Procrastination
"Procrastination is the thief of time" - Edward Young (1683-1765)
Usually when people delay things they are procrastinating - putting off tasks until they are unavoidable. It can be very tempting to put off particular tasks in favour of something more enjoyable or a task that you are more comfortable dealing with. Procrastination can often occur when you do not understand the difference between urgent and important tasks or spend too long doing one and not the other. You need to ask yourself are you really the only person who can deal with urgent tasks? Delegate tasks where you can. Procrastination delays progress, wastes time and can restrict future opportunities.
Procrastination can come about in a number of ways:
- Paralysis by planning: Here the planning process is drawn out to avoid confronting an issue. Plans are argued and polished and perfected, but implementation of the plans is delayed unnecessarily.
- Perfectionism: Often tasks are fussed over long after they have been achieved to a quite sufficient level. This often serves to delay tackling other problems. Often perfection simply is not required, and is not cost-effective to achieve.
- Boredom: Boring jobs are very easy to delay for spurious reasons. Here self-discipline is needed.
- Hostility: Where you are hostile to the task, or to the person giving the task, there is a strong temptation to delay.
- 'The Deadline High': Coming up against a tight deadline and meeting it is immensely satisfying. It can be associated with strong rushes of adrenaline. The problems with this are that you may find that jobs are being delayed precisely to get this rush of adrenaline, and that occasionally jobs may fail because they have been left too late.
The way to tackle procrastination is to set deadlines by which goals should be achieved. The way to avoid Deadline High procrastination is to set intermediary goals which must be achieved. © Mind Tools Ltd - The points above were taken from the article, "Negative Delay - Procrastination" from the Mindtools website.
