How I Stop Procrastination - A 2 Step Strategy that Gets Faster and Easier Each Time

Are you a procrastinator like I was? If so this Hub is a gift especially written for you. If you aren’t a procrastinator or you aren’t procrastinating right now, then you might as well get Hub-hopping!

What I’m about to share with you is a very real and very simple strategy for putting an end to your procrastination.

Why Should I Continue To Read This Hub? Good question. Take a minute and think of your worst procrastination experience? Did you procrastinate at home, at work or at school?

How has procrastination negatively impacting your life?

How does it make you feel when you miss an important deadline or when you don’t follow through with a promise to do something for a person or persons you really care about?

How Can I stop Procrastinating? Well, I’ve come up with a revolutionary new way of ending procrastination. It’s a behavioral science-based, 2-step strategy that actually gets faster and easier each time you apply it. It takes about 7 minutes to learn, about 7 minutes to apply and about 7 minutes to start working. You can see the positive effects on procrastination almost immediately.

I developed the approach through years of studying and working with applied behavioral science as a professional counselor. After working with hundreds of individuals, couples and families I have never seen it fail with someone who sincerely applied it.

Why Do I Need to Stop Procrastinating? Before I outline my procrastination-busting strategy, I want to share why it’s so important to stop procrastinating sooner rather than later. I’ve seen the negative effects from my own procrastination and form the procrastination of others.

I’m sincerely motivated to help you stop procrastinating. I know stopping will benefit you, your family and the people around you. When you see how well this strategy works, please share it with others!

Procrastination Is Not Good For Your Health. In my view any practical definition of procrastination has to include the fact that it can really, really harm the quality of your life. Procrastination is genuinely a “life-interfering-behavior.” For me, procrastination only applies when it really counts.

Poor Work Performance: leads to incredible amounts of lost opportunity. For example, procrastination at school leads to poor grades and lost future educational opportunity.

Less education has been proven to reduce the amount of money you can earn and how much you enjoy your work.

When you make less money, it’s much harder to afford nutritious food and many other health-protective activities and other important resources for you and your family.

People from poorer families are much more likely to have problems with their physical and their emotional health. They develop addiction problems more easily and live fewer years of life.

I’m sure you can quickly come up with a list of 20 negative health and developmental effects of reduced income on quality of life.

What impact do the negative effects of procrastination have on our kids? Well apart from what I’ve described already; let me ask you: How can your kids learn to reduce harmful procrastination if the adults around them don’t know how to stop?

Procrastination also negatively impacts social relationships and feelings. When we don’t follow through with promises and commitments we can really hurt and disappoint the people we live and work with. What hurts us emotionally more than disappointing the people we love and respect the most in our lives?

My approach to stopping procrastination involves 2 simple steps which are also general principles of human behavior and motivation.

In Step 1 you identify and harness motivation. In Step 2 you transfer the motivation from tasks you love to do, over to the tasks you would otherwise procrastinate on instead.

This way you’ll end up doing the procrastination task as fast and as easily as you would an activity you are highly motivated to do and, that you do easily and quickly in the first place.

In my simple strategy I call motivation, “Motivation-Juice” and liken to electricity to be transferred from one task to the next by keeping them very close together in time. The more of a time gap that develops the more difficult it is for the Motivation-Juice to jump over from the fun activity to the high-procrastination task.

Common Reward Activites Include:

• Watching TV
• Renting Movies
• Playing Video Games
• Listening to Music
• Internet Time

(In the full Procrastination-Free-Living Program I include simple strategies for changing unhealthy reward activities into healthy activities)

Common High Procrastination Tasks Include:

• Work Assignments/Projects
• School Assignments/Projects
• Diet and Exercise Programs
• Housework
• Homework

When you keep the work task and reward close together, motivation jumps from the fun to the work task and makes the work task far less likely to lead to procrastination and avoidance.

We can tell if there's a little or a lot of motivation-juice in the stuff we love to do and do each day or we wouldn't do it.

We know there's little to no motivation-juice in the stuff we procrastinate on because we never or barely do it.

The way procrastination and motivation are related is not really hard to explain, it's just hard to see. Once you apply this simple strategy for transferring motivation, you say Aha! to yourself because you actually see and feel the motivation increasing in your previously high-procrastination tasks. Ending procrastination is one of those things you have to learn by doing; - but, only by you do it right.

Here’s a very simple, but very practical way of starting that process of learning about motivational transfer by doing or rather, starting to do it quickly, easily and in real life!

The Low Powered task List Becomes A High Powered Task/Reward List:

1) Do procrastination tasks right before high-motivation-juice tasks and keep them about 1 minute apart in time maximum; - especially at first.

2) Use a basic Task-Reward List to keep the motivation transfer process on track.

3) Put the hardest or high procrastination tasks at the top of the lists with the highest enjoyment activities (the one's you'd usually procrastinate to).

4) Start by reducing the time you spend working, and increasing the time or intensity of the fun activity that quickly follows it on your list.

5) Gradually increase your time spent on work and decrease your time spent on fun as recorded on your simple Task/Reward List.