Reasons for Procrastination

I will write this tomorrow...

One of our most feared enemies, the one that can struck at any moment and any second when we are struck with any opportunity that life presents us, all to left that same thing for the next day or just in time to finish a deadline. Procrastination has formed part of our existence since we began to develop a conscience. Even If we know when we are pushing things to the last minute, we don't really know why It happens to us, only letting us to gasp and fall defenceless to the machinations of these impulses. That's why in this article I'll talk about many of the internal causes that might be causing you to procrastinate, letting you know about little steps you can give to be less prone to the effects of It and letting you know that you're not the only one that suffers from this. Let's begin:

Fear

One of the most primal and fundamental motivators for our actions. Since our tribal past, where almost everything represented a choice between life and death, we learned of the virtues of being cautious so we can extend our existence a little more and bring more prosperity to our close ones. However, we are no longer in that ruthless point of history, being in the more relatively prosper period that we have ever lived as an species, though these responses deeply ingrained in our brains still get triggered by different stimuli, seeing many things as a continual threat to us and paralyzing us in the face of action. The fears that might be producing our tendency to procrastinate are varied and can range from the fear of failure and being judged by other to simply the fear of not being in control and not knowing what to do. A simple tip you can apply to get past this fear is to give little though incremental steps towards doing It, slowly though steadily getting to where you want to be.

Perfectionism

As I've pointed in previous articles, wanting everything to excel can be both a blessing and a curse, as It can lead us both to put intense effort towards the realization of something and It also can lead you to nowhere by thinking that whatever we do It won't be able to live to our own standards. There are two types of perfectionist: Adaptive ones, which are proud of the hours of work they put in the work and their exceptional attention to detail and the maladaptive type, which don't do anything all because of fear of It not being perfect, so I'm referring with this to the second group. To get past this point you can give yourself some freedom to release things when they reach a point of "good enough", and sometimes even putting up the first draft.

If you want to know more about how to deal with perfectionism, you can check the next article that I've written about It:

https://read.cash/@JophMax/wabi-sabi-accept-imperfection-e3a38df6

Being Overwhelmed

Sometimes we procrastinate not because we don't think we can do something, as there are moments when we simply put things at the side because It is not physically possible to get them realized in such a short period of time. For example, we can look at the checklists of many businesses, which put an absurd amount of items on them for a particular day. As a result of this, they usually don't get past half of those objectives, thing which only decreases the morale of the team working in a particular task and the overall productivity of the group. All of these can happen to you individually when you put unreal expectations upon yourself with a long to-do list for the day. The best approach you can use in this situation is to simply spread the daily tasks in a period of a week, just putting an amount of two or three really important tasks to realize each day, liberating you of the pressure of having to accomplish so much with so little spare time.

Procrastination can have a great amount of emotional triggers that might be derailing us from the path to our own freedom, making us not only more miserable though less efective in our day to day lives. That's why I hope that this article could had been of use to you, leaving you with a description of the motives of this phenomena and giving you some advice as to how to combat It. The next part of this series will come tomorrow, so, till then, thank you for support and good luck!