What is procrastination and why does your success depend on it?
If you are concerned about your personal productivity, that of your work group or that of your company, you have surely searched for information on how to improve and have come across that strange word countless times: procrastination.
Procrastination is something you face with greater or lesser success every day without realizing it. You need to understand how it works, what psychological elements are behind it and what strategies are most appropriate to combat it with a minimum of guarantees.
Although the word procrastinate It seems like an imported Anglicism, the truth is that it comes from Latin (pro-, differ, crastinus, the next day) and is included in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy as a synonym for defer and postponeIn very simple terms, you are procrastinating every time you tell yourself “well, I'll do that tomorrow.”
The phenomenon of procrastination began to be studied by philosophers, psychologists and economists since George Akerlof wrote an essay in 1991 entitled Procrastination and Obedience (“Procrastination and Obedience”) Through his own experience—he spent several months putting off a task he had to complete every day, in an incomprehensible way—Akerlof realized that this phenomenon, beyond being a bad habit, exceeded all limits of rationality.
According to academics, procrastination occurs not when you decide to put something off until tomorrow, but when you do it knowing that it will be detrimental and go against yourself. And that is precisely where the irrationality lies. We procrastinate even though doing so negatively affects our morale, increases our stress and does nothing to help us be happier.
There is no correlation between intelligence or the level of education or knowledge of people and procrastination. They are irrelevant factors. From a social point of view economic, a much higher benefit is perceived in doing homework today's, which leads us to postpone tasks from the future over and over again, until it is too late. In other words, the main cause of procrastination seems to be the recent social trend to pay more attention to what is current and relevant.
Every wrong decision—every time we choose to procrastinate—incurs a small loss (generally speaking, not just financially), but the accumulation of these errors over time can result in large losses in the end. And the consequences can be very significant. Akerlof gives several significant examples: people who live out their old age in poverty because they did not know how to save at the time, people with problems and illnesses due to substance abuse that they did not know how to stop, and companies that fail because projects are not started if they are finished when they should be.
There are those who think that it is possible to procrastinate productively. At least, that is what certain theories that speak of positive procrastination. Breaks are necessary to perform well. If at a given moment, your energy or mood is far from optimal, stopping work is a good option. Perhaps it is not the time to start a project because there are key aspects that are not sufficiently defined.
Sometimes, it's just better to wait, although I would call this procrastinating: Efficient people know when they have to start a task and when they have to wait. This move ensures that for very perfectionist people, procrastinating can even be productive. By not starting a job until the last minute, they can't devote all the time in the world to getting the perfect result.
They have to settle for a “good enough” result. And before they start that job, they may have done a lot of other things that they probably wouldn’t have done if they had started with the most important task. In reality, procrastination has nothing to do with laziness. Natural procrastinators are actually hard workers. They are capable of getting a lot of work done, as long as it’s not the work they are supposed to be doing at the moment.
Doing another task, one less important than the one we have to do, is the most common procrastination. You know what the number one task on your list is, but you have the overwhelming urge to do something else before that. So you choose one or more easier, but less important tasks, so you don't do what you don't want to do.
There are opinions for all tastes, but in my opinion Procrastination is a great enemy of productivity And people who engage in this behavior on a regular basis do not take advantage of their potential at all. What can you do to stop procrastinating or, at least, greatly reduce your level of procrastination? Well, there are many strategies that can help you in this fight against yourself.
One by one they yield small benefits, but a combination of them can yield big gains. Here are my top 20 strategies to stop procrastinating. Choose, test and adopt the ones that work best for you.
