Procrastinate

Procrastination – the art of avoiding required tasks by allocating tremendous importance on actions more useless, mundane, or interesting. Procrastination is generally considered unproductive, and many teachers, bosses, and managers take great pains to point out it delays the inevitable and places a spanner in the works of completing tasks.

Yet, have you ever considered the benefits of procrastinating? There are actually some good reasons to procrastinate, as you'll discover when learning how to master the art of procrastination, all for the greater personal good of course! Although intuition can be wrong, doesn't our heart tell us that something so natural and widespread in mankind could not exist without benefit?

Note: While there is no one-size-fits-all formula for successful procrastination, the following steps aim to provide a helpful steer. Coming up with your own beneficial methods of procrastinating is a form of procrastination in itself!

Steps

  1. Contemplate the reasons that make procrastination a good thing to add to your daily tasks. Time management experts (and a considerable number of bloggers nowadays) insist that procrastination is the worst enemy of mankind, and that allowing it to pervade your life results in inevitable nails-biting, hair-shredding, and not-doing-the-best-you-can-ing, all of which lead to poorly performed last-minute work. Anti-procrastinators are ready with scoldings, admonishing you with the potential for failure. Turn this apparent "problem" around by considering the benefits of procrastinating:
    • You can percolate a lot of ideas. Instead of snapping to it and methodically working through the task, a procrastinator could very well be allowing the ideas to percolate, mature, and bubble to the surface in a much more inspired and fascinating form.
    • You can avoid problems as much as create them. Jumping right in and doing something without thinking through the consequences and finding the weaknesses can bring about new problems and delays. Procrastinating can provide the thinking buffer space to find what can go wrong and to find ways around that. Equally, procrastinating can unearth all the things that never really needed doing anyway - think how many times you've been glad you didn't jump to it when asked and how that saved you from a lot of trouble because either someone else did it, or it ended up not being a good idea to do it anyway.
    • You might be using procrastination to protect yourself when you're not ready to do something. If you lack the skills, the courage, or the experience, procrastination can prevent you from leaping in where you're just plain incompetent or not capable.
    • Procrastination can allow an unpalatable idea or task to grow on you. If you've been putting it off because you hate it, or don't want to be associated with it, procrastinating can provide the time needed to get used to it and to eventually settle in to a place of acceptance that lets you get on without feeling disinterested or even hostile about being involved in something.
    • Procrastination can give you the time needed to build up the energy needed to proceed with gusto when you do get going.
    • For people whose work is principally cerebral based, doing something practical (with the hands) is often a much-needed break from the depths of intellectualizing everything.
    • Think about all the other things that are getting done as you avoid the procrastinated task!
  2. Listen to your procrastination. Procrastination happens for a reason, as much as any other task-impacting attitude. Aside from the possible reasons outlined in the previous step, learning to listen to your procrastination can be a way of listening to your inner feelings when you would rather put that challenging task on hold. Is it possible that your procrastination is telling you one of the following?:
    • What you're doing is genuinely boring and even if it has to be done, perhaps there are better ways of doing it? Ways that don't necessarily involve you, or you on your own?
    • What you're doing isn't your strength or even interest. Perhaps you're studying the wrong field because your parents told you to become a doctor or lawyer but you wanted to be an artist? Or perhaps you're working in the wrong job because you liked the sound of the company until you joined it and realized what you're really in for?
    • What you're doing is riddled with inconsistencies, weaknesses, errors, and blatant inaccuracies but to fix these would take a lot of effort or even explaining to the boss and you know it's way over your ability to fix.
    • What you're doing is no longer a strength of yours because you've moved on mentally and experience-wise and you're ready for a new challenge.
    • What you're doing is View Literature Objectively pointless, and there are probably really much better things you could be expending your energies on. You just need to find the right way to explain this to the boss, teacher, or client...
  3. Think about the value of deadlines to you. Deadlines are the fuel of procrastination. And even though deadlines are often couched in terms of self-discipline and personal blame when they're missed or poorly met, they're less about virtuous behavior and more about achieving conforming behavior, which is often the reason why some people hate meeting them – there is an element of resentment or rebellion against being made to meet someone or something else's determined time. For other people though, deadlines bring out their best and bring on the adrenalin pump needed to dig in and pull out the inner genius that produces outstanding work at the last minute. And if you have work that is lackluster and routine, a deadline can sometimes be truly the only source of motivation to bring about its completion. Recognizing how you value or cope with deadlines is part of procrastinating in a way that doesn't harm your own goals, efforts, and opportunities in the long run. Deadlines can be the procrastinator's friend if they're viewed in a positive light, as a source of eventual motivation and as a source of drawing out creativity.
    • Work out your perfect equilibrium of brushing with deadlines and getting work done successfully. Once you know the absolute limit, use a balance of both deadlines and procrastination to your advantage.
  4. Slow down. Procrastination can be viewed as one means of putting the brakes on your speedy, out-of-control lifestyle or work pace. It can be the pathway to more thinking and less doing, something sadly lacking in our harried, over-filled modern lives.
    • Stop admiring busy people and busy methodologies. These can give the impression of doing something when really, nothing's happening at all. At least when procrastinating, something else is happening!
    • Allocate thinking time. Allow yourself to use this time to think through ideas, consequences, and the bigger picture.
    • Enjoy the process and not the destination. Procrastinating allows you to immerse yourself in the process. Some of it's boring, some of it's rough, some of it's really enjoyable but all of it's a whole. Procrastination is like a thread weaving the entire process together, keeping it moving along toward its inevitable end point but allowing you to swim Check if Your Spirit Is Working and enjoy life as you get there.
    • Embrace distractions for what they are and let guilt fly.
    • Recognize that a refreshed you works twice as hard and twice as focused upon return to the task at hand. Sticking with it without breaks, means losing sight of the forest for the trees as your perspective and enthusiasm turns stale.
    • If other people want to negatively label your thinking-time procrastination, that's fine. Tell them that procrastination has become a positive, must-do in any modern achiever's life and watch their confusion.
  5. Avoid excessive contemplation about the Stop Worrying About Future Demise. While a little consideration of the future is naturally essential for healthy living, obsessing about where you want to be in 5, 10, and 15 years' time can lead to burn-out, and can stick you on course for a narrow trajectory, focused always on the future, on the person you're planning to become instead of celebrating the person you already are. Procrastination requires that you live in the now, in the present, and don't let things like graduation, job loss, homelessness, and financial dependence cloud your thinking. Excessive worrying doesn't change anything but it can entrap you in a cycle of fear, marrying you to sub-standard work and living choices for the rest of your life because you're too afraid of the consequences of letting go of those initial sub-standard choices.
  6. Value Manage Your Internet Leisure Activities and work time equally. The true procrastinator sees equal value in both the video game and the thesis or work paper. This is balance in action and valuing them equally is a sign that you've got your priorities ordered toward both work and play, not all work and no play (which, as we all well know, makes a person dull of mind and heart).
    • Balance procrastination with obligation. Life isn't either all easy cruising or all full throttle. Try to combine both elements in your life and allow distractions in rather than letting them become moments of guilt or worry.
  7. Find ways to procrastinate. While procrastination is not really something you need to be told how to do, it can be incredibly reassuring to learn that you are not alone in doing the following motley and amusing procrastinating activities (and feel free to indulge in any of them), outlined in the next few steps.
  8. Get creative. Something as simple watching a fan blow your papers all over the room can keep you enthralled for hours. You can even draw all over your stomach.
    • Stare at the mirror and make random faces. For starters, you could act like a monkey, just fold your lips inside and over your teeth, and jump around like a madman. If you can do this for a good half hour, you've been successful at wasting a good chunk of your time.
    • Stare out the window. Notice what form the clouds are taking, people watch, count the arrival times of trains, watch the street being swept, and work out how long it'll take to reach the next corner, etc.
    • Create your own laser light show.
  9. If you insist on the TV, make sure you check all the channels. One of the beauties of procrastination is that it creates interest where none existed before. For example, the cooking channel becomes the equivalent of late night Cinemax; or watch the Spanish channel and try to figure out what's being said.
    • Always choose movies over TV shows. TV shows are an hour maximum, most half an hour (some specials, especially some reality shows, sporting events, and shows on the History Channel are two). Each time a show ends, it forces you to make a decision between work and more TV. If you're given that decision two times every hour, sooner or later you'll crack. Movies, on the other hand, are at least two hours, and since most channels string about three movies together, that is only three TV-work decisions in six hours!
    • Worship Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, and Jackie Chan. These three men are a procrastinator's dream, since their movies are a) always on TV, at any hour of the day or night; b) have plots that revolve around roundhouse kicks and gigantic explosions, letting the mind relax without having to cope with a complex story; and c) never mention any form of work. For example, Steven Seagal has never seen a cubicle, unless he was either killing someone in it, or blowing it up. For those who don't enjoy action movies, romantic comedies can act as a substitute, since they are all the same, and create the same mental lethargy.
  10. If the computer is your weapon of choice, always kill the ninja, always. If you see a pop-up that asks you to shoot, poke, prod, laser-blast, punch, kick, or place some object in something, play it immediately. Not only can you win free cool junk and spam, but there is a never-ending stream of these games. Also, you could go to comical websites to waste time. Websites like http://wikiofstuff.wikia.com/wiki/Wiki_Of_Stuff_Wiki allow you to read or write random articles without any restrictions.
    • Click on any links you can find. This will allow you to access new and interesting information, that your mind will absorb instead of the work, clearing all thoughts of work right away.
    • After following the above advice, you can procrastinate further by clearing your computer of the spyware, trojans, and Prevent-Viruses,-Spyware,-and-Adware-with-Avast-and-CounterSpy you'll no doubt accumulate. This could use up a LOT of time. Have fun!
    • Access your favorite forum at least once in a half hour, and while checking out the posts, refresh the page every two seconds to check for new replies. This should pretty much keep you busy for a good while and keep you from doing real work. Have you checked your Farmville account lately?
    • Browse wikiHow or Add to an Existing Wikipedia Article. Go to a random page and click on the blue links (there are plenty in this article for starters). Not only will you procrastinate, you'll be learning at the same time!
  11. Don't worry. If you spend all your time worrying about the work you haven't done, then you aren't enjoying your procrastination and you're missing the point of productively introducing procrastination into your life. Just let your mind rest, clear it of worries, and focus on enjoying the distractions. Work is only as serious as you make it. Procrastination lets you enjoy the little things in life that would otherwise pass you by. The grass is greener, the clouds are fluffier, and Seagal's boots are just a little bit more blood-soaked.

Tips

  • Chilling totally is not the same as procrastinating. Procrastinating is doing something else, even if that's thinking. Chilling is downtime, when nothing is meant to intrude on your peace, and definitely not worries about what else you ought to be doing.
  • Procrastination becomes a true form of art when you are able to use procrastination to totally erase any guilt you feel about not having completed your work. If the paper is three weeks late and you're going out drinking, you've figured it out.
  • Write a list. The next time you find yourself procrastinating, write a quick list of "Why I like to procrastinate". You might surprise yourself as to the reasons that are going down on the list, as there could be impetus to re-prioritize a lot of things in your life!
  • If it's homework, don't procrastinate. You'll miss out on sleep.

Warnings

  • There is procrastination, and there is procrastination. If procrastination is halting your progress along your intended path in life, then it's unhealthy. Good procrastination is an aid to uncovering what really motivates you and what makes you enjoy the here and now. If all it does is cause you to give up on anything, then it's self-sabotage rather than procrastination. Be sure to get the balance right and avoid harming your own chances of getting your life well sorted.

Things You'll Need

  • Things other than the things you should be doing

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