“PROCRASTINATION IS THE thief of time. Collar him!” wrote Charles Dickens in his novel, David Copperfield, way back in 1849. Over a century later, in 1976, American psychiatrist Dr Wayne W. Dyer termed it “the art of avoiding today” in his bestseller, Your Erroneous Zones. But he gave it a positive twist: he said procrastination was a fairly common quirk that wasn’t very difficult to get rid of. (Read our article, Do you keep putting things off? You’re not the only one, to learn Dr Dyer’s views.)
Continuing from our first article, we will now explore why you persist with this immobilising habit and then look at ways to “collar” it.
Why you procrastinate
According to Dr Dyer, a combination of escapism and self-delusion is what makes you put things off. Here are some reasons why you cling to this habit:
(i) Postponing things allows you to dodge activities you find unpleasant, either because you’re scared or plain unwilling to do them.
(ii) It helps you delude yourself that you’re not a “shirker” but a “doer”. So, it makes you feel comfortable.
(iii) It allows you to continue being yourself and put things off indefinitely. “Thus, you eliminate change and all the risks that go with it,” writes Dr Dyer.
(iv) By letting you hope for things to get better by themselves, it allows you to do nothing and then blame the world for your unhappiness.
Avoiding self-doubt
(v) By letting you put off anything risky, it helps you to avoid failure. So, you don’t have to face your self-doubt.
(vi) By letting you persist with your Santa Claus fantasies and wishful thinking, it makes you feel as protected as you were in childhood.
(vii) It helps you justify your below-par performance by leaving very little time to do a task. It gives you a chance to say: “But I just didn’t have time.”
(viii) It opens up the possibility that someone else will do the job you are repeatedly putting off. So, “procrastination becomes a means of manipulating others”.
How to change your habit
Dr Dyer gives a long list of techniques to get rid of procrastination. Here are a few of them:
(i) Think and work in five-minute capsules. Instead of mulling the entire stretch of a task and getting worried, break it up into five-minute units and start doing it now. After the first unit, do the second. Refuse to put it off. In a while, you’ll find that you’ve completed several units and it wasn’t as tough as you’d imagined.
(ii) Just start what you’ve been putting off. Start a book or write a letter. Just start. You will find that it’s quite enjoyable. Starting will eliminate postponement anxiety.
(iii) Assess why you are putting something off. Think of what is the worst that could happen if you started doing it. Usually the answer is so insignificant that you’ll be spurred into action.
Love yourself
(iv) Allot yourself a fixed time slot to do what you’ve been putting off. Say you’ve fixed Monday 10am-10:15am. Those 15 minutes will be enough for you to scale the procrastination roadblock.
(v) Tell yourself that you’re too significant to live with postponement anxiety. “… remember that people who love themselves don’t hurt themselves that way,” writes Dr Dyer.
(vi) Carefully look at what you are putting off at this moment. Then start tackling your fear of living effectively. “Procrastination is substituting the now with anxiety about a future event. If the event becomes the now, the anxiety… must go.”
Do it… now
(vii) Quit smoking and drinking — now. Start dieting and exercising — now. “That’s how you tackle problems… with action, now! Do it! The only thing holding you back is you, and the neurotic choices you’ve made because you don’t believe you’re as strong as you really are.”
(viii) Stop using words like “hope”, “wish” and “maybe”. Instead of saying “I hope things will work out”, start saying “I will make it happen”.
Bottomline
“Rather than using up your present moments with all kinds of immobilising anxiety over what you are putting off, take charge of this nasty erroneous zone and live now! Be a doer, not a wisher, hoper or critic,” concludes Dr Dyer.