You want to lose weight, feel fit, kick a bad habit, get organized, and spend more time with your family and friends. This is as good a time as any to start. Waiting is a form of promissory note procrastination.
Once on procrastination's web, you'll snare yourself with different types of entanglements. You may start with a burst of hope than sputters to a halt. Prematurely stopping what you started is a form of behavioral procrastination.
Doing What's Meaningful
Promissory note procrastination occurs when you make timely, meaningful, and relevant promises to yourself and then don't carry them out. You have a fattening eating habit. You're on the path to excessive weight and type II diabetes. Changing the pattern is necessary, pressing, and consequential. If left undone, you're in trouble. This is a relevant and timely change. However, will you do it?
You probably have different reasons and results in mind when you promise yourself that you'll make an important personal change. If you want to make and stick with a personal change, set clear goals. Here are three goal standards for tipping the balance in favor of following through: (1) The goal is meaningful. It's something that has a clear value for you. (2) It is measurable. You can objectively assess your progress. (3) It is attainable. You have a reasonable change to accomplish what you set out to do.
When you have a meaningful goal, it reflects a problem you want to solve. For example, you feel depressed and lonely. By engaging people socially, you may make friends and feel less lonely and depressed. However, depression and procrastination interfere with engaging people. You have a problem to solve. Now, how do you solve the problem?
Gear-up, Start-Up, Keep-up
Goal setting is a first step in making an organized effort to make meaningful personal changes. However, goals do not automatically translate into productive actions.
Goals without plans are like having a destination and then flying by the seat of your pants hoping you'll magically get there. You can gear-up by using concrete plans as stepping stones for positive changes. Let's take depression as an example. You want to feel free from depression. How do you achieve that result? Your stepping-stones (objectives) map the path.
Overcoming depression is ordinarily a byproduct of doing something else first, such as exercising, challenging depressive thinking, and engaging people when this is an important goal. So, what do you do first? You can start with an evidence-based activity schedule. This is an outline of what you'll do first, second, etc. Activity schedules include rewards that follow prescribed actions. After following through with an action step, do something nice for yourself, such as listening to your favorite music or taking a warm bath.
Suppose that getting exercise and staying fit is on your antidepression to do list. You can get a twofer benefit by joining a group for short daily walks. That may help solve your loneliness problem. You set a time to start. You create an activity schedule where you follow corrective actions with something you currently find rewarding, such as reading news reports on the Internet.
Getting started can seem burdensome. To help yourself over this hump, use my five-minute inertia breaking method. If the activity is exercising with a group, engage your chosen exercise activity for five-minutes.
Although this is a minor time commitment, it's easier to continue once you've started. After the first five-minutes elapse, you can decide on doing another 5 minutes, etc., until you are done with this start-up step. In addition, when engaged in a five-minute activity with a group, you may get an extra boost. You may be reluctant to quit until you finish the walk. Once you are familiar with the routine, it may be easier to hit the hiking trail again.
You may start but fade from the challenge before accomplishing what you set out to do. To avoid this behavioral procrastination barrier, assess where the breakdown is likely to occur. If you get to that point, plan to push yourself beyond this breakdown point. Give yourself a bigger than normal reward for this accomplishment.
American naturalist and author Henry Thoreau ended his book, Walden, with this thought. If you take a different path from what most others follow, you may hear the beat of a different drummer. The question, of course, is what path will you follow? That choice determines if you are going to be on a productive or deviant path.
Persisting where others might procrastinate is like marching to the beat of a different drummer. If you are going to step to this beat, a lot depends on developing an enlightened perspective.
To engage an enlightened perspective, look beyond the moment where you first start to talk yourself into quitting your resolve. Review your goal. Remind yourself why you made the promise to yourself. Examine the progress you've made. Consider the gains that you can still make. This reassessment can rekindle your will to pursue a change that you decided was healthy for you to do.
Although water will flow along the easiest path, sometimes you have to restrict and channel it to make it more useful for you. That, too, is following the beat of the different drummer.
If you want to dig deeper into understanding and overcoming procrastination, you can listen to my free Podcast at www.smartrecovery.libsyn.org.
A free, brief, eBook accompanied the Podcast: Beat Procrastination Now.
If you want on-going information on how to overcome procrastination, visit me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/BillKnaus.
Use End Procrastination Now! for guidance on how to be a more efficient and effective you.
Dr. Bill Knaus
