How to Stop Procrastinating

While on the surface, occasional procrastination is not that harmful, if you become a chronic procrastinator, then it negatively affects your productivity and eventually your prosperity and happiness.

Understanding the Basics of Procrastination

Procrastination simply refers to putting away a task for a later time. Therefore, if you are supposed to send an email to your boss, but you prioritize uploading your Facebook status over it, you are procrastinating on the previous task.

That said, if you delve deeper into procrastination, you will realize that it mainly involves postponing a more important task to do something less important, but seemingly more attractive.

Let’s face it, all of us have resorted to it at some point in our lives and procrastinate on certain tasks even on a regular basis. As long as that isn’t affecting our lives negatively or does not keep us from achieving our targets set for the day, that’s okay.

Procrastination becomes problematic only when we engage in it for too long and resort to it every time we have something incredibly important to do.

Let us look at the different ways through which procrastination harms you.

Lowers Your Productivity: One of the first and most substantial effects of procrastination is that it hampers your productivity. Naturally, when you keep putting off your work until the last minute, you keep piling up work, and when you finally start to work on a task, you have so much on your plate that you end up tossing the plate out the window instead of working on anything at all. This keeps you from achieving your goals and moving closer towards the many goals you have in life.

Affects Your Discipline: When you keep delaying your tasks, you soon inculcate the habit of procrastination. On the surface, this may not seem too disturbing to you, but deep down, it disrupts your self-discipline. When you keep giving in to your temptations, you soon let go of your inner resistance that helps you combat your distractions. With time, your ability to maintain self-control weakens and before you realize it, you completely lose the discipline you once had to do what is right and vital.

Weakens Your Self-Confidence: With time, procrastination starts getting the better of you and makes you falter at everything you do because you have lost the ability to work hard and believe in yourself. This depletes your self-confidence, and you stop trying your hand at things you really want to do.

Increases Your Stress Levels: Stress is often rooted in the inability to perform as you do or not fulfilling your goals. Naturally, when you keep falling behind schedule, have tons of tasks to do, feel unconfident and cannot muster the courage to battle your temptations, your stress levels increase which adds to your problems.

Affects the Quality of Your Life: If you are governed by your temptations and not your own will, you keep succumbing to your meaningless desires. Instead of working on essential tasks, you keep working on pointless tasks and never achieve the sense of contentment and fulfillment you need to feel good about yourself. Also, procrastination gets in the way of your routine chores, personal goals and your responsibilities towards your loved ones.