Procrastination is like Masturbation

Did you hear this: “Procrastination is like Masturbation it’s all good and fun until you realize you are only fucking yourself!”

They’re really the same. In the end, you realize you’re just screwing yourself.

OK, so maybe a little off-color there, but you get the point. There is truly not anything good to say about putting things off. It becomes a bad habit that is difficult to shake. In fact, it is quite possible to procrastinate doing anything about your tendency to procrastinate!

There is no shortage of advice out there on this topic, but let me suggest that it helps to distinguish between two forms of procrastination:

Putting off things you Don’t want to do
Putting off things you DO want to do
The strategies for dealing with these are somewhat different. Let’s look at things you don’t want to do first.

If you’re a procrastinating type, the list of things you ought to do but haven’t done yet tends to get longer all the time. The list nags at your mind, but it also exhausts you to even think about it. And if you wait too long on some items, it could have actual negative consequences.

If you’ve allowed such a list of undones to accumulate, you can’t tackle it all at once. But what you can do is to address one item from the list each day, with goal of crossing it off.

The best way to go about this is to do the annoying thing in the morning, as early as you can possibly manage it. Then you’re done! – and you can give yourself a reprieve from the list until tomorrow.

This really works. All those worrisome to-dos start to disappear. The list gets shorter.

Now, when it comes to procrastinating on things you do want to do, what is probably holding you back is unacknowledged fear.

You want to start a small business, but it never seems to be the right time. You want to launch that blog or begin writing that book, but where will you fit it in?

The key here is, do something, and do it now. Do it today. Tomorrow is too late. You need to feel some urgency.

You don’t have to do it all today, and indeed, you can’t. But take the example of the book. Can you write a paragraph today? Can you write a page?

Don’t let yourself off the hook easily on this. Of course you can. It just requires trading a half-hour of some other activity to focus on your writing.

Does that half-hour exist? You bet it does. Even if it is a half-hour of sleep – which would not be optimal, because I know you need your rest – you can find it, re-purpose it, and invest it in your goal.

If you do this every day, the project inevitably begins to take shape. Write a page every day for a year, and you’ve finished the draft of your book.

Impossible things start to look possible when you divide them up into manageable units – and fortunately, that is the only way to actually do them. The mental attitude and the doing of the work are completely aligned. Once you’ve incorporated that truth into your life, procrastination ceases to be a major issue.