Procrastinating
How can you stop procrastinating?
Self-help:
- Make a list of everything you need to do. Don’t forget things you find enjoyable, and be sure to include free time!
- Cross off all the things you never really wanted to do anyway.
- Identify your own goals, values, and priorities. Set realistic goals for yourself. Write it all down.
- Identify your underlying conflicts, such as fear, anger, and/or perfectionism, along with your irrational views, like the idea that your tasks are too difficult, failure would be a disaster, and so on.
- Fight your irrational views. Try to think more logically and ground your perspectives more firmly in the real world.
- See whether you have a chance of successfully completing what you have set out to do in spite of your current conflicts and views. If not, get help in the form of psychotherapy.
- Consider whether the things you have been postponing are sufficiently aligned with your goals and values. If not, focus only on the goals that are meaningful to you and let the other ones go.
- Plan how you can achieve your goals in small steps and bits and pieces. Even Mount Everest can be broken down into a molehill. Estimate how much time it will take to complete your project and then double it.
- Set a reward for yourself for when you succeed and reward yourself for every step.
- Keep close tabs on yourself and write down your observations in a change log.
If you do not follow any of these suggestions even though you suffer from procrastination, or you do follow them, but find that they are not enough to help you with your problem, you may need professional help:
- Attend a class on time management strategies.
- Learn a relaxation method such as autogenic training.
- Get pyschotherapy. You can approach this starting with behavior (behavioral therapy), your mental structures (cognitive therapy), or emotional conflicts (in-depth psychotherapy, psychoanalysis).
- The Workshops and advising section presents points of contact where you can turn whenever you want personal advice and support, along with our workshop program, which can help you tackle specific issues.