We all have some unfinished goals. Often these goals are important for us. We are missing happiness because we have not achieved these goals. Most of us take an easy way out by putting the blame on others, circumstances and even fate.

One prominent factor or behavior, which keeps us away from our goals, is putting off doing things or taking actions. This is a habit. Think of it as a ‘Demon’. You have heard the saying ‘We all have our own demons to fight’. In my opinion, Demons are our thoughts, behaviors that keep us away from our goals our happiness that comes from achievement of our goals.

One such behavior, that stands out as an enemy of achievement, task completion and ultimately our success and happiness is ‘Procrastination’.

All of us are familiar with this, an apt quote I remember is “Procrastination is the thief of time”, my addition is not just time, but ‘procrastination” also robs you of happiness. It stops us from getting to our goals and makes us miserable by keeping on, the constant nagging of unfinished tasks.

So let us see what happens when we get into this behavior. The sequence is, as follows:

A task (e.g. writing a report) that needs to be complete is on our mental list; most probably, it belongs to a kind that we do not like doing. Imagine we have a report to finish. This is how Procrastination happens:

• We try to look for other things that we must complete before getting on with writing the report.
• We attend to each new idea or seemingly important tasks, which we could do later without losing anything at all.
• We convince ourselves we are doing something far more important than the task (writing the report) which we are trying NOT to do right now (but actually needs to be done)
• We use every interruption as a justified reason to push back completion of the task in question.
• Sometimes when all the possible reasons are exhausted, we search for or invent new ones.
• At times we just “Don’t feel like doing it now”

In the end, some event or someone pushes us into completing it. It is often an external push. (We all remember times when we got a reminder mail.) At times, it is a gentle reminder, other times a stern warning. Then we get down finishing it. When we have completed it, we feel a sense of relief.  When we look back, we find the time taken to complete the task is just a fraction of the total time we spent on postponing the doing of that task.

Have you experienced ‘Procrastination?

How did you overcome it?