End Your Production Procrastination Today
Understanding Production Procrastination
Productivity is often a misunderstood concept. Being productive isn’t necessarily about accomplishing more, but rather it’s about investing your time and attention in a more strategic way to add value to your career, life, and relationships. If you’re like most people, you probably wish that you could be more productive in your life. However, one thing that you may have failed to consider is the reason and motivation that drives you to work toward accomplishing your goals.
Too often, our desires to be more productive are based on the belief that it is what is expected of us by society or because we think we are being overloaded with work and don’t feel as if we can handle the workload. You might feel a desire to be more productive to impress your coworkers and boos or even to appear as though you are busy.
While these are all valid reasons for wanting to be more productive, they are all external reasons. Other external motivators for wanting to be more productive may include material things, money, or fame.
While money can be a great motivator for many people, it is vital that you consider whether or not there is something else driving you. If your reasons for wanting to be more productive are shallow ones that don’t serve a higher purpose in your life, chances are high that it will decrease your motivation down the line, allowing your productivity to fall by the wayside.
If you want to increase your productivity then you need to take the time to consider what is driving your desire for productivity. If you need more money to support your family, then the love you have for your family might be your driving factors.
Perhaps, you’ve found yourself in poverty, and your drive is the desire to improve your situation and yourself. If you want to improve your productivity, you need to determine what drives you on a deeper level and understand why you are working so hard. It is critical that you make sure that you know what you are striving to achieve. Only you know what is driving you. Only you know what will make you wake up early and work hard. Only you know why you need to be more productive.
It doesn’t matter what you tell other people, and it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not. You may have a desire to tell people what they expect to hear, but it may not be your real reason for wanting to improve your productivity. What does matters is what you tell yourself?
If you want to improve your productivity you have to be honest with yourself. To keep your productivity from falling as quickly as it has risen, you need to continue to remind yourself why you are working so hard, being sure to always keep it in your heart and mind.
Keep it as simple as possible
Before you can begin to improve your productivity, you have to slay your habit of procrastination. This chapter is going to present you with the three general strategies for overcoming your procrastination, followed by specific tactics to optimize your personal productivity in the proceeding chapters.
These tactics can motivate you, even more, to continue staying clear of the habit of procrastination. Habits, like procrastination, are unconscious and they fall under the control of the subconscious mind.
This is the reason why you can only go so far when trying to consciously change your habits before you revert back to your normal habits. This includes the king, cursing, and procrastinating. The only way you can make lasting personal changes is by converting them into habits, either subconscious or conscious, through reprogramming your subconscious mind.
According to Dr. Maxwell Maltz, the author of Psycho-Cybernetics, the subconscious mind can be likened to heat-seeking or laser-guided missiles launched from fighter jets and warships. When these kinds of missiles are launched, they automatically seek out the targets given to them.
After the missiles are launched, the pilots and warship captains no longer have control over the movements or trajectories of the missiles. The missiles’ on-board computer systems are what control them en route to their programmed targets. The best way to control these kinds of missiles is to give them their targets before they’re launched.
Your subconscious mind is like these guided missiles. You can make it go wherever you want and achieve what you want by simply programming it to acquire certain targets or habits, like eating healthy, exercising, and ending procrastination.
You can do this by using your conscious mind through visualization and affirmations or through declarations and positive self-talk.
To help you retrain your subconscious mind and end procrastination, you need to say your positive declaration several times a day and with emotion. An example affirmation might be,
“I will stop procrastinating and, instead be a very proactive person.” When you continually tell yourself this, you can change your subconscious mind’s programming over time so that it will manifest the affirmation.
It can even become more powerful if you combine it with visualization exercises, where you play a movie in your mind’s eye and you see yourself acting or living out your affirmations. Another way you can use positive self-talk to reprogram your subconscious mind and end procrastination is by asking the right questions, particularly positive and empowering ones. An example of the right question to ask would be, “What should I do to start closing more sales?” rather than “Why am I not able to close enough sales?”
By asking how you can achieve something rather than why you can’t, it allows your subconscious mind to focus on how you can. When you ask why you can’t achieve something, you are effectively programming your subconscious mind to continue keeping you from successfully accomplishing something or getting rid of a bad habit.
What you focus your mind on often determines, to a great extent, how your subconscious mind will be programmed. If you can program your subconscious mind for the possibilities, it will go after those possibilities. If you program it for limitations, it will do what it can to enforce them.
Just Do It – In 5 Seconds or Less
The last general strategy for beating procrastination is simple. Mel Robbins, wrote the book, The 5-Second Rule, and while you may be familiar with this rule when it comes to dropping food on the floor, this book focuses on the neuroscientific foundations for how our minds work when we procrastinate.
The idea behind this rule is that it requires you to disarm and decapitate procrastination by taking necessary action within the first five seconds because the longer you put off action, the higher your risks of procrastinating.
So, whenever we experience stress, such as when we have to wake up in the morning or having to exercise when we don’t feel like it, our brains take those signals that something is wrong.
This puts the subconscious mind into the fight or flight mode to try to preserve the body through inaction in an attempt to pre-empt dangers from happening. It results in feeling more and more sluggish causing us to procrastinate.
However, with the five-second rule, you don’t give the subconscious mind the time to build momentum and yield its power. By acting against its wishes to procrastinate, you nip the procrastination problem in the bud.
When you act within the first five seconds, you set your body in motion, which in turn creates emotion. So, by getting up and immediately moving, you’ll be able to create a counter-emotion that makes you want to continue moving forward.
So, when you feel the temptation to put off working on the first few tasks of the day, just count backward from five. As you get closer to zero, act. Action will break the inertia and motion will create emotion. The more you can do this on a consistent basis, the quicker you can develop a habit that will stop procrastination for good.
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Tom Guu