Overcoming Laziness

How To Stop Procrastinating Step One: ‘Does It Make Sense?’

Posted by john on September 21st, 2006 — Posted in Stop Procrastinating

“Tomorrow is the only day in the year that appeals to a lazy man.”

- Jimmy Lyons, a successful jazz musician. Source: http://www.ucalgary.ca/~steel/procrastinus/quotes/quotes.html (There are other great procrastination quotes there as well.)

I used to be a terrible procrastinator who couldn’t get anything done. It felt like my life was out of control. I missed out on so many great opportunities, costing me untold amounts of money and lost career goals. (I spent almost all of my twenties unemployed.) I couldn’t ever just get started on anything, from exercise to housecleaning. And worst of all, I hated myself.

Then I stumbled onto the secrets of overcoming my procrastination, and started applying them, and it changed my life in a big way. I’ve gone from being stressed out (yes, idleness causes stress)… always doing things at the last minute (if I did them at all)… and doing low quality work —

– to burying my old limitations, and becoming a motivated person who charges full forces toward each goal — and doesn’t stop till my dream comes true. And if someone like me can do it, then you can do it too.

The first step in overcoming procrastination is to figure out what the repercussions are of procrastinating on something vs. the benefits of doing it. Take the time to think it through. As an example, suppose you’re out of shape, and you’ve been procrastinating on starting a weight lifting program.

You know that weightlifting has many benefits:

• It gives you good muscle tone, making you more attractive.
• It gives you more strength, so you can do common activities like carrying bags of groceries without straining or getting worn out.
• It improves your resting metabolism, so you literally burn fat while you sleep, which allows you to eat more and not gain weight.

Now that you’ve thought about the many benefits you’ll get from the thing you want to do, it’s time to consider the repercussions of NOT doing it.

With our example, if you procrastinate on weightlifting:

• You won’t have to put out the effort to pump the iron, BUT…
• Your metabolism will remain low, which harms your health.
• You’ll get more flabby and fat.
• You’ll be weak physically and have a low amount of energy.

So clearly in this case, the benefits of doing it outweigh the benefits of not doing it.

Another example: suppose you sell something on eBay, and someone wins the auction. You could put off packaging up the item and mailing it… but you know that the result will be an angry buyer who will demand a refund and give you a bad feedback score. That enflames you with a single-minded goal to get down to the post office ASAP.

Sometimes, however, the benefits of procrastinating are higher. For example, if you’ve got a looming deadline on a paper you need to write, then it’s better to put off vacuuming until tomorrow.

So if you’re procrastinating on something, you always need to ask yourself this:

What are the benefits of doing the task vs. the repercussions of not doing it?

If the repercussions aren’t that severe, and putting off the task frees you up to do something more important, then you should cross the task off your list for today.

But what if you’re procrastinating on something that truly needs to get done? I’ll answer that in the next post.

Action Step: Think of the task you’re currently putting off. Write it at the top of a piece of paper or a word processor document. Now write the benefits of doing the task, just as I did above in the example. Now write down the advantages of NOT doing the task, along with the disadvantages of not doing the task. When you think about the benefits of doing the tasks vs. not doing it, what makes more sense?