Feel like Procrastinating? Try out these 2 Quick Tips!
“when ur heart says you should meet someone, don’t delay. i always wanted to meet Kalam saab and i should have made the effort . my loss .”
After the demise of the renowned aerospace engineer and the former President of India (2002-2007), Dr.A.P.J.Abdul Kalam, the above words were shared in Twitter, by the Bollywood Star Salman Khan. Salman’s tweet not just exhibits the respect that he has over the India’s ‘Missile Man’ but also explicitly stresses the elimination of an undesirable feature (i.e. Procrastination) from an individual, once and for all.
Several attributes of various individuals have been determining the outcomes of their respective actions. Wherein, procrastination has been one among the primary features, which have been inflicting a negative impact over the results of their efforts.
So, what generally makes people to procrastinate? There are a lot of reasons that come to my mind, for example:
- Lack of self-control
- Task aversiveness
Consider the scenario where a person procrastinates by postponing the early morning workout to evening. But what if the person gets stuck in a work in the evening or feels exhausted after a hectic day? In this scenario, isn’t the person losing a day’s exercise just because of the lack of self-control?
Rebecca Olsen’s thought about self-controlled decisions:
In this regard, I came across an idea that has been proposed by Rebecca Olsen, a PhD student from the Victoria University of Wellington. Rebecca, who has been researching on how to help people be more self-controlled and focus on long-term gain rather than immediate rewards, says:
“The act of imagining personal, future events have shown to help people make more self-controlled decisions. This means vividly imagining an event that will happen when you have achieved the long-term goal you’re working towards.”
Even though Rebecca’s research is underway, her thought about self-controlled decisions seems to be handy.
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Dr. Tim Pychyl’s recommendation to overcome task aversiveness:
As far as the case of task aversiveness is concerned, Dr. Tim Pychyl, a procrastination researcher at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, has recommended a different approach. Now, consider this situation in your workplace where you have been expected to complete a task within a particular time that has been stipulated by someone else. But, you sense that the stipulated time is practically not enough to accomplish the work and also there is no room for the time to be reversed. In this situation, you feel the task to be averse and tend to procrastinate it.
This is where you find the recommendation of Dr. Tim Pychyl to be useful. He suggests one to break down the attributes of an aversive task and work out on the attributes that require a change in the approach of their execution in order to make the task desirable.
From now on, if you feel like you’re procrastinating, just try out the suggestions that have been stated above and feel the difference! Sound off in the comments about any other method to eliminate procrastination, which you would like to share!