You’ve been putting off the research for your work project only to find yourself watching the Director’s Cut, Extended Edition of all 3 Lord of the Rings films (with 93 extra seconds of previously unseen footage).
The bathroom looks as if it’s been the breeding ground for a horde of Gremlins for the past month but you accept an invitation to a leaving party of someone at work you said “Morning” to six years ago.
Your assignment is due and you have lecturers breathing down your neck as the deadline is fast approaching. However, every time you sit down to crack on with it, you notice the kitchen worktop needs a bit of a scrub, you ought to rearrange your CD collection from alphabetical to chronological order and you should just make a quick coffee and perhaps a quick sandwich… Soon you find yourself with a full stomach, a clean kitchen, but no further forward with their dissertation!
We’ve all been there, putting off jobs we know we should be doing but unable to force ourselves to do!
But is procrastination just another form of laziness?
What is laziness?
Laziness is defined as ‘the quality of being unwilling to work’. This means that you have a task to do but are unwilling to put in the effort to complete it in an effective way.
You might have some clients to phone in order to meet your quota. However, if you are putting this task off because you are afraid of what they might say, this is a common indication that you are procrastinating, not just lazy. There is a reason behind your putting off the tasks you need to do.
Laziness would manifest itself for a different reason – be that you are unwilling to phone them because the task takes too much effort. You just can’t be bothered to.
As we see, if we can delve deeper into the reasons behind your putting off a task, you may come to realise that you are not lazy, but that you are procrastinating (ie. there is a reason behind why you are putting some activity or decision off). If there is no reason behind you putting in the work, then it might just be laziness.
This point is very important because we often chastise ourselves as being lazy. It’s easy to do because we know we should be making progress towards our goals. We use laziness as a rod to beat ourselves with.
Mel Robbins has a great short video talking about procrastination as a habit. Nearly all habits have a trigger, a response and a reward. We can’t do much about the trigger (which Mel says is nearly always stress) but we can control our response – the habit of procrastinating.
How to do it? We take small action – just 5 minutes will jump start you and help you to banish those procrastination blues.
What happens when we view ourselves as procrastinators?
Importantly, she also explains that we must see ourselves, not as procrastinators, but as people with a procrastination habit. By labelling ourselves as ‘procrastinators’, we view ourselves as unchangeable – procrastination is just what we do! So rather than staying impotent to do anything about this negative trait, we should see it as a habit that we can influence when we apply the right techniques.
Watch the video here: the only way to stop procrastinating
So how can we overcome our self-concept of procrastination?
- Determine whether you are putting off a task because you can’t be bothered to do it (laziness) or whether there is a deeper reason, such as fear or stress, behind your unwillingness to get cracking. For more information about some of the causes behind stress, you might want to check out our article here: the 8 reasons you are procrastinating and another article specifically focusing on the link between fear and procrastination
- Then you can apply these 7 questions to help you beat procrastination
- Then you need to take action. This article on the 7 different ways you can overcome procrastination might be useful.
- FInally, you may want to read this article, which is about looking at procrastination as a positive part of your life – sending you a signal that something isn’t quite right. Click on the link here: how to benefit from the positive aspects of procrastination
Conclusion
Stop beating yourself up about being lazy, pathetic or no good. Most people find that there is a hidden reason lurking beneath your procrastination and once you can identify this, you are much more likely to be able to deal with this issue and move forward again towards that version of ‘You 2.0!’