Perhaps you have noticed a specific pattern emerging in your daily or weekly planner.
While you have plenty of projects and to-do list on your schedule, there are still a few that do not get completed within a day, move on to the next week, or even go a whole month without you touching them!
What’s even worse is that these are the projects that you find most meaningful.
If this sounds like something you do on a regular basis, then it’s important to take a closer look at the whole situation.
What is holding you back? Yes it’s procrastination. But there is something deeper going on: it’s called anxiety.
When it comes to doing things that are important, why are we so afraid?
It boils down to one thing; the fear of failing.
Humans are remarkably creative when it comes to finding ways to avoid that bad feeling, be it procrastination (“I’ll do it tomorrow”), diversion (“I’ll just check Twitter first”), or self-sabotage (“You know what? It’s a dumb idea anyway.”)
This last one is particularly popular among millennials who may not even realize the extent to which their hyper-rational reasons for abandoning a dream are influenced by fear.
So how do you dig yourself out of procrastination?
We often get into the habit of selecting actions that are more comfortable over behaviors that are ideal for us depending on the reason.
For example, most people work hard so that they don’t have to do something else, or are tired of making progress in a given area.
To counter, this, it would be wise to first list all the reasons for not doing higher priority tasks and then challenging the credibility of these reasons.
Decide if these rules have led to successes in life or if they need to be upgraded in favor of success-oriented reasons for making decisions.
That being said, the most effective strategy would be to break a larger goal down into small, measurable steps—and scaling expectations way back!