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Dr Mehmet Yildiz
How I Overcome Procrastination Creatively
2021-01-15
I deal with procrastination creatively, deliberately, and compassionately. Our primitive brain in the survival model can manufacture a myriad of excuses.
Procrastination is natural and widespread. Many of us experience it frequently.
As an entrepreneur and writer, I learnt to refrain from procrastination by motivating myself with deliberate actions. Even when they seem to be hurting, taking mindful steps helped me overcome my fear, anxiety, and fatigue.
Learning to deal with procrastination effectively can be a critical success factor for many of us to produce more and attract more opportunities.
Procrastination is a natural tendency and may have many underlying causes.
The symptoms usually manifest as fatigue, lack of appetite, and craving for comfort.
Our primitive brain in the survival model can manufacture a myriad of excuses.
I deal with procrastination kindly, deliberately, and compassionately.
For example, as soon as noticing my mind dwelling into the default procrastination mode, I try to have a friendly conversation with myself and kindly ask my neo-cortex to take over. This conscious prompt can activate the action centre in the brain.
Even though self-talk is usually frowned upon in traditional settings, I took the plunge and shared my conversations in this article on News Break. I Feel Better After Talking With Myself.
Most of the time, my healthy neo-cortex takes over nicely, and the reptilian brain quietens. The mighty limbic system stops supporting the reptilian part and starts helping the neo-cortex. With this winning transition, I feel the balance manifesting as motivation.
Emotions play an essential role in dealing with procrastination.
Learning how to stop procrastinating in earlier days of life, helped me meet new people, create new opportunities, and become grateful for my blessings.
Awareness of rewards can be an excellent learning tool which can help us move from procrastination to action mode. This awareness can be a success factor for us to be productive and prolific.
This approach helped me clear my task backlog efficiently and effortlessly. As mentioned in my agile and design thinking practices, I dump all my tasks in a backlog. Check my tips on doing less achieving more.
As time goes, some tasks go to the top of the list and some sink to the bottom.
My priorities are determining factors for these task promotions, demotions, fluctuating ups and downs.
As a principle, if a task requires further analysis, deeper thinking, and detailed planning, I usually allocate an opportune time to undertake it and act on it when that time comes. This practice removes the fear of big tasks especially when my energy level is not up to scratch.
Developing a plan, setting the priorities, and acting on the plan can be excellent success factors in our writing endeavours. Plans can be seen as mental rehearsals and can help us achieve our goals effectively and productively.
Another method which I adopted from my technology career was to deconstruct the task to smaller chunks and tackle them in priority order, component by component, if the task cannot be completed immediately.
Deconstructing tasks are like the metaphor of eating an elephant. Rather than seeing the whole beast, we eat such a big thing one bite at a time. This simple metaphor play an important role in beating the procrastination effectively.
The takeaway point: never leave tasks at hand if they can be done in a few minutes.
Thank you for reading my perspectives.
If you enjoy this article, you might also check my other leadership articles published on News Break.
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