So you like to procrastinate? It’s likely that you came across this article when you were supposed to be doing something else. That’s fine, I make no judgments I want to welcome you and hopefully give you a different spin on procrastination.

What does Procrastination mean?

I’m sure you know I’m not trying to insult your intelligence here but words are very important to me and I’ve noticed that sometimes the words we use most can be the ones that often become out of context. Procrastination is the act of procrastinating and to procrastinate is a fancy way of saying to delay an action or to put something off.

Now I know that many people have a negative association with the word procrastinate. However if we look at its definition there is nothing bad about procrastination in itself. I mean there are lots of instances where I’m sure that it is necessary to delay an action as you may need time to think about information before making a decision.

However if you have been looking at ways to stop procrastinating then it’s obvious that this process has become counterproductive.

So

Why do I procrastinate?

Have you asked yourself that question? I know I have, for me the question was really specific I wanted to know: Why do I procrastinate with things that are actually really important to me and then feel guilty about it afterwards?

Now for me, I‘ve broken that down into two main reason why I procrastinate:

I did not want the goal enough (this can also be identified as not being willing to take the steps to get there)

I was not realistic with myself

Let’s look at those two reasons in a bit more detail and see if you can relate

You want to be a millionaire and you read some books about how other people made it, your motivated, however when you discover that you may have to change some of your friends and initially you may have to give up the luxury of watching TV for 2 hours a day you make the decision that your current level of comfort is more important than the original goal. To justify your decision you may make a statement like ‘all rich people are unhappy anyway’ to make yourself feel better.

You join the gym and you want to get fit, on the first session you are really motivated and push yourself harder than anyone else, you do a class plus follow some exercises. When you finish your workout you realize you’ve been in the gym for 3 hours. You want to continue this everyday, and are really pumped up. You maintain this for the first week, then it starts to dwindle, your getting tired but you don’t want to feel like your taking steps back. By the end of the month you are burnt out and don’t set foot in the gym again.

In example one, if a goal is not important enough to you to make you act on it, then I guess it doesn’t really matter whether you achieve it or not.

In the second example it is important to be honest with yourself about what you can and can’t do. When you work within you’re capabilities then you can sustain productivity for long periods.

This article is an example of productive procrastination, I’ve written it, whilst deep in the midst of some other online stuff I was supposed to be doing and I felt my mind drifting, rather than waste my time surfing the net blindly I decided to write this post.

So don’t fight the beast, think of creative things you can do with you’re procrastinating time and who knows, you may even inspire someone else in the process. Plus it'll make you feel happy.