Procrastination - A career killer

byPoulvGud

166 followers

6 years ago

Have ever had a day off with nothing to do, but your own interests? You plan on spending the entire day building your business, but end up wasting it entirely on low priority tasks that you otherwise wouldn´t do?

That is procrastination. I am probably one of the worst when it comes to this destructive habit. You plan everything out and suddenly you look for distractions that aren´t relevant at all to what you are doing. Like social media, youtube or checking mails.

People usually mistake this for being lazy, but they´re not the same thing. Procrastination is an active process, you choose to something else than what you should be doing whereas being lazy is unwilling to take action.

First thing to overcome this is to realize that you´re Procrastinating. Remember we all do it to some degree in our life it´s simply human.

Perhaps you´re doing some of the following:

• Doing a lot of low priority tasks such as social media or watching youtube videos that barely even interests you.
  
• You have an item or a task on your to-do list that you never accomplish that have been there for a long time.
• You check you mail inbox all the time to make an excuse not to do the task at hand.
• You start some high priority task like making new content only to immediately get up and make coffee.
• You do irrelevant tasks for other people they could be doing themselves
• You wait for it to "feel right" or to be in the right "mood"

I myself have been guilty of all of these and am still trying to get my act together. So in order to change these bad habits its very important to have a good routine, time management, to avoid distractions and to know when and why you are procrastinating.

Here´s some of the things to watch out for and what you can do.

What to watch out for: social media and videos

Most of the time were aware when we are setting things off, but if you´re finding yourself doing a lot of low priority tasks you need to stop immediately!

You think you might be watching a 5 min video or checking your friends posts, but what you´re doing is a string of small time waste that can end up blowing away hours of your day! Close it down and put it away you can always do it when you´re done!

Figure out why you´re procrastinating

Do you feel overwhelmed with learning new stuff?

Are you disorganized and find it hard to find a place to start?

Perhaps you´re a perfectionist and you content must be perfect before anyone sees it?

These are all common traits for beginners here on WA and something you should be asking yourself. If you´re overwhelmed slow down! use the live chat the only stupid question is the ones not asked.

Don´t know when or how to get started? Perhaps you cannot come up with ideas and end up doing nothing instead. write a blog about or use the live chat. There is 100 % someone who have had this feeling before and have overcome it. They will help you, but they cannot do so if they don´t know you feel this way.

Your content is not good enough? Look no one start out making good content, we all start out making really bad mistakes. We have ugly pages, bad grammar and are afraid of criticism.

You have to fail before you can succeed so just start to write something, it doesn´t matter that it´s bad you need to get feedback and listen to what people are criticizing. If you do this long enough you will find the path to success.

You don´t need to have all the knowledge in the world to begin. Just do some research and write about what you´ve just learned.

Make some strategies to overcome procrastination

• Lack of motivation to start? Remember the consequences of not completing the task. Why did you want to start an online business? Is it so you can escape your dead end job or perhaps you need a extra income to pay the bills?
  

• Disorganized? First clean up your work space if you haven´t trust me on this one. You can´t work if you´re living in a mess, so clean up! Make a to do list and prioritize what´s most important and start with that, remember to finish one task at a time.

• Reward yourself! Whenever you accomplished what you set out to do simply reward yourself with something you like. This is very important to keep you motivated and a reward simply feels SO good when you have accomplished something you´re proud of!