Denoting a tendency to regularly postpone unpleasant but obligatory tasks until later. At the same time, the person does not lie on the couch and does not watch movies instead of working. He turns on the computer, opens documents, but decides to make himself some coffee first, then checks his mail, opens the letter and reads the article sent, i.e. busy with something all the time.

An hour later, the man remembers that he was going to work, but suddenly begins to tidy up the table, being filled with the conviction that it will be easier for him to work this way, and then goes to water the flowers. As a result, the procrastinator wastes his time on unnecessary things, while he and the work are not done.

Reasons for procrastination

Psychologists believe that it can arise as a result of several reasons. The main factor, as a rule, is boring, unloved work. In second place is a lack of understanding of your goals in life. If a person has difficulty imagining why he should do a project, write a thesis, or study strength of materials, it will be quite difficult for him to get down to business.

Procrastination also affects people who are afraid of making a mistake and for this reason are afraid to get down to business, or, on the contrary, perfectionists who want to do everything in the best way and therefore miss all the deadlines. Finally, procastinators may simply not be able to properly manage their time and set priorities.

Please note that sometimes the reason for the inability to force yourself to do something may lie in vitamin deficiency, low hemoglobin levels or another disease that reduces activity and performance.

How to deal with procrastination

Fortunately, psychologists offer treatments. First of all, you need to realize that it is present and tune in to fight. After all, in the end you will have to do the very things that scare you so much.

Procrastinators not only spoil relationships with colleagues and others due to tasks not being completed on time. They also experience health problems due to constant nervous tension.

Start planning your time. Break things down into blocks, write down how long you will work on each block and how long you will rest. Keep a special diary where you will record your plans.

Change your attitude towards responsibilities. Don't tell yourself "I have to do this." Replace this phrase with “I will do this of my own free will.”

If you are constantly stalling on completing a particular type of work, consider whether you could delegate it to someone else, taking on some of that person's responsibilities.

Procrastination is a psychological problem of a person, putting things off for later, as a result they remain unfulfilled. At first, this problem does not seem global, however, this is not entirely true. The syndrome of putting off important things is a habit that simply needs to be fought.

Do you need to stress?

Postponing things for later is a process familiar to every person. However, if it becomes a habit and becomes a pattern of behavior, it becomes a problem and is called procrastination. Her syndrome is fraught with a certain danger.

A person who is accustomed to putting off important things for later, as a result, abandons them, which leads to degradation and the development of depression. Looking back, you can see a lot of missed opportunities. This becomes dangerous for the further realization of a person as an individual. We urgently need to take action. Otherwise, a feeling of chronic dissatisfaction with life will begin to devour you from the inside.

Don't expect to be able to stop procrastinating immediately and effortlessly. Positive results occur only if the maximum amount of effort is applied by the person himself. The habit of postponing everything until later will recede if you correctly determine its true cause and use tips and recommendations.

Where to begin?

In essence, procrastination syndrome is not a disease. However, the desire to put things off until later can provoke serious problems in human health. To prevent this from happening, it is recommended to get rid of it. Before starting the process, it is necessary to determine the type of procrastinator that a person belongs to.

Stressful procrastinator:

• Fear of achievement. Some are afraid that later this will be constantly demanded of them, some are afraid of losing friends because of this, and there are also people who consider themselves simply unworthy of success. This type of attitude should be changed to a positive one.
• Fear of failure. Getting a bad result will be more painful than doing nothing at all. Another side of this type was well formulated by Abraham Lincoln: “It is better to remain silent and appear an idiot than to speak and remove the last doubts.”
• Confrontation: “It’s impossible to force me to do something.” In this case, you need to ask yourself who will be worse off if the job is not done. Perhaps this standoff is simply protest for protest's sake. Is it worth spending your entire life aggressively asserting your personal freedom rather than contributing anything useful to it?

Relaxed procrastinator;

• Rejection of a particular type of activity and the desire to avoid it. The solution will be a new attitude - the desire to put off unpleasant work is the choice of students and uneducated people.

You cannot hide from life’s difficulties; sooner or later you will have to face them face to face. You can stop putting off unpleasant things until later by taking just seven steps. The recommendations should be applied immediately, because by putting them off for later, the person will again plunge into procrastination.

1. Keep a diary. Things require accounting, so you should make a list of things that have been put off until later and determine priorities. Use a different color marker to make personal notes - by urgency, by personal interest, by degree of importance. Put an approximate completion date next to it - you will see that the following tasks will be done tomorrow, so you shouldn’t put anything off. Advice: think over a system of rewards and punishments for yourself.
2. A large work with many components can be divided into blocks: “A big elephant needs to be eaten in parts.” Unpleasant work that requires a lot of time can be divided into time intervals: “I’ll do 15 minutes and rest.” Psychologically, it will be much easier to approach such work - it will no longer seem impossible. We recommend taking a break between stages.
3. Write down all the standard phrases used for procrastination, and choose a counterargument for each. “I can do this tomorrow” - “This should be done today, and tomorrow I will spend going to the cinema, shopping, etc.” Look for positive moments, put more positive things into your arguments, and life will no longer be joyless.
4. Don't be distracted from the main task. Focus on only one task and don't be distracted by other things. For example, when you start cleaning out your closet, focus only on cleaning and not on trying on outfits. Having completed the main task, you can do more interesting things for yourself.
5. Make a detailed plan of realistic goals, defining each as short-term or long-term. After achieving even a small of them, reward yourself for responsibility and hard work. Praise and please yourself, because you completed the task on time, without delaying it for long.
6. Look for the right motivation and personal interest, because, in the words of Calvin Kulich, “nothing in life replaces perseverance.” Come up with a positive reason and things will go much easier. For example, by doing a new project, you are approaching a salary increase.
7. If you have no idea how to approach something and do it correctly, just start doing it. Our behavior also obeys the law of inertia. This means that energy must be expended only at the beginning of any task. And then it becomes noticeably easier - the law of inertia comes into force. In the process of activity, the decision will come by itself, you will get involved and, unnoticed even for yourself, complete the task. Praise yourself! After all, you didn’t spend a lot of time setting up, preparing for execution and thinking through the sequence of actions in detail.

How to get results as quickly as possible?

Any habit is developed within 21 days. We advise you to develop a certain business routine - start business at the same hour. If you started on time, be sure to praise yourself, a little, lightly. To make it less boring, develop a personal ritual of getting involved in work. After 21 days, most likely, the habit of putting things off until later will disappear, and a new, useful one will appear in its place.

By the way, the reason for procrastination may be the desire to do the job super-perfectly. And the person begins to waste time collecting information. And you just need to get to work. According to the Pareto principle, 20% of available information already provides 80% of the information needed for work. And the rest is just a waste of time, since the missing 20% ​​can only be calculated during practical work. To reduce the time of searching and processing information, the simplest plan will do, so there is no need to complicate everything.

Give yourself permission to be imperfect and you can get the job done quickly. The best teacher is practice, its experience is priceless. Once you do something, you will do it much faster and better in the future. Learn to enjoy little things, reward yourself for starting things on time and not putting them off for later.

Even if the result doesn’t turn out exactly as you expected, reassure yourself that you did it!

» Fighting procrastination

© Peter Ludwig

What is procrastination and why fight it?

Fragment of the book Peter Ludwig. Conquer procrastination. - M.: Alpina Publisher, 2014.

Each of us has had occasion to put off important things until later, delaying their completion as much as possible, doing anything else instead. Unable to explain to ourselves why we do this, we are then tormented by a feeling of guilt due to missed deadlines and the fact that we have let someone down again. The author of the book, who was convinced from his own experience of the insidiousness of procrastination, comprehensively studied the problem, identified the causes of its occurrence and proposed several simple and effective ways to combat it.

When we cannot convince ourselves of the urgency of completing necessary or desired tasks, it means we are procrastinating. Instead of important things that make sense to us, we do something insignificant: watch TV shows, water flowers in the office, play computer games, spend time on social networks, eat (even if we are not hungry), do repeated cleaning, wander aimlessly around the office or simply “spit at the ceiling.” Later, due to self-reproach and frustration, a feeling of helplessness arises, again leading to doing nothing.

But attention! Procrastination is not easy laziness. A lazy person does not want to do anything and does not feel any concern about it. A procrastinator would be happy to do something, but he is unable to start.

Procrastination should not be confused with rest. During rest, we are filled with new energy. When we procrastinate, on the contrary, we lose it. The less energy we have left, the greater the chances of postponing a task indefinitely and doing nothing again.

People like to leave everything until the last minute, explaining that they work better under pressure and with an approaching deadline. But in reality this is not true: putting things off until the deadline is a breeding ground for stress, blame and inefficiency. It doesn’t hurt to remember the famous proverb: “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” .

History of procrastination syndrome

People have suffered from procrastination since time immemorial. Even the ancient poet Hesiod paid attention to this problem in the poem “Works and Days”:

And don’t put things off until tomorrow, until the day after tomorrow:
The barns are empty for those
who is lazy to work and always likes to put things off:
Wealth comes from effort.
Meshkotny struggles with troubles all his life continuously
(Translation by V. Veresaev).

A procrastinating person, a procrastinating person, a slacker person - this is how we can describe today’s procrastinator.

The Roman philosopher Seneca warned: “As long as we postpone life, it passes away.” This quote states the main reason why you need to fight procrastination.

Procrastination is one of the main obstacles that prevents us from living a full life. Regret about missed opportunities and the associated self-reproach take up much more time than it would take to solve the problem. A recent study found that when people are on their deathbeds, they regret the things they didn't do more than the things they did.

Due to procrastination, we waste time that we could spend usefully. If we manage to defeat it, we will be able to redo more things and realize our life's potential more effectively.

Present Tense: Decision Paralysis

What's the deal with procrastination these days? Today there are more and more opportunities for procrastination. Learning to deal with procrastination is one of the most important tasks of a modern person.

Over the past hundred years, average life expectancy has almost doubled. During this time, infant mortality decreased almost tenfold. Today we live in a world in which there is less violence and military conflict than at any time in human history. Thanks to the Internet, almost all the world's knowledge is available to us. We can travel almost without restrictions throughout the planet. Knowledge of foreign languages ​​helps to find understanding in foreign countries. We have mobile phones in our pockets that are more advanced than the supercomputers of 20 years ago.

The opportunities offered by the modern world to harness our potential are enormous. You can think of them as scissors. The more chances we have in the modern world, the wider these imaginary ideas can be revealed. scissors of possibilities. And today the number of these chances is greater than ever.

The ideal of modern society is built on the idea of ​​expanding individual freedom, on the conviction that the more of it people have, the more satisfied they will be. According to this theory, with each opening scissors of possibilities we should become happier and happier. So why aren't people happier today than their ancestors? What challenges does the expanding range of options pose?

This is primarily a problem of choice: the more opportunities we have, the more difficult it is to decide on something. The so-called decision paralysis. Thinking through all the options requires so much energy that we end up not being able to choose any of them. We postpone making a decision, and at the same time taking actions related to it. Let's procrastinate.

The more complex the options being compared, the higher the chance of postponing a decision. Given multiple options, it is likely that no matter what we choose, we will still experience regret, imagining what would have happened if we had chosen a different option, or noticing the shortcomings of the decision we made.

Are you familiar with the situation when you know that you should do something, but despite this, you do nothing? When was the last time you put off any action or decision? Has it ever happened that you could not choose any of the opportunities that opened before you? What feelings did you experience at that moment?

Rise decision paralysis contributes to increased procrastination. Procrastination leads to decreased productivity. The realization that we are not using our full potential causes self-reproach and frustration.

There are simple tools (techniques, methods) that can help you use your full potential every day. Using them only takes a few minutes a day, but can add up to several extra productive hours. These techniques enable more efficient use of the human brain, as well as an innate or learned tendency towards inefficiency. A secondary product of combating procrastination is the increased activation of the reward centers in the brain. Thanks to this, you will experience more positive emotions.

How did it feel to truly live a day of your life to the fullest? When was the last time? In the book, you will also learn why realizing your potential every day is the most effective way to achieve long-term satisfaction.

Let's get started! How do our motivation, performance and satisfaction actually work? How to beat procrastination? How to achieve tangible and lasting change?

Motivation

Once upon a time we were born, and someday, unfortunately, we will die. Our life time is limited and finite. Therefore, the greatest value is time. And not money, which, unlike time, we can borrow, save or earn. As for time, each of its unique moments disappears forever.

The fact that life is finite was also expressed by Steve Jobs in his address to students at Stanford University: “The realization that I was going to die was the best thing that helped me make important decisions in my life. In the face of death, almost everything loses importance - the opinions of others, ambitions, fear of shame or failure - and only what is truly important remains. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the mental trap of thinking you have something to lose. You're already naked. And there is no reason not to follow your heart."

Awareness of the finiteness of life leads to the fact that we try to spend the days allotted to us carefully. We begin to look for what we would like to devote our time to on planet Earth - we begin the search personal vision.

If we can find it vision, it will become the most effective motivational magnet for us. It will help us in the present to do what we really see meaning in, and at the same time it will pull us towards our ideal future.

WITHamodiscipline

The two main components of self-discipline are productivity And efficiency. There are only 24 hours in a day. If you subtract your sleep time, you are left with productive time.

Productivity measured by , what percentage of our time do we spend on activities that correspond to our personal vision. Regular sleep, time management and positive habits significantly increase this percentage.

Efficiency - an indicator of whether the actions we take are key, moving us forward. This also includes the ability to set priorities, delegate authority, and correctly divide large tasks into smaller parts.

Imagine your vision like the way. Productivity- an indicator of how long each day you walk along this path. Efficiency determines whether you are taking the biggest steps possible.

Self-discipline - is the general ability to act in line with your personal vision.

Rehatltats

As the proverb says, “A plan without action is a dream. Action without plan is a nightmare." This saying expresses two main problems in life. Many people have their own vision, but they do nothing to follow it. Others, on the contrary, do something, but do not see the point in it. Ideally we need both vision, and actions. If you can combine this, it will appear emotional and material return.

Emotional I'm giving related to production dopamine - a neurotransmitter that causes a feeling of satisfaction.

Material I'm giving represents specific results of labor.

ABOUTbeTotiveWitht

The last important part in the personal growth constructor is our objectivity . Anders Breivik, who shot and killed 69 people on the island of Utøya in July 2011, probably had very high motivation and self-discipline, which ultimately brought him emotional and material rewards. This extreme example shows how far you can go if you don't keep an eye on your objectivity.

Objectivity is an important tool for testing our not always error-free intuition; it is a method of understanding the nature of things. Promotion objectivity based on a person receiving feedback from the surrounding reality regarding his views and actions. Because the brain has a tendency to believe something that is not actually true, we need to continually detect areas of possible bias.

As Bertrand Russell, Nobel Prize winner and one of the most famous mathematicians and philosophers of the 20th century, said, “The problem of the modern world is that fools are confident in themselves, and intelligent people are full of doubts.”

conclusions

• Procrastination - not laziness, but the inability to force oneself to perform necessary or desired actions.
• If we look into history, we will find that people have been procrastinating since time immemorial.
• Our time promotes development procrastination , so you need to learn how to deal with it.
• The choice of opportunities offered to us by the modern world is the largest in the entire history of mankind. Scissors of possibilities open as wide as ever before.
• Increased choice often leads to decision paralysis .
• Due to decision paralysis, hesitation in making decisions and procrastination, life passes us by, causing us to experience unpleasant emotions.
• There are simple tools to help you win decision paralysis And procrastination .
• If we use our potential, the pleasure center in our brain is activated, dopamine is produced, and we experience positive emotions.

See also:

There are two types of people. The first type: a person is successful, achieves everything he wants, 24 hours a day is enough for him. Second: procrastinator. People of the first type will most likely never come here; they have many important matters that require their direct participation. And this article is just for you, representatives of the second type.

I hasten to note that there is no shame in being a procrastinator; moreover, the absolute majority are procrastinators of varying degrees of severity.

The word itself " procrastination", as Wikipedia tells us, has Latin roots and currently in English has the meaning of "delay, postponement." Thus, “procrastination” is the tendency to constantly put off unpleasant thoughts and actions “for later.” Up to a certain level, procrastination is the norm (we all know the common joke about work that is not a wolf and will not run into the forest), but beyond this limit, procrastination becomes a serious problem. Laziness and procrastination have a lot in common, but they are not the same thing. Rather, laziness is one of many components that make up the phenomenon of procrastination.

So who is he, this mysterious “procrastinator”?

First of all, those who are not accustomed to discipline suffer from procrastination. In fact, who wants to brush their teeth on a schedule and exercise strictly from 6:30 to 6:45? Who is actually ready to do this exercise without even being tied to a certain time? That's right, only those who will not read this article.

By the way, this very article was planned to be written at least six months ago. And all this time it was not published solely due to the problem of procrastination that the author of this article had. It’s difficult, you know, to take it and write it, and what if it doesn’t work out? What if I'm missing something? But what if…? Ahh... okay, it really doesn't burn. I'd better go and have some tea.

And this is the whole point of procrastination.

What does a procrastinator do when he has things on his agenda and he realizes their importance and the need to complete them? He, most often, is distracted and has fun, until the last moment trying not to notice this unpleasant feeling in every sense that time is running out, and nothing has yet been done. A person begins to be distracted and have fun with a vengeance, just to forget about the oppressive consequences of not doing everything that needs to be done.

A true procrastinator is never in a hurry to complete his tasks. There will always be 1000 and 1 reasons why “the whole world will wait.” Sooner or later, in particularly advanced cases, It becomes difficult not only to finish what you started, but also to start anything new at all. The fear immediately arises that another one will be added to the mountain of unfinished tasks, which will only bother you with its presence.

Even if a procrastinator has found the remnants of strength in himself to complete a particularly important or particularly long-drawn-out task, the fact of its completion does not bring the former moral satisfaction, only... The reason is that the remaining pile of tasks has not gone away, and completing one project with such difficulty is a merciless reminder that there is still a long list of tasks ahead, each element of which will require no less, if not more, effort.

By the way, it would be nice to have this list. Most often, the procrastinator does not have this list, naively believing that all his numerous unfinished tasks fit into his head. The only thing these things do in his head is that they bring “confusion and vacillation”, do not allow him to concentrate, and frighten him with their quantity, which often “from the inside” seems greater than it actually is.

Therefore, this leads to a conclusion for those who decide to move from the second type of people to the first:

Rule #1: Make a numbered list of things that have already accumulated.

After compiling such a list, a small positive reinforcement follows: almost every person had this list in their head much more extensive than it is on paper. This means that there is not as much to do as it seemed. The mountain to be climbed is not that high. For a neglected procrastinator, this is a good sign and some relief.

I’ll say right away that following these rules is also a matter and it will also fall into the same pile if you don’t start implementing it right away, before it even occurs to you to go have tea. If you have time to read this article, then you have time to create a sorted, numbered list. Therefore:

Rule #2: Make that list now.

In this case, it won’t be possible without pleasant bonuses. The fact is that every time a procrastinator brings a task to the end, even the smallest and even the most insignificant, he will have the effect of realizing that he could, that he is worth something, that he can, when wants. Time after time, this confidence will grow stronger. And the day will come when, after small things, great things will come into play, which a person (no longer a procrastinator) will be able to bring to their logical conclusion. Would you like to experience a little bit of the joyful feeling of being closer to solving your problem? Then follow rule #2.

Immediately after drawing up a list of to-dos, it is strongly recommended to decide on priorities. This means that it is necessary to reconsider the importance, urgency and necessity of each individual item. You'll see, if you approach this task with all seriousness, your “mountain” will become more like a hillock than Everest. And this, again, will add enthusiasm.

Rule No. 3: Determine priorities (importance, urgency), sort tasks in accordance with implementation priorities. Eliminate from the list those things that have already lost relevance or were never important.

There may be difficulties along the way. A person is accustomed to believing that all his affairs are important and that he cannot do without them. In fact, it was not for nothing that he carried them all the time in his head, so that he could then take them like this and throw out, say, half of them. Definitely not in vain. He wore them because they seemed important to him, but it is time to reconsider them and take a critical look at this great importance.

A simple test will help you here. For brevity, I will refer to this test as the “desirability test.” Take each point and say it out loud "I want…" and instead of the ellipsis, substitute the wording of the case that you have listed there. If it suddenly turns out that you don’t want to, but, for example, have to, then this matter is not suitable for you and you can safely remove it far away from this list. If you are afraid to part with those things that you owe to someone, but don’t want to do yourself, then create a separate list specifically for them. You'll see, by the end of this article you can safely throw it away. But for now, do it anyway, this exercise will also greatly help you on the path of transforming from a procrastinator into a successful person, and will also give you an incomparable feeling of “a weight off your shoulders” when you finally throw away this list.

The importance of meeting the desirability criterion cannot be overstated. The fact is that, regardless of religious, philosophical and other ideological views, I hope that each of you cherishes the time of your life. Using this criterion, you can free up as much time as possible in your life only for those things that you always want to do. These things will be done not so much for the sake of the result, but for the sake of the process itself. This means that the time spent watching them will fly by unnoticed, but this makes it no less pleasant. Such things are not even business at all, but natural relaxation.

It may seem that I advise you to leave only some frivolous matters, but then how to live? How to eat? How to work, after all? How many people, author, have you seen who like to work? But you have to live!

Of course it is necessary. But you also need to know why it’s all there. The eternal question arises: “Do we live in order to eat or do we eat in order to live?” the same with all other areas. Do we live to work or work to live?

Today I will tell you what procrastination is, what its symptoms are and how to deal with it, what is the treatment for procrastination

Good afternoon, dear readers. Dmitry Shaposhnikov is with you.

Today we will talk to you about such a phenomenon as procrastination.

Surely you, like me, have noticed very strange behavior in yourself from time to time. You need to complete a specific important task, but some incomprehensible inner feeling is preventing you from getting to work.

Instead, you constantly strive to distract yourself with other, more pleasant things. But in the end, you spend time on unimportant things, which leads to missed deadlines, overexertion, dissatisfaction with yourself and even stress. Maybe it's laziness, or maybe something else? What to do?

Below, I will share my personal experience with you. Go ahead, friends!

1. What is procrastination really?

The term “procrastination” literally means “delay” and “putting off until tomorrow.” This concept came into use in 1977, when two serious scientific articles devoted to this problem were published.

In Russia, no one dealt with this issue until the mid-2000s. It is clear that procrastination has always existed, but scientists began scientific research into the phenomenon relatively recently.

The simplest definition of procrastination is:

Procrastination- this is postponing for an indefinite period important, complex and unpleasant tasks that, nevertheless, must be completed.

The science of psychology defines this term more verbosely:

Procrastination- this is an individual’s tendency to constantly postpone specific important and urgent tasks by replacing them with extraneous matters.

The procrastinator understands well that undone tasks threaten professional and personal troubles, but he cannot help himself - he ignores an important task, doing anything but completing it.

Well aware of the need to perform specific tasks, a person replaces them with entertainment and is distracted by everyday trifles.

The phenomenon is familiar to many, even if you are hearing the word “procrastination” for the first time.

Unlike a lazy person who just lies on the couch in front of the monitor, a procrastinator is always busy with something, but this type of activity is unproductive, ineffective and does not bring results in the form of personal development, improvement and increase in wealth.

Procrastination almost always leads to life problems and painful psychological results.

The most complete psychological study of the phenomenon was carried out by Professor Piers Steele in his work “The Procrastination Equation.” The scientist believes that the rhythm of life of a modern person consists almost entirely of postponing important things.

He sees the problem in the lack of the habit of following one’s own intentions and the characteristics of human psychology.