The Only Underwhelming Way to Curb Procrastination

 If you were to choose between doing these two things, which one would you pick?

1. Waking up and doing nothing apart from watching your favorite shows.
2. Waking up and going to your 9 to 5.

If you're like me, you've probably chosen the first option.

What I am trying to put across?

We all want to relax and do the good stuff, but we also have bills to pay. You know the must-dos. Sometimes the must-dos overwhelm us to the point we procrastinate doing them. 

We fail to strike a balance between work and leisure. We dedicate most of our time to leisure. Leisure gives us immediate rewards- which is feeling good at the moment. 

Work gives us delayed rewards. Its reward comes in the future( salary comes at the end of the month.)

Don't get me wrong, sparing some time out of your hectic schedule is not bad. It has so many benefits.

The good news is: we can work, have time for leisure, and as a result, not procrastinate doing our important work. We just need to know how to do that. 

In this article, I am going to show you how you can easily beat procrastination with this technique.

Action inspires motivation 

Most of us procrastinate doing our tasks because motivation hasn't struck yet. Here's the funny thing: motivation rarely strikes. We keep putting off important tasks.  If we want to stop procrastinating, then we can establish a reliable system.

 A system that will make it easy to start doing our tasks. After we have done our tasks, we will have crossed the action line. We've already gotten into the workflow. In other words, we need to make it easy to start.

Do something principle 

In his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Mason stresses how important doing something about your task can help you overcome procrastination. 

If you are to clean the entire house, you can apply this principle and clean bits of your house daily. You find this underwhelming as compared to stressing about cleaning the entire house. 

Whatever it is, just start doing something. Before you know it, motivation will strike. You will overcome procrastination.

Make it easier to start doing a task

The core reason we fall back into the procrastination habit is: we make it hard to start our tasks. Instead of aiming to read a few pages of a book, we want to read the entire book. Instead of decluttering one closet, we want to aim for cleaning the whole house. 

When we do this our tasks overwhelm us. This is part of the reason we believe that to-do lists never work. While in a real sense, we are the ones making unrealistic to-do lists.

Here are ways we can make it easier to start doing our tasks:

• Use the 2-minute rule to start doing your tasks. For example, for a task that takes an hour to complete, designate two minutes for that task. After two minutes, you'll realize that your mind is already in a state of workflow 
• Break your tasks into small, manageable bits. Instead of decluttering the whole house, start with your bedroom closet. This will make you stop feeling overwhelmed. We sometimes procrastinate when we feel overwhelmed by our tasks.
• Do your motivation ritual. It good could be listening to music. It could be taking your pet for a morning walk. Anything that will remove the urge to procrastinate.

Which tactic will you try first? Let me know in the comments section.