The Quickest (but Hard) Way to Overcome Procrastination
I had been a chronic procrastinator for years and it has always affected my productivity adversely.
Like everyone else, I kept reading and watching content on different sources on internet to find a way to fix it, all of them looked logical but they didn’t work in long run.
Most of them talked about changing thinking patterns, which isn’t as easy as it seems. So one day an idea popped my mind and I decided to give it a try and it seemingly worked for me, hence it may also work for you as well.
When I retained my attention on the definition of the word ‘procrastination’, it said, a tendency of the brain to defer the work for later, which means when you tell yourself mentally that you will do this work later, then it also means that you’ll do another work before, and your job is to find out the task you always give priority to.
Suppose, programming is my job and I get paid to make web apps, however whenever it comes to coding I decide to do it later than watching few Youtube videos. So whenever you put some important task to do later, then you are actually doing another favourite task earlier. In my case the task I was preferring was watching Youtube videos, so I took a decision one day and implemented it the next day.
I decided that tomorrow for the whole day, that means for continuously 12 hours I’ll keep watching Youtube videos, even if I reach the end of the page, I’ll refresh and continue watching, even if I don’t feel like watching, I’ll still watch, because it’s an exercise just for one day, it’s hard, but you can do it at least for a day without rest. I deliberately thought of topics I would search to keep watching Youtube videos for 12 hours. I took break for lunch, tea, and other bio tasks. This way my brain got tired of watching Youtube videos and my mind finally realised that watching Youtube videos are so boring. Once your mind has associated your favourite task to the boredom, it’ll dissociate that task from pleasure and then your mind will never crave for the same task for quick dopamine hit ever again or at least for another 2 weeks.
So first thing is to find out what do you do earlier so you have to put your important task to later, it could be using Instagram or Facebook, or watching movies, whatever it is, you simply have to do it compulsively without rest for whole day and then you’ll never crave for that tasks again for another 2 weeks, you can repeat the exercise again after 2 weeks to remind mind that how boring it is to do the task that was putting another important task off for later.
Once you have done this exercise for all your cravings, one by one your mind will dissociate your cravings from pleasure and the only task you’ll be left to do with is the important one and when you complete a small part of it, it’ll give you a sense of completion and finally your mind will associate this sense of completion with pleasure and you’ll become workaholic one day.
Please do it at least once and let me know your experience in comments.
