’s more about delivering the results, timely and with acceptable quality.
Occasionally delaying things can be viewed like a tool for staying away from pressure because of really unorganized situation of the entrepreneurs. But, it’s not the reason for you to rationalize yourself and continue to procrastinate.
Procrastination usually means postponing a hard, delayable, significant task for anything simpler, faster, and much less stressfully. Furthermore, it suggests delaying essential activities before the overall performance and the results are lower than they might have been if completed promptly. In the same manner, stopping doing things implies that we fall, hold off, and panic in reaction to the challenging responsibility. Stopping doing things usually happens when we experience, or we are open to public critique.
I find myself how I procrastinate my tasks sometimes. For example, in my Omni Focus (my choice for task management app) I have three perspectives: quick for tasks that I can finish in 15 minutes, medium for tasks that I can finish in one hour time, and long for tasks that I can finish for more than one hour. In such a way, I usually start with quick and medium perspective in my task management system, and delay starting with the longer perspective where I need to invest more time and efforts.
Sometimes this is ok, because when I finish 15 tasks from 20 of them for today, my personal feelings are very good because I think that I have finished more of the tasks and that give me power to continue with the longer perspective. But, the problem is when I stop doing things, because I feel so good with 15 finished tasks even if I know that the rest five tasks represent 80% of my work for today.
This kind of behavior is a big barrier for your entrepreneurial goals accomplishment.
Occasionally you simple want to prevent yourself from unpleasant feelings and because of that you just delay doing things.
But, you don’t have to panic because of the fact it’s really a common condition for being a human. Whenever you procrastinate, you just permit a boring idea, concept, or task growing on your to-do list.
How to Overcome to Procrastinate?
You need to ask answer following questions:
- As an entrepreneur, are you currently delaying an uncomfortable task until the very last minute.?
- Are you currently merely waiting around before the very last possible moment to take action?
If your answers are yes, than it is very probable that you’re an entrepreneur who procrastinates.
How you can overcome procrastination?
- Start with analyzing yourself to find answers about when and why you rely things around yourself. Then, start thinking proactively, and implement your own time management system that will help you in your efforts to prevail procrastination and improve your own productivity.
- When you analyze how you spend your own time, you will quickly realize that sometimes you force yourself with everything around you. That will tell you what you need to do, and what you can simply drop out from your head and forget forever.
- Simply start doing things form one that’s the biggest priority for you and your business. You are an entrepreneur, you are the persons who do things, and not someone who delay them.
- If you want to prevent putting things off, quit hearing the bad words in your mind connected with fear and asking you for perfectionism.
- Start with small, achievable tasks, and take control of your desire to jump from one thing to another without finishing. Your own commitment and self-confidence will come.
- Overcoming procrastination is something that need exercise from your side. It’s not something that you can replace with the tools.
