What's your plan to end procrastination?

Throughout the book, dozens of different methods are listed, which can help you improve your motivation and reduce procrastination. As an extra tool, at the end of each chapter, there is "end procrastination!" Your plan-"column, you can record your" war drag "log on the horizontal line. You can write down what you think is important, what you plan to do, what you did when implementing the plan, the results after implementation, and what you can do to apply what you have learned. This journal provides a continuous record, which is convenient for you to review your achievements at any time and use what you have learned to enhance your confidence and achievements. It includes four parts: core idea, action plan, actual operation and achievements. Whether you want to remind yourself which methods are useful to you, or you want to make your own action plan and form a set of action plans, you can refer to these materials.

There are many things you can do to get rid of procrastination. From the perspective of long-term self-education, you will be less likely to repeat the mistake of procrastination. Learn to seize the opportunity and set up small obstacles on the excuse road that may lead to procrastination, so as not to slip into the mire of procrastination; Realize that those unpleasant emotions and feelings are temporary, accept them, and you won't shrink back because of this normal discomfort; Force yourself to start doing the right thing, and your life will be less troublesome, more successful, healthier and happier. Let's go!

Procrastination, changing consciousness.

Procrastination is like a fog. This changeable and complicated process is often accompanied by a series of excuses, symptoms, jokes and terrible stories. Sometimes it is accidental, sometimes it is continuous; Sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes it's good at pretending. In this chapter, you will look at procrastination from different angles. You will learn to adjust your expectations according to the time and resources you need, and take corrective measures to fight procrastination.

Being alert is the first step to recognize the procrastination trap, which is very important, so as to make positive changes and overcome procrastination habits. However, alfred Kerri Buschi, the founder of general semantics, an educational discipline that studies the exact usage of words, once said: "A map is not a real territory, but a symbol and guide. If you want to know the truth, you have to experience it yourself. " All right, let's get started.

Common types of procrastination

Procrastination is an unnecessary postponement of activities with time constraints. This definition applies to all kinds of situations, from small things like returning phone calls to big things like making business plans and quitting smoking.

The occasional procrastination in those relatively unimportant aspects of your life doesn't mean the end of the world. If you usually go shopping in the supermarket once a week, but it is only delayed for one day at a time, this delay can be ignored. However, if you are always overwhelmed by the things left over from the previous day and habitually procrastinate, even on unimportant activities, it will bring you frustration.

No matter whether your procrastination is staged or protracted, you can take action to stop procrastination habits and behavior patterns and help you break through the restrictions set for yourself in the past. Any aspect of procrastination itself can be transformed into a textbook to get rid of procrastination, because only you know best how procrastination makes you feel unsafe and incompetent. Procrastinators are completely different from "time management" experts. They advocate smart work and easy work, and encourage people to work harder and achieve more results.

There are many reasons for procrastination, some are social, some stem from the way the brain works, some are caused by faith, and some are related to temperament or mood. Some forms of procrastination are also related to anxiety, such as feeling uncomfortable because of being evaluated and judged. There are also individual differences in motivation behind procrastination. However, it is precisely because of the complexity and variability of procrastination situation and the consistency of procrastination process that procrastination can be separated from specific conditions and become the object of special research. Compared with the energy and time spent on different occasions, various forms and unexpected procrastination, it takes less time and saves more energy to change the psychological suggestion of panic response. Let's first look at the common types of procrastination.

Delay in the deadline

The deadline has a time node, and it is all related to some kind of constraint rule, which you can't control but must abide by. When you want to procrastinate, you may wonder whether to miss the deadline or sprint to catch it. This is a common procrastination scenario. Predictably, the deadline is approaching, that is, the day lily is cold, and it begins to rush to the deadline.

Any work is limited by schedule, process and deadline. Suppose you are making a semi-annual brochure of the company. In order to do it well within the specified time, you need to complete some steps, such as content preparation and design, printing and distribution, which should be completed with reference to the timetable. If these behaviors are not managed, this booklet may eventually come out in a chaotic state.

If the timetable and action guide are vague, but the deadline is there, you are in trouble. You may postpone tasks that are not clearly stated. If the goal and description of a task are clear (time, place, method), it is easier for you to start immediately. So, if you are not sure, just ask; If there is no clear structure, design one yourself.

For a long and complicated project, you may have a deadline, but its only reward is the little sense of relaxation you get when you finally finish it. In this case, you may have to face another challenge-you have to stick to it far away from the internal reward mechanism. Pigeons are active in short-term small returns, but they will slack off in long-term returns that require more efforts, even if the returns are greater; When the reward is out of reach, monkeys become irritable and procrastinate. Distant rewards that require more work often lead to delays. In this respect, we are no different from other mammals. Humans are also more inclined to get short-term returns and underestimate greater long-term returns. For those seemingly complex, vague and uncertain tasks, we prefer to delay the start. On the one hand, it is to escape the uncomfortable primitive impulse caused by complexity, on the other hand, it is our advanced cognitive ability to solve problems. The conflict between the two will interfere with your rational decision-making and lead to procrastination. Complex long-term projects can be as terrible as storms unless you can make some preparations in advance.

Delays that include deadlines often require you to weigh them over and over again. After all, if you still want to get paid, you must obey the company's process and timetable to avoid delay. Your company gets the results of your work, and you get the salary you need, which is what you get for providing services. If the project you are working on has a deadline, and the project is complex and needs long-term continuous work, then you may have no choice but to start as soon as possible and invest a lot of time and energy. If the project process itself is enough to provide you with internal returns, it may be enough to support you to continue. Otherwise, you have to divide the whole work into blocks wisely in advance, set some intermediate deadlines for yourself, and reward yourself regularly according to the completion.

It should be remembered that in the "war procrastination" scheme of our cognition, emotion and behavior, maintaining awareness and awareness of our procrastination habits is the first step. Reminders are always useful, because people's memory is bound to make mistakes, and some delays are due to forgetting. With some mechanical processes, you can be punctual in many ways automatically. For example, public utilities and the automatic payment system of the mortgagee will save you a lot of trouble. Moreover, using these tools can also greatly improve efficiency. You can use due memo files, calendar marking system, iPhone, PDA and mobile phone memos to help you remind those important days.

Dick filled out the "personal priority list", which helped him to divide the things he had put off into several different categories. Most importantly, he wants to learn to talk remotely on the computer so that he can contact his children and grandchildren directly. He also wants to visit the art center, travel and study political science. His previous complaints only made him unable to see what he was doing: at that time, he mostly slept during the day and watched TV at night. When he set his priorities and saw that complaining was useless, as expected, Dick immediately took action to meet the challenges of self-development, and those challenges were no longer as mysterious as before.

Simple procrastination

Simple procrastination is a kind of procrastination without doing anything: when you feel a little uncomfortable or unhappy about a task, the reaction to its resistance and withdrawal is simple procrastination. This delay may begin with a momentary hesitation. Unless you can take effective actions to complete the task quickly, this moment of hesitation may trigger an automatic reaction of procrastination. The process of hesitation may be closely related to the way the brain works.

The brain will be connected to a "do it later" factor, or it will automatically slow down the speed of decision-making: when the brain responds to sensory signals, it takes longer than expected. The reason may be that it is difficult for higher psychological processes to understand signals from lower brain functions, which leads to decision-making and delay problems. The conflict between low-level brain processes and cognitive decision-making processes may partly explain how simple procrastination and inaction reactions begin. If this conflict causes you unpleasant feelings, you will aggravate from procrastination to procrastination, and the factor of "doing it later" provides a possible mechanism for this aggravation. However, whether this mechanism does exist or not, or there are other reasons, the solution is the same: action must be taken to overthrow this physiological resistance.

Complex delay

When procrastination involves multiple related factors, it belongs to complex procrastination. Complex procrastination refers to procrastination accompanied by "self-doubt" or "perfectionism" and other factors. Usually, this procrastination has a multi-layer structure. You can divide these layers and solve the sub-problems of each layer by divide and conquer. There is an internal connection between different levels, so when you deal with a problem at one level, it may also weaken its connection with other levels. For example, you are always driven by an impulse and easily distracted by entertainment activities; In order to avoid important things, you turn to do those trivial things, which may cost more; You were going to pay the bill, but instead of going, you went to the casino to try your luck. Then, in order to temporarily forget your new gambling debt, you watched TV again.

Even if you have faced up to and overcome these concurrent factors, your goal of reducing procrastination has not been fully realized. You may have eliminated one of these complex levels, but procrastination is often like having your own life. As soon as you get a chance, you will walk towards their height again in the spring breeze. If you really want to get rid of this burden, you need to further deal with habitual procrastination: you need to change procrastination thinking, exercise emotional endurance, and take action to pursue the goal of high efficiency.

Symptoms, defense, resistance and bad habits

Procrastination may manifest itself as a symptom, a defensive behavior, a problematic habit or a combination of these common situations. Procrastination may be manifested as a complex pattern of symptoms, for example, worrying about anxiety itself, but delaying learning cognitive processing skills that can solve anxiety; Meaningless busyness is also a symptom of potential tension, because avoiding problems you don't want to face. This hectic behavior is a distraction, just like running into a dead end, which is meaningless at all.

It is also very useful to identify the symptoms of procrastination, which reminds us of those omissions that need to be recognized and corrected, but we have ignored them. For example, Charles Darwin, a British naturalist, once postponed his medical research, but he finally found his real interest and put forward his own theory of biological evolution. His symptom is to escape from medical school. Suppose your family advised you to run a sporting goods store at home. You were really not interested in running this store, but you accepted it out of responsibility. Procrastination will appear when you place an order, make a report or deal with personnel problems; But when you make full use of shelf space, decorate shops or beautify the landscape, you are fast and efficient. That's because what you really want to do is to learn architecture. What you pay special attention to in your work is your real personal interests.

Procrastination can be a defense against certain situations, such as fear of failure, anxiety, or fear of blame, which all fall into this category. If you tend to think in a perfectionist way and feel that if you can't meet your standards, you won't devote yourself wholeheartedly or you'd rather do something else first-this leads to procrastination. If your attention is attracted by the fear of failure, you may miss some promising solutions, such as procrastination caused by perfectionist beliefs, which is the case. Fear of success is another manifestation of failure anxiety, which is equivalent to fear of failure. If you believe that you will face more arduous tasks and bear more pressure after success, in this mode of thinking, you will pay much less for delaying now than for risking failure later. Of course, there are other explanations for these. From a conceptual point of view, it is of course a kind of delay to delay reflection on this evaluation fear and take feasible intervention measures.

As long as you can deal with the causes of procrastination, you can regain control. But then again, as long as the unconscious procrastination habit exists, you will continue to have the unconscious procrastination impulse.

Some habits themselves will not lead you to useful goals, but they will lead you blindly all the way, and so will procrastination habits. To deal with the habit of unconscious procrastination, you can systematically over-practice your "war procrastination" strategy, thus weakening the power of unconscious procrastination.

Procrastination is usually a complicated and problematic reaction process. Breaking procrastination down into symptoms, defenses and problem habits can provide a framework to help you know what happens when you procrastinate. A good evaluation of complex procrastination can guide you to find a truly effective war traction technology. If you can accurately find out the mechanism behind procrastination, you can correct it more accurately and pertinently, or find potential solutions through your own reading and research.