It often seems to me that procrastination more than anything else has prevented me from achieving excellence and making the gains in life that I would like. However, procrastination, occurs as a symptom, and hence demonstration, that a person has internal conflict. The result manifests itself as immobilisation and the inability to get things done. Much of the internal conflict comes from not facing up to the truth about a lack of ability to do the overall task selected or imposed to the standard desired and within the time and resources available or specified.

In retrospect, my unwillingness to face the truth that I did not have the adequacy to carry out my goals in life led to procrastination and massive indulgence in distractions to avoid the truth on a daily basis. Consequently, I lost decades of time for doing the things that I truly wanted to do and for which I felt put on this planet to do. I felt so deeply in conflict with myself that I often had to mentally creep up on myself to get anything done. I would generally only do the important things first thing in the morning when I would sometimes leap out of bed and just get on with them, without any debilitating and agonising thought over what I wanted to do. Then, if I struck a problem, I often got derailed for the day and indulged in distractions such as napping, watching films, reading novels, playing video games, playing guitar, and whatever else I could find to avoid the pain of facing up to my inadequacy. I could almost never bring myself to return to the difficult task that day and had to wait for another morning burst of activity to make further progress. In the end and to avoid feeling the almost inevitable and often devastating disappointment of finding myself woefully inadequate, I found it easier to put off doing things until sufficient pressures forced activity, usually in such a manner such that I could use lack of time as the excuse for my poor results and hide from the reality of my inadequacies.

I wasted so much time with this ineffective, dead loss approach. One saving grace lay in the fact that I became something of an expert on how to act with effectiveness and efficiency in order to make some progress and to offset the devastatingly damaging effects of my internal conflict and the procrastination that it caused. Finally, I found a method and a mechanism to blow this problem away for good!

We tend to procrastinate because we perceive that doing the activity feels more painful than not doing it until we reach a point where to continue in that way becomes more painful than actually doing the activity. Sometimes we never reach that point and procrastinate for our entire lives on certain issues. Often though, the activity in question has a direct importance for us and we know that we must fulfil it. This causes us to think about it but the difficulty of it causes us to turn away from it and to feel bad. When this happens we feel and enact procrastination most vividly.

Eventually internal or external pressures create sufficient pain that we get on with the task but often in a rushed and shoddy way. We have effectively manipulated our time management to get the thing done but rarely to the best of our personal standards or capabilities. We often find that the lack of time concentrates the mind, blots out distractions and causes us to more readily get into that state of mind where we flow and action and results flow thick and fast. However, this occurs with personal stress and discomfort before and during the activity and at the end of it we know that we could have, and perhaps should have, behaved better and that to do so would cause less fretting, less stress and would meet our desire to behave maturely and in control of ourselves.

In my experience procrastination tends to disappear when I face and accept the truth about myself and my real capacity to generate results based on real world results and not upon wishful fantasising. This unblocks the mental conflict that I previously felt and allows me to get on with things and I no longer have a fight between my perception of how I want to act and how I actually act, or with what results I want to have and what results I actually achieve. For years I felt like I had a split personality between a part of myself that had vision and enthusiasm and wanted to get up and get on with things and another part of myself that seemed to hold me back and would not cooperate. The enthusiast felt like ‘the real me’ and the hinderer felt more like an infantile presence that simply seemed to delight in thwarting me at every step of the way. I now think differently. I accepted the truth that I bullshitted myself continually by setting out to do so many things that I did not have the adequacy to do. Correspondingly once I set out to build adequacy and stopped thinking about improbably difficult objectives that the resistance of the hindering part of my mind disappeared. That part actually gave a reality check and refused to cooperate on flights of fancy. Finally, after many years of searching, I found and understood the mechanism that creates procrastination. Now I can enter into a state of free flowing action easily and consistently.

My formula goes as follows: Correct state of mind + distinct and easy purpose + organisation = free flowing action

State of mind

We procrastinate because we seek to do things that are personally impossible for us to do in the moment. This is a challenge to our abilities, and we face the uncomfortable likelihood that we will find ourselves lacking in ability and that we will struggle to create our desires. Recognising that we have too high a level of expectation immediately allows us to relax and to accept ourselves and our current limitations and to start thinking along the lines of, “Okay, if I can’t do it to my idealised standard, then just what can I do right now?” Such an attitude allows us to start to make headway on the problem.

These days, if set to work on something and quickly find that my concentration breaks easily, that frustration or annoyance builds and that I get impulses to stop and indulge in some form of distraction, I instantly stop and recognise that procrastination wants to rear its ugly head again. First I often sigh and then recognise that a challenge to my competency and adequacy exists and that since I choose to pursue these things that I have set myself to do then as a result I must face up to my inadequacy and deal with it. If the problem of procrastination proves particularly intractable then I ask myself questions along the lines of:

• What about this problem can I definitely do well? This starts to get me thinking resourcefully and to recognise that not the whole problem but only a part of it gives me difficulty at this time.
• What proves the greatest challenge? Here I isolate the real difficulties.
• How do I feel about that? This helps to face up to feelings of inadequacy on this particular issue and the truth of the issue. It prevents me from pretending, wishing and hoping for a better result.
• Can I give up? This practical question causes me to consider again whether I really want this objective and thus reaffirms my commitment and the fact that if I choose to continue then I remain responsible for dealing with the consequences.
• What has happened that I didn’t prepare for? This reminds me that I often don’t plan out everything exactly and that some of my difficulties might just lie in the fact that I need to do more preparation work.
• What could I do to get a better result or to improve? This gets me to consider possibilities and unlocks creativity.
• How can I break down the most difficult parts and make them easier to deal with? This gets me to manage the problem in smaller and easier chunks and if done well and practically, i.e. taking my current abilities fully into account, will make free flowing action inevitable.
• What will happen if I don’t deal with this? This gets me to think over and to recognise the short and long-term effects of continued procrastination. Since it always results in unpleasant conclusions it underlines the reality of my situation and also strongly bolsters my desire to get on with things. This works particularly well when carried out in conjunction with negative affirmations.
• What benefits will I get from overcoming this? This gets me to seek instant and long-term rewards for making the effort to deal with a seemingly intractable problem.

Recognise that without dealing with these things the final results, if any, will commonly end up rushed, shoddy and below par. Rushing things craftily disguises our inadequacy in the short-term by blaming it on other things but in the long-term we lose out. This subtly undermines our perception of our self and the likelihood of us ever achieving our desired levels of competence even further.

Easy purpose

Because procrastination quickly sprouts up when we seek to do things that are, or seem, personally impossible in the moment then the perception of that difficulty also generates a perception of personal inadequacy. In order to make things easily possible in the moment, I seek to do just a few things each day and I break them down into easy things to do. Even the most difficult things can get broken down further to a level where some progress becomes possible. Small and consistent incremental gains have a much greater power to ‘move mountains’ than occasional mammoth efforts. Consequently, I seek and set a clear and easy purpose for the things that I do. This ensures that my set desire is close to my likely result in reality. This diffuses the likelihood of generating a lot of negative feeling by seeking to have the impossible.

I also set a minimum level of performance that stretches me but not in a hard way. I seek to complete either 3-pages of writing or to write for 2-hours continuously, whichever comes first. I got this idea from reading about Anthony Trollope, allegedly one of Victorian England’s most prolific writers who only wrote for two hours each day but he did it each and every day. I was initially surprised at this discovery as I had assumed that prolific output comes from prodigious activity so I decide to try it out. Some years ago I took a break to write a book about some of my experiences as a young man and I put this method into effect. I found it easy to do two hours writing a day and to carry that out with resolute discipline. The writing came together slowly at first but with great drive. Although seemingly counter-intuitive it does work and the power lies in the consistency of action. By having a minimum level of performance when I reach it I can stop further work for the day without anguish or continue if I choose to. This consistent effort gives me high levels of certainty that I will get done what I want to do. Slogging away at mammoth sessions proves very draining and frustrating. It creates stress and highlights incompetency, which makes it even more difficult to face on the next bout.

With my writing I tend to think of an article and then get my unorganised thoughts down on paper. This forms the skeleton for the article and often represents the hardest part. I tend to do this in advance of when I want to write the article because to do the two at the same time feels too hard. I find that the thinking mode for generating ideas differs greatly from the thinking mode for organising ideas. If I mix the two together then I struggle to write. The ideas don’t flow and the text comes out with difficulty. I also find it useful to generate ideas and then ‘sleep on them’ as this helps my brain with the organisation process and sometimes also leads to even more ideas.

Thus when I come to write the article first thing in the morning I have already done the most difficult part (the creativity) in a relaxed and unhurried way. My writing becomes merely the abstract form of my speech as I explain and describe my ideas.

Organisation – Procedures and guidelines

Sometimes just breaking the task down into chunks does not prove enough. At times I have to take decisions over how to proceed and this can sometimes block progress. An inability to make a decision means that I lack certainty on how to proceed and achieve a competent result. If any signal of procrastination kicks in (broken concentration, frustration or annoyance, an impulse to indulge in a distraction) then I stop and think about what I seek to achieve. I then draw up guidelines or a procedure on how to achieve that result which makes decision making simple, easy and consistent. For example, recently I struggled with my article editing process and breaking it into bite size chunks simply did not prove sufficient so I came up with the following guidelines for the editing process:

• Ensure inclusion of information on cause/reasoning, method, usefulness/application and negative consequences for not changing. Ensure that each article has this or refers to other articles that will ensure complete information.
• Eliminate non-essential ‘filler text’ and initially highlight that text, and see how the piece reads without it. Take it out if it doesn’t feel appropriate but keep it for possible subsequent blog posts.
• Edit initially to restructure and rewrite the piece as necessary. If it still seems disjointed in parts then leave until the final edit to check the flow.
• Edit for flow on a separate occasion as it requires a different, more relaxed attitude with greater attention to finer detail.

With this process in place I had a clear idea of how to tackle the editing, what to pay attention to, how to create a consistent approach and how to make decisions easily and with confidence.

Organisation - Expectations

Another cause of frustration and annoyance can come when I find that I don’t meet my desired levels of performance. Setting a standard or target also sets a rule with an inherent level of expectation, sometimes I don’t even formalise the standard in writing but some level of expectation just seems to automatically arise. When I don’t meet the expectation or rule or standard then I find that annoyance and frustration begin. If I have broken the task into easy chunks and have a clear process on how to proceed and yet still feel annoyance then it usually revolves around some arbitrary standard that I feel I should meet but do not. I then stop and think about this arbitrary standard and introduce some flexibility based upon the real world results that I experience. For example, I might set a standard that says that I should write a new article each day. However, I must also edit articles and that proves much more time consuming than I at first thought. Consequently, I choose to edit regularly to avoid building up a massive and daunting backlog of articles. On some days and often for days at a time this means that I do not write any new articles. This sometimes breaks my concentration when editing because I think that I should write new articles because I set that rule. By recognising that a break in concentration signals a difficulty of the mind then I stop and change my rule. In this case I tell myself that when I have a backlog of editing that this takes priority and that the writing productivity target goes on hold until this gets done. With this improved criteria, which more accurately reflects my reality I find that my concentration returns and I can easily get on with things again.

Organisation – Time Usage

I used to attempt to heavily schedule my day but since I almost never ever met a schedule it used to get me down. Rather than persist in doing the impossible or improbable I changed my thinking. I realised that some activities benefit from scheduling and some do not. Urgent tasks require scheduling otherwise they get easily neglected. Also routine tasks can benefit from scheduling. My writing disciplines work so well for me now that I can schedule in time and expect, with high certainty, that I will meet my time and output objectives. I schedule this time so that I keep up the consistent and disciplined effort that produces prodigious output. Some activities absolutely bomb when I attempt to schedule them. These activities normally revolve around some kind of development where I need creativity and learning. At the beginning stages of any development, progress occurs slowly and frustratingly and haphazardly. It usually takes a slow time to learn new information and to develop new skills. Over time the bulk learning of new knowledge finishes and repetition of the skills speeds up productivity and repeatability. At such a point it becomes routine and can fit a schedule. Before that time though it will not fit a schedule and expecting that only creates unnecessary stress. I find that I need to ‘get into the zone’ when developing new abilities and I cannot automatically produce that to a schedule. I have to weave my way into it and then once in the zone I want to keep going for as long as reasonably possible, so I don’t want distractions or obligations to interfere.

Consequently I block out my days to take account of routine, urgent and developmental activities. I use my early mornings for routine productive work. Keeping up the flow of consistent action proves essential to reaching objectives steadily and without crises so I like to do this work first thing when I have most energy. Also, in doing this I always have little victories early in the day, which makes me feel good, and by hitting my quota early I can feel relaxed, competent and successful for the rest of the day. Sometimes I do more than my quota but rarely because I don’t need to do more to get where I want to go and I don’t want to set consistently higher expectations for myself in an area where it doesn’t feel warranted. In the late morning and early afternoon I do the urgent tasks or else do other routine work of a less intensive and productive nature, such as learning the intricacies of a new piece of software, editing existing articles, corresponding with other bloggers and the like. The late afternoons and evenings I designate as ‘Playtime!’ where I just have free and unstructured time to focus on the skills and capabilities that I want to develop. I usually set a whole period aside for just one activity because I like to focus on things intensively, especially in the early stages of development. I call it Playtime because I want to remind myself to just have fun without rules, obligations or expectations and in that way I get into the zone quicker, enjoy myself much more and hence get better results faster by default.

I keep lists of things to do organised by field of activity and I refer to these at the beginning of the day to map out what I want to achieve during the day and I generally leave a generous allowance for activity duration overspill. Without this organisation I tend to drift off into other things and before I know it vast swathes of time have gone by with little productive result to show for it. By doing the most important routine things immediately, I seize the day. I make excellent use of the day within the first few hours and then I can then get on and do whatever I like without the mild stress that overhanging procrastination and the feelings of inadequacy bring.

Summary

In essence, to tackle procrastination you must make everything that you do very easy to do. This can seem counter-intuitive as we often feel that we should push ourselves and fight hard. In fact many of us take a perverse pride in ‘hard work’ but such a concept undermines us. On rare occasions we truly must work hard but to do so continuously simply wears us down. I find the concept of ‘working hard’ one of the most ineffective approaches to getting a task done and the need for it generally shows a prior neglect or other poor methods of working that consequently forces the need to work hard to get something done.

Breaking a task down into small, easy to do, easy to perfect pieces proves the most effective, the most efficient and the easiest way to get anything done. It can seem bothersome at times because of the detail involved but if you cannot do the small, simple, easy things in life correctly then you will never do the big, complex and difficult things in life. You cannot neglect the basics and do very little correctly and then suddenly expect to pull a rabbit out of the hat and get an excellent result on something very difficult. I call that fantasizing and yet many of us indulge in that. When it doesn’t go right for us, rather than accept responsibility for our inadequacy and lack of effort we blame everything else under the sun.

If you don’t accept breaking things down and making everything easy on the important things in your life you will end up, by default, doing it on other things in your life but perhaps not realising it. When we procrastinate we indulge in distractions and we like those distractions because of their relative ease and simplicity. Turning on the TV and watching a programme or a film, going out with friends and drinking beer, sleeping, playing video games, whatever – all of these things come easier than doing the important things in life. By making those important things very easy you develop adequacy and competence and then the distractions hold no sway over you and if and when you do indulge in them then you do so as a proper reward after doing the important things.

Recently I read the book “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell and I felt much struck by how crime in New York City became massively reduced. It all started with paying attention to small details on the subway system. In an environment that paid no attention to vandalism and fare dodging it set up a very real possibility that one could get away with other criminal activity until a deluge of crime occurred. By refusing to let trains go out with graffiti and by clamping down rigidly on fare dodgers whilst simultaneously making it easier for Police to arrest wrong-doers criminal activity on the subway system rapidly tailed off and this passed on into other aspects of city life. It all came about from paying great attention to the little things. If you cannot do the little things correctly then you will never do the big things correctly. You simply don’t have the foundation of capability and skill to do so. The sooner you accept this then the sooner you will vanquish procrastination and unleash the massive productivity in your life that you deserve.

If you procrastinate then look for where the angst lies, the excuses, the ‘out there’ factors and then recognise (probably with a big sigh) that you bullshit yourself yet again. Your perception of yourself does not meet with reality and these tasks that you want or need to do force you to recognise that. The sooner you accept that and choose either to give it up or to resolve to keep working on the situation in a realistic, practical and enjoyable manner that slowly plods along, doing whatever it takes to make the progress and meet the objectives that you want, the better. Look at where you find yourself inadequate for the task that you need to do and immediately work on breaking that issue down into things that you can do. At times you may find it better to delegate that task to others or you may find that you have to delay progress in order to develop the capabilities that you need to handle this with competency by yourself.

As soon as your concentration breaks and you feel annoyance or frustration and want to indulge in a distraction then stop and think about what stops you. The problem lies in a lack of adequacy to deal with the current task. Reset your state of mind by accepting this reality. Next make the current task easier by breaking it down into a smaller chunk, or by creating a clear process on how to proceed, or by changing your expectations of how the work should go. Organise yourself to support this process. You will then have the result of free flowing action and high productivity. With this tool of a process you have the best chance of creating everything in your life that you desire.