Chapter 2

Understand That Procrastination Has To Go

Socrates who was one of the most popular Greek philosophers alongside Plato and Aristotle had a popular saying that goes thus, "An unexamined life is not worth living".

What this particular axiom meant is that everyone must always continue to engage in self-introspect and analysis at every point in time. This particular chapter is aimed at helping you to analyze yourself in order to chart a course towards perfection. The chapter is not only going to help you overcome procrastination within your relationship but in general aspects of life and that is the golden nuggets will apply to general scenarios.

Before I jump into some of the steps that you can take in order to avoid procrastination, what do you define as procrastination. According to the dictionary, procrastination is defined as the act of delaying and postponing something. Many people take procrastination for granted throughout the course of their lives and they fail to understand the hurt that it brings to their relationships and work.

Let me show you some of the damaging effects of procrastination.

•It destroys trust: Within every relationship, romantic or formal, procrastination gradually erodes trust in the capability of the individual to get things done and this is destructive in the long run because the individual may end up not being trusted again. For example, if Georgina keeps giving excuses and fails to turn up for Fred's games, Fred would slowly begin to lose trust in her and at a time, he would not bother about trying to invite her. He may even end up with the feeling that Georgina no longer loves him since she does not make time for him

•Procrastination destroys good reputation- Trust me, you do not want to be that popular manager who is fired later on because of a series of postponed projects. That is how terrible procrastination can be. It is so much cancerous in nature that it would make you lose every high position that you may have acquired in the last.

Haven examined some of the ways Procrastination can be deadly, let us see the ways you can overcome it.

Get A Coach

There is absolutely nowhere you can get to in life without the help of others and there are very limited heights you can reach without a mentor or a coach to guide you. When taking on the task of defeating the enemy called Procrastination, you will surely need all the help you can get.

Who are your mentors? Members of some interviewing boards sometimes ask that question because the answer to such question can help them form a quick opinion about you and your motivations. To identify your mentor/coach, you must take your time and never choose based on personal sentiments arising from your relationship with the person.

In most cases, many people choose their parents as mentors and end up procrastinating because their coach has not been able to overcome procrastination. Choose a person who is insanely dedicated to their work and has been successful in the career. This means that if you are pursuing the goal of becoming a musical artist in the genre of New Age Music, you can get Enya and Yanni to be your mentors as they would be able to provide you with information on how to conquer procrastination as your career advances. However, in some occasions like the one previously stated, you may choose a mentor that is not easily accessible, and that is why you should work towards getting a coach that can be easily accessible.

Boxers wisely choose their coach because their coaches are the ones that come, looking to drag them away from their homes when the fighter begins to procrastinate. In your case, you should always inquire from your coach on the best way to be stimulated enough to overcome procrastination because that is the best way to overcome. While many Top 500 Forbes companies adopt the measure of deadlines to stimulate their employees into completing projects, that kind of stimulation may not work for individual human beings. Ask your coach to teach you the best way to set deadlines for yourself that you will be able to work towards with the same vigor you would adopt if you were at your workplace.

Join Arduous Tasks With Pleasant Ones

One of the easiest ways to get discouraged and begin to adopt the act of procrastination is when you separate easier tasks from the difficult ones. In the course of achieving any goal that you set, there would be the easier ones that would give you an immediate thrill when you finish engaging in them, along with the difficult ones that can be physically and mentally draining. Your goal will be to do the hard tasks immediately after the easier ones so that the thrill can stimulate you enough to tackle it.

Let us say for instance that you are harboring the intent of writing an important professional exam that will bring you a promotion at your job and you need to take both Statistics and an English exam. Let us imagine that you are a person who is totally inclined to the arts but find the statistics course to be mentally challenging and nothing you do seems to be working. Naturally, what happens is that you may begin to passively postpone the period of reading your Statistics books because they frankly bring you no joy while you relish the time spent with your English books. You can overcome your procrastination and get it right by choosing to read your Statistics immediately after you drop your English book. The reason is that it has been scientifically proven that your brain is more excited when you try out enjoyable things and this can enable it to pick the more difficult things immediately while it is still flooded with the feel-good dopamine.

You will have to make the self-conscious decision of writing down the most enjoyable tasks which you have to engage in and the 'most annoying jobs I would rather not face but must be done'. Penning them down in a detailed manner is the first step.

The next would be to pair them together in order to ensure that complimentary tasks go together. If you are into web designing and have to learn how to code using JavaScript and the likes, you will have to fix the time for coding, which a few web developers do not like to do, along with the time for designing on paper. This is because it is thrilling to design how the website would look on paper and the dopamine that is released during that moment can be used to attack difficult tasks such as coding. I have discovered as well that the most people who make the killing gains on the Forex market are those that forecast immediately after making a huge profit. At that point, they are able to shed off some form of restraints of fear and buy the shares while adopting some form of caution as well.

Do Not Try To Overstretch Yourself On Tasks

The simple truth that is being said here is, don’t overtask yourself.

Frankly, you are not an automated machine that can perform a billion tasks at a given time. Even automated machines can run into bigger problems when they are taxed to engage in the tasks that they have not been programmed to do, so slow down.

You cannot become everything. That fact is very vital for you to understand today because so many people are stressing themselves over becoming many things and then get to realize that they are failing badly at most of them because they are procrastinating.

Imagine you meet a lady who is training to become a Black Belt holder in Taekwondo, studying to become a ballet dancer, studying to become a financial expert and also trying to become a screenwriter. I know that you may be so much surprised and feel that she is awesome but in reality, she will be struggling with avoiding procrastination since most of the tasks would require her to focus on them.

If she chooses to strictly focus on screenwriting as well as Taekwondo, she would be able to effortlessly manage herself and draw up concrete plans that she can focus on achieving without overstretching herself. Your ultimate goal should not be to acquire as numerous titles as you can in reaching the top but to acquire one and work your butt off to becoming excellent in that field.

Take the case of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple: he could have chosen to take on his tasks with singing with a band but he did not. Instead, he focused daily on building tasks that were solely within his niche and worked tirelessly at achieving those goals he set. Today, Apple has broken through the One Trillion dollar valuation margin and it is mainly thanks to one man who chose to stick to one task.

Let us take a scenario that you may be more familiar with. Have you ever seen an Olympic 100 meters race? The thing you notice is that each athlete has a special lane set up for him or her. The white line that separates them mainly defines these tracks and you notice that when the gun pops, each athlete begins to run within their lane so as to avoid reaching the finish line in another person's lane that attracts disqualification. Usain Bolt won all his titles by sticking to his lane and not crossing into the lane of other contenders like Asafa Powell, Tyson Gay, Justin Gatlin and the likes. The immediate lesson that you can get is that there are no gains for running in too many directions. Often, such people do not end up reaching the finish line of any of the directions because they would have procrastinated so much.

Don’t Beat Yourself Over What You Cannot Change

There are some things that will never change so don’t get frustrated by trying to change them. You will have to recognize this fast in order not to engage in tasks that would be extremely frustrating for you and make you engage in the act of procrastination.

The general idea is that you should find a goal that you have a passion for, and then begin to engage in it with much vigor. However, during the course of reaching your destination, you will meet with some challenges that you cannot solve and will have to adopt the option of letting them go.

For example, in the course of building your team that will spur you to achieving your goals, you will recognize some team members who are going to slow the group down considerably because of their inefficiency. There are other team members that may be very brilliant but have terrible character traits that they are unwilling to change. In such cases, you will have to let the two sets of employees go so that you can be able to advance speedily towards achieving the group goals. This has to be done so you don’t expend much energy trying to change what such group members may be unwilling to change.

Seasoned achievers like Steve Jobs easily recognized this fact and began to apply them at an early stage of their business. They first began to scrutinize the ideology of their would-be employee or team members. When they ascertain that a group member is not on par or is not motivated, they immediately pull the plug on the involvement of such team members in order to keep the team morale high. They did this particular action when it involved their family members because they realized that there was no place for personal sentiments in building a unique brand.

Also, if you are in the practice of trying to salvage a relationship that is going off the rocks and the other party keeps dragging it down with a force of habit, it is time you consider pulling the plug. For example, if you are in a relationship that is perpetually filled with accounts of domestic violence that seems not to have an end, you should try and work it out with the partner and then leave if the partner is not showing promising signs of changing.

The reason you have to leave is that your sanity and esteem is very important and you do not need to continue remaining frustrated as time goes by. Within frustration lies the seed of procrastination as it becomes easy for you to lose focus of the most important part of your goals while you try to change something that will never change