The first thing you must do is make it through the Critical Entrance. And the item that wins should be the one that means the most to you—the item that’s most important for your happiness. Let’s start with the easy one: Procrastinators love planning, quite simply because planning does not involve doing, and doing is the procrastinator’s Kryptonite. Buy it here. This means stopping whatever you’re doing when it’s time to begin the task, putting away all distractions, and getting started. Before you know it, you’re done, and you’re in the Happy Playground.

Laying each brick yields an inner struggle—and in the end, your ability to win this very specific struggle and lay brick after brick, day after day, is what lies at the core of a procrastinator’s struggle to gain control over his world. Take the steps that result in meeting the solution.

But a year later, the real author has a completed first draft of a book and the wannabe author has…nothing. So why would an otherwise capable person put forth such a lame and futile effort again and again? Patiently ask yourself a few “why” questions—“why does it feel tough to do this?” and “why’s that?”—and the blockage can surface quite quickly.
You occasionally even end up super-engaged with what you’re working on and enter a state of Flow, where you’re so blissfully immersed in the task that you lose track of time. Set an alarm to remind yourself to start a task, or to remind you of the stakes. The slots are non-negotiable and non-cancellable—after all, it’s your first priority and the thing that matters most to you, isn’t it? That’s because it’s easier for our brains to process concrete rather than abstract things, and the immediate hassle is very tangible compared with those unknowable, uncertain future benefits. Things will change when you show yourself that they can. If you want to beat procrastination, you need is a system for doing work. Fighting through to the Tipping Point is hard, but what makes procrastination so hard to beat is that the Instant Gratification Monkey has a terribly short-term memory—even if you wildly succeed on Monday, when you begin a task on Tuesday, the monkey has forgotten everything and will again resist entering the Dark Woods or working through them. So let’s say your dream is to make your own app, and you know that if you build a successful app you could quit your job and become a full-time developer. When this happens, you lose all impulse to procrastinate and now both you and the monkey are speeding toward the finish. Often, the issue is that a perfectly noble competing commitment is undermining your motivation. She doesn’t end up finishing the task: Here’s a procrastinator who couldn’t bring himself to get started, even though a work deadline was approaching, and he spent hours in The Dark Playground, knowing the looming deadline was drawing near and he was only making his life harder by not starting. But when procrastinators plan, they like to do it in a vague way that doesn’t consider details or reality too closely, and their planning leaves them perfectly set up to not actually accomplish anything.

(Some experts argue that telling people in your life about a goal can be counterproductive, so this depends on your particular situation.).

Let me start by saying that I’ve had just about enough of the irony of battling through crippling procrastination while trying to write posts on procrastination and how to beat it.

The most important date is the first one. Caroline Webb is the author of How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life.

To make the task feel smaller, break it down into easy steps—that will keep you motivated as you achieve each goal.

Copyright © 2020 Harvard Business School Publishing. While we might weigh the pros and cons of doing something new, we far less often consider the pros and cons of not doing that thing. Once you get 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through a task, especially if it’s going well, you start to feel great about things and suddenly, the end is in sight. Solicit external support by telling one or more friends or family members about a goal you’re trying to accomplish and asking them to hold you to it.

Procrastinators’ visions of future scenarios never seem to include the monkey. There are two components of being able to achieve things in a healthy and effective manner—planning and doing.

The procrastinator’s Storyline goes something like this: For the Have-To-Dos in my life, I’ll end up waiting until the last minute, panicking, and then either doing less than my best work or shutting down and not doing anything at all. The follow-up to these two posts: The Procrastination Matrix.

Well, no, because “Learn how to code” is an intensely icky item—and every time you decide it’s time to get started, you will coincidentally also decide your inbox needs to be cleaned out and your kitchen floor needs to be mopped, ASAP. The key to tackling those unwanted tasks is making the action itself feel more significant and real, while making the costs of performing the action feel smaller.

Remove the hidden blockage. Create a Panic Monster if there’s not already one in place—if you’re trying to finish an album, schedule a performance for a few months from now, book a space, and send out an invitation to a group of people. So if there’s a call you’re avoiding or an email you’re putting off, give your brain a helping hand by imagining the virtuous sense of satisfaction you’ll have once it’s done—and perhaps also the look of relief on someone’s face as they get from you what they needed. All rights reserved.
We all know what an icky item is. You’ll notice how much more work you can get done when you’re less short sighted.

Once you’ve made that conflict more explicit, it’s far more likely you’ll find a way to overcome it—perhaps by setting your daily goals the night before, or on your commute into work. To make things harder, the Dark Woods is surrounded by the Dark Playground, one of the monkey’s favorite places, and since he can see how close it is, he’ll try as hard as he can to leave the Dark Woods. The other thing that might happen when you pass the Tipping Point, depending on the type of task and how well it’s going, is that you might start feeling fantastic about what you’re working on, so fantastic that continuing to work sounds like much more fun than stopping to do leisure activities. Effective vs Efficient: What’s the Difference Regarding Productivity?

Eventually, the deadline got so close, the Panic Monster suddenly came roaring into the room, freaking him out and causing him to fly through the task to hit the deadline.

Perfectionism and fear of failure are at the root of some procrastination.

The key is to know yourself and balance your motivation with your ability to focus. 98% of their day is otherwise identical.

No one “builds a house.” They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house.

noun

You can beat procrastination by not putting yourself in a tempting position.

If urgent items are involved, those will have to come first and should be knocked out as quickly as possible in order to make way for the important items (procrastinators love to use unimportant but urgent items as an excuse to forever put off the important ones). Because defeating procrastination is the same thing as gaining control over your own life. The Critical Entrance is where you go to officially start work on the task, the Dark Woods are the process of actually doing the work, and once you finish, you’re rewarded by ending up in The Happy Playground—a place where you feel satisfaction and where leisure time is pleasant and rewarding because you got something hard done. Only thing left is to do…. I’m still a wretched procrastinator, but I’m definitely better than I was last year, so I feel hopeful about the future. Research has found that it matters greatly to us whether we’re respected by others—even by strangers. And if the methods you set up aren’t working, change them.

To un-icky the item, you need to read, research, and ask questions to find out exactly how one learns how to code, the specific means necessary for each step along the way, and how long each one should take. We might have “learn French” on our to-do list, but who can slot that into the average afternoon?

Because it’s much easier for our brains to process concrete (now) versus abstract (future) benefits. For example, suppose you were finding it hard to stick to an early morning goal-setting routine.

If not, change my methods.”. Meet the mammoth.

Confront the downside of inaction.

Procrastination comes in many disguises. So much of what makes people happy or unhappy—their level of fulfillment and satisfaction, their self-esteem, the regrets they carry with them, the amount of free time they have to dedicate to their relationships—is severely affected by procrastination. It helps expose bad choices and highlights when it’s most critical to make good ones. Recognize that your brain needs help if it’s going to be less short-sighted.