The Procrastinator's Guide To Being Successful: How To Focus Your Mind on Progress (Not Perfection)

By Desta Paulette

Are you tired of going to bed feeling guilty because you did not manage to complete a task? Everyday, you promise yourself that you'll get it done but you just can't seem to even get started! Are you looking for enjoyable, effective, and creative ways to ensure that you never have to put off important tasks again? Then you should read this book!

Procrastination is more than just a destructive habit; it's an emotional reaction to the subconscious fear that you're incapable of getting something done. In fact, research shows that procrastination affects 20% of the population. Are you done with being part of this statistic?

The Procrastinator's Guide to Being Successful is an easy-reading, comprehensive book that will transform your mind and habits so that you can learn to conquer your fears and fall in love with success again!

 

Inside The Procrastinator's Guide to Being Successful, you'll discover:

 

• Effective daily activities that will transition you from being a procrastinator to an initiator!
• Six powerful to-do list methods that will ensure that you complete any task you're meant to do, even if you've failed before!
• Strategies that will help you transform your mindset by dealing with the need for perfectionism, fear of failure, or need for control.
• Ways you can get more done by getting help from your friends and the people around you.
• A step-by-step guide to backward planning, an effective method that allows you to create an action plan for success.

 

Imagine spending each day being able to successfully complete any essential task that is on your plate. No more doubting yourself, waiting until the last minute, or setting yourself up for failure. You are capable, and this is your time!

Don't put off reading this powerful guide until tomorrow. It's time to claim your success now!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Desta Paulette
• Release date: Mar 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201335243

Book preview

Why Do We Procrastinate?

Procrastination has largely to do with how we view doing tasks and the influences of our environments. The reasons below are the most recurring:

Anxiety

Anxiety arises from a fear of failure or a fear of performing a task poorly. Anxiety-fueled procrastination manifests differently in everyone, depending on their circumstances. You are more likely to put off a task or make a decision when the stakes are high, and you don’t want to mess up or come off as inexperienced. Which in turn raises your anxiety as you think about the numerous ways you have failed before even doing anything.

Uncertainty

It’s easy to give up on performing a task or making a decision when the outcome or expectations are unclear. The more daunting the task, the more likely you are to put it off. As uncertainty causes you to question your abilities and the results you are getting as you work. Uncertainty can arise when expectations are high, but expected results are unclear.

Low Self-Esteem

No one likes negative criticism over something they spent all their time and energy on. Repeated failure can lower your self-esteem, limit your ability to make certain decisions, or perform certain tasks to a point where it is paralyzing to even think about and where you don’t want to do anything anymore, even when you know you have to. Low self-esteem can also arise from being forced to make decisions or take on tasks you don’t want to and getting mocked during or after the process for the produced results and outcomes.

Lack of Structure

How you grow up is also attributed to how you respond to things that need your attention. For example, research shows that children that grew up in strict households were more likely to procrastinate decision making out of low self-esteem. This stems from never having had the option to make decisions in their early and young adult years. When a child never learns how to make decisions and explore right from wrong, their ability to come to conclusive decisions or action is affected when they need to do this on their own. It is also important to note that our peers are also highly likely to encourage delayed decision making or action (because more times than not, we are in the same boat as they are). It’s easy to find encouragement to put off something important for a later day when you know someone else is doing the same.

Lack of Motivation

Motivation plays a great role in how we act out of different aspects of our lives. You are more likely to put off something you find unpleasant or mundane to do than you are with something that sparks joy and excitement in you.

Perfectionism

While perfectionists are more likely to get the job done better than anyone else, they are also the most likely to be chronic procrastinators. As a perfectionist, you set high standards for yourself and work to get to those standards, even though they could be unrealistic in certain situations. When something doesn’t come out how you envision it or isn’t reaching the standards that you’d set, it’s easy to give up on it.

Lost or No Morale

When excitement to get a task done or a decision made leaves, it is always hard to get back. When you lose your morale, you lose the motivation to get something done and the excitement to see it through. There are many ways you can lose morale, including not finding something exciting anymore, not being challenged by what you are doing, too many negative emotions arising during the process, and so much more. Lost morale will lead you to not wanting to do anything anymore as they love to get it done is just not there.

Fear of Commitment

Commitment means investing yourself and your time into what you need to do. However, for some, the idea that they need to do this for extended periods could be scary enough to not want to get involved in anything. Especially if it has to do with how someone else will react to what they do.

Does It Ever Go Away?

The truth is, procrastination never really goes away. And you especially could never rise past it without intention and putting in the work. Procrastination is a habit, and just as every habit, it can be learned and unlearned through small steps taken at a time. Almost all of us are guilty of putting things off when we know we shouldn’t. The process to overcome procrastination is not an easy one, but no good things ever come easy. The idea is to take baby steps and learn how to build from the steps taken.

The goal of this book is not to provide you with a procrastination cure. It is simply intended to educate and provide tips on how to live a more successful and fulfilled life, with a focus on moving from point A to point B over producing perfect results. They say one by one makes a bundle, and that is going to be the focus here.

We’ll go over how you can train your mind to be excited about the result of an action or decision you’re about to take, rather than thinking about the process. The process always feels like a task, but we want to eliminate as much of that feeling as possible by providing actionable steps that will help you get to where you want to go and stick to the decisions you make.

Chapter 1:

Problem-Solving

When does procrastination become a problem?

The thing about chronic procrastinating, it is not something that happens all at once. You don’t wake up a chronic procrastinator in one day. It happens gradually, building from the decisions you make every day and the pleasures you indulge in as you put off decisions or actions. Then years later, you are faced with the challenges of leaving the short-term pleasures because you haven’t built the resilience to tackle harder tasks.

Tim Urban, a professional writer and self-proclaimed master procrastinator proposed the idea of why we find it so easy to procrastinate by showcasing the difference in the minds of a procrastinator and a non-procrastinator (Urban, 2013). In both minds, he showcases the Rational Decision Maker, a part of your brain that understands the need to get things done and think long-term. In the mind of a procrastinator existed what he termed the Instant Gratification Monkey that interrupts your productivity so you’d start doing less important things, like binge-watching YouTube videos, checking Amazon for sock prices, and such other trivial matters. The Instant Gratification Monkey takes pleasure in short-term pleasures and blocks the Rational Decision Maker from making any long-term decisions or making rational decisions.

When you can’t find the motivation to make important decisions or do things even when you know they need to get done, then you know it’s a problem. When you would rather binge-watch a series than file your taxes or sign up for classes, then it’s a problem because it has started to interfere with your daily life and long-term goals. You pay for that hour of relaxation and pleasure with years of struggle and feeling unsettled and dissatisfied.

As Tim Urban proposes, The Dark Playground is a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening (Urban, 2013). When you put off doing important work for less important work or pleasure, you work in a space where the logical part of you keeps a reminder at the back of your head that the pleasures you are partaking in are unearned. Thus, you seldom enjoy yourself fully. The only way you move from the Dark Playground and start doing what you know you should do is when the Panic Monster sets in. That part of you that is afraid of failure, feeling unworthy, and mostly when a deadline is coming up.

It is safe to say that to help you live a more successful life, we need to look at procrastination as a major problem that’s stopping you from reaching your fullest potential. To solve this problem, you need to identify and accept the fact that you unnecessarily put off doing things in your life until the last second, regardless of the paralyzing anxiety that you experienced during this period. Even worse, you might find yourself not doing anything at all when you should have, thereby affecting not only your life but that of the people around you or those depending on you.

You can’t rise above a problem without being intentional about working on the problem.

The first step we’ll look at to solve this problem is to conceptualize your ideal or desired conditions. In other words, what do you want out of life? Visualizing what you seek to accomplish in life and how it will look like for you when you do, plays a major role in motivating one to push forward to work toward the end goal even when the drive to do so isn’t always there. When you know what you want, you understand what you have to do to get it and what works and doesn’t work for you in the long run.

Knowing the end goal also serves the purpose