How To Stop Procrastinating: 4 New Steps Backed By Research

From BarkingUpTheWrongTree


How To Stop Procrastinating: 4 New Steps Backed By Research

I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. It’s awful and horrible. I hear it causes cancer. I’ll do it when I feel better. I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll do it when I’m taller.

Procrastination plagues us all. We always think there will be more time tomorrow and research shows that’s just not true.

No, you won’t do better work by waiting. In fact, studies show leaving things unfinished makes you stupid.

To be honest with you, dear reader, I should have started writing this hours ago. So how can both of us finally banish procrastination for good? I decided to call a guy who has answers.

Charles Duhigg is a reporter for the New York Times and author of the bestseller The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.

You can watch the video of Charles talking about habits here: BarkingUpTheWrongTree

Here’s what you’ll learn in the post below:

• Why your standard response to procrastination never ever ever works.
• How turning habits into “personal starting rituals” can make beating procrastination easier and fun (believe it or not.)
• Why the most powerful habits are all about how you see yourself.
• Why eating chocolate with friends might be the secret to beating procrastination — and every other bad habit you have.

No more putting things off. Rather than doing this “eventually” let’s do it now.

1) You Don’t Need More Willpower. You Need To Build Habits.

You don’t have a willpower problem. This wouldn’t all be better if you could force yourself to do that dreaded task.

As I talked about when I interviewed the foremost researcher on the subject, willpower is a limited resource.

Relying on it to get things done is a really lousy strategy. As Charles says, you really only have the willpower to muscle yourself to do about three to four things a day.

Yeah, three or four. (So basically I’ve used up all my willpower by the time I get out of bed.) So what’s the answer?

Building better habits. In fact, 40% of the things you do every day are habitual.

So if you can just move those awful, horrible mom-don’t-make-me-go-to-school tasks into the habit territory, you’re far more likely to get them done. Research shows we’re wayyy more productive when we automate tasks by making them habitual.

Here’s Charles:

When people make hard tasks into habits, it tends to use less willpower. You’re thinking about it less. Think about brushing your teeth. Anyone who has children knows that getting your kids to brush their teeth is like fighting demons. Everything about it is hard. When you think about it, it’s not hard for us as adults to brush our teeth. The reason why is because as that behavior becomes a habit, it requires less and less willpower. It starts drawing on different parts of the brain than the prefrontal cortex where decision-making occurs and activities that require willpower occurs. That’s the lesson. If there are some things that are hard to do, that you want to make them more automatic and less demanding of willpower, then by deliberately making them into habits, by paying attention to cues and rewards, you gain a strength over how to influence that.

So habits are the answer. But how do we use habits to beat putting things off?

2) Turn That Habit Into A “Personal Starting Ritual”

I’ve posted a lot about the research and solutions to procrastination. What’s a common theme we see again and again?

Getting started is where the war is really won. This makes sense intuitively. Often it feels like something is impossible… but then once we get going we find it’s actually not that bad.

Finishing things isn’t as much of a problem as just getting started in the first place. Here’s Charles:

One way to use habits to fight procrastination is to develop a habitualized response to starting. When people talk about procrastination, what they’re usually actually talking about is the first step. In general, if people can habitualize that first step, it makes it a lot easier.

So don’t make this some terrible grind of a habit. Make this a habit that’s a “personal starting ritual.” Get your coffee or whatever energizes you and turn that into a visceral signal that always means I’m getting going.

And here’s the best part: your starting ritual can be fun. As in doing some of the stuff you’d do when procrastinating.

3) The Most Powerful Habits Change How You See Yourself

Read more frrom BarkingUpTheWrongTree >>