A call to ex-Procrastinators!

LOL, John!

Interesting John. Still waiting for having you back.

Pure gold!

Crystalys,

STOP being in search of perfection! This is why most people procrastinate.

You have to make some efforts and realize that everything can't be perfect in this world

Perfection can be admirable, but in the long run, it is self-limiting and will bring you nowhere.


Heres why you keep procrastinating:


1. Waiting until everything is perfect to get started.

Get over it immediately. There will never be a "perfect" time to start your online business.
All you need is a few basics like a broadband connection and a simple business idea. Once you start,
you'll identify and prioritize what else is needed.


2. Keeping at it.

These are people that start working on a business idea but then stall because they don't think it's coming along perfectly.

It's not suppose to be perfect when you are in the middle of developing your business.

Just FOCUS on one thing and MASTER it. Your business will get better and better.

Set short term goals instead of only having a long term goal. Let's say your goal this week is writing three search engine optimized articles about an affiliate product you're promoting... or something along those lines.


3. Pull the trigger.

Stop waiting for your online business to be perfect before you launch it.

Your business will be evolving forever. Find a criterion other than perfection for launching the business. Instead of perfect, your business is ready to launch after you've completed all of the necessary components and proofread everything three times.

It wont be perfect but is gonna be good enough to start making money for you.

All the success

Devid

mikelmraz,

Thanks for your honesty in admitting your present condition. I have started this thread so that all warriors who are stopped but the trap of procrastination (and i am one of them!) may get advices as to how to get out of it.

By the way, i would like to thank all of you Warriors who have participed in giving ideas in this thread. From the bottom of my heart, thank you very much.

I remember reading somewhere three words that get Me in Gear - Do It Now!

Just those three words can turn my inaction into action.

What it doesn't mean?

Don't wait until what you are doing is perfect - this isn't your 3rd Grade Teacher grading you on your blog post.

Don't read your email every 10 minutes - contrary to what you brain may be telling you otherwise, it won't make you any money.

Do only those things first in the day that WILL make you money, the rest of the time-wasting stuff, save for when you get sleepy or tired - such as reading that inbox full of enticing emails.

Don't wait to do what in your GUT you need to do....

Have a daily action plan and Focus On One Thing Online and then and only then, when it makes you money, scale it up and don't run off to the next thing.

One more thing....

DO IT NOW!

(or faster than you can say Peace out...) Kristie from Georgia

I'm a little curious about this theory Russel, even with your arguments against the simple idea of "Just do it". I still think it can be this simple. I think we tend to make things out to be more complex than they really are and that the possible reason for this is because we need them to complex in order to justify to ourselves as to why we aren't following through.

I also think that it is an risk vs reward equation. If you believe that the risk outweighs the reward then you are less likely to take action. However if the reward is greater than the risk then you will take action. If Richard Branson told me to build his new Vigin Galactic shuttle and he'd give me a $1,000,000. I would say no. If he told me to chop of my left arm and he'd give me $1,000,000. I would say no. (I'm a lefty) I accept that these are extreme cases, but then so is being given $1,000,000 for a website.

Basically, if you want to reduce procrastination, then create more reward or reduce the risk, until the results are in your favor.

I have ADHD so I don't think I'll ever be an 'ex' procrastinator, though I'm trying to be better. Lol. As long as I can find a moment of comfort without any immediate threats hours away, I'll procrastinate. Threats have to be in really close range to make me feel anxious and not be illusioned over thinking I could get way more done in little time than reality! It's a misperception of time that gets a lot of people with ADD, making them have to get very close to deadlines in order to realize they need to seriously speed up and take things seriously. By then, it's often too late to speed up fast enough and then the anxiety and stress only adds confusion and unclear thinking unfortunately, along with the sickening regret of how fast the time went and having had all that time for it they didn't use and no longer have!

The main reasons for PROCRASINATION are:

Avoiding immediate pain and not delaying gratification
Disorganization and confusion (not knowing what to focus on next)
Default shifting to easy habits and routines that require little thought
Distortion of time and not managing the pace of actions correctly
The law of Inertia

I don't think that it is fear most of the time. It's simply a matter of avoiding or delaying pain or being confused. Tasks that are painful cause they are either boring or cause you don't really know how to do them, or you don't know what to do.

Besides for the myopia and emotional stuff that is always distracting me, and the people etc always distracting me, my number one reason for procrasinating is disorganization and habits!

It's difficult to get focused on what you should be working on when you don't exactly even know what that is! You might have a general idea of it of the larger project to complete, though you have no organization of the steps involved and the exact order of the steps. If its all just in your mind, then it's all over the place and you don't know what to focus on or do next, it's painful to even think about cause it confuses and overwhelms you, so what do you do instead? Things that are routine, things that you know what to do and what to do with those things, things that don't require much painful thinking or figuring out. Like check email and see if there's anything you could take immediate easy action on, go to your bookmarked favorite sites and forums and read and reply, watch something, play games, go get more food to alleviate the boredom, look at photos, read some more articles on things you want to do in the future or could add to your business later on, wonder if you should change directions, see if there's more you should know or overlooked before you put more work into it, write another list of your new goals and deadlines, etc etc.

What all those procrasination actions have in common are that they are all actions. Therefore your mind has no problems with doing actions at all. In fact the mind is constantly on the search for some type of action to do. Even thinking or reading is an action, everything is an action. The mind does not want to be blank and idle! That is why it is so difficult to quiet the mind and do or think nothing. It always wants content, context, understanding and stimulation.

So the reason it's often difficult to get it to want to do the actions you know you should be doing as opposed to others are often cause they are competing with other actions that have a stronger pull. Of course they often have a stronger pull cause they're more enjoyable. Though most often they are more enjoyable cause they require less manual thinking and mental organization. They are default and semi automatic. You already got the difficult part of learning them out of the way and so you can do them easily and know what to do, which makes them more enjoyable.

It's like with anything, the better you get at things, the greater your skills for it increase and the more you know what to do and how to do it, the less painful it becomes and the more routine it becomes. Then the mind has expanded on something else to often default actions to cause they are now part of it's database of easy routine low thinking tasks.

So besides for organizing and breaking down projects into simple step by step tasks to focus on, which GREATLY helps by reducing the thinking required on what to do. It's also important to make the important tasks into routines and to get over the learning curves of them. Then they'll become more default actions.

Getting started is the most difficult part. The law of inertia! That's another thing that makes the tasks easier and easier. How often have you delayed on writing something you needed to cause it seemed daunting and you didn't know where to start and what to write and felt blocked from it mentally. Then once you had Finally pushed yourself to get going with it, it got easier the more into it you were and the block was gone, everything started to flow, you kept getting more great ideas and even started to enjoy it and want to focus on it? Then the next day when you got back to working on it, it was much much easier to get going with it than it was before you started it. momentum!

So basically you'll always need to manually get over the difficult parts of learning curves, organizing the tasks and goals and figuring out what they should be, and then getting started on them and keeping on until they become routines.

Though to make the most of those efforts so they turn into easy low thinking habits that you don't have to think about, you just do, you need to:

1) Always create lists for your projects. To do lists are not enough, as they are often way too broad and not broken up enough in smaller STEP BY STEP tasks. This leaves you still lost and confused on how to do the task, what to start on. I mean if your To Do list is like "Write 5 artcicles" "Create a squeeze page" etc. then that still leaves way too much thinking to your mind! Too many questions left unanswered about what exactly to do in what order to complete those.

So each To Do task, break it up into much smaller action steps. Steps you can look at and think, ok I know how to do that, I could do that right now. I know how to do a Google search for this plugin I'll need for it so I could easily do it now, no worries.

In other words, don't leave any to do goal with questions of how to complete them or what to start on. Get the painful mental organizing out of the way first. Or else the mind having to do think of what to do at the time will not want to and default to an easy routine task instead and say it'll get back to it...

It's much easier to walk into a gym as a fitness newbie with a list of easy to do exercises you already know how to do and have an order to do them in with the exact number of reps and sets to do them in, then to walk in with just the to do task in your mind of "do a full body workout tonight". Leaves too much to have to think about and too many choices to make quickly, no organization. You often end up wasting so much time, going slowly, talking to people, checking your phone, wandering around, indecisive.

2) Make the most important tasks as routine as possible. Not that they have to be on any exact time schedule, though make sure you do something to do with them each day and make them as easy as possible to do. Create 1 click links to them in a task bar, step by step instructions to default to until you don't need that anymore cause you got it down as a habit etc. And also learn something new each day to improve your knowledge and skills which will make tasks easier and more motivating.

3) Since long term rewards are not as motivating as immediate rewards, set up immediate rewards for yourself for completing small tasks. Could be anything you had to delay in order to complete the task, like a favorite food, a video you want to watch, a friend you wanted to talk to, relaxing, buying yourself some thing you wanted, or whatever things you usually did to procrastinate. You can still do all those things, just use them as rewards for the breaks in between your money tasks. Make yourself earn them first and set a limit on the rewards.

A few things which helps me:

Make a list of things todo, only write down the most important things and break it down in small steps, do this in the evening when your head is full and your to tired to do work anyway

Keep the list very small and if you have for instance 8 hours only plan 4 hours with the most important things, if those 4 hours take more time, you get additional ideas (or want to surf the warrior forum) there is plenty of time left. The key is here make a list that is comfortably possible and make a habbit of finnish the items on the list

If there are some specific task you procrastinate on a lot check what it would cost to hire someone to do this specific task. For instance don't spend hours creating a graphic if you can get it done for $5,- without any effort and time or energy wasted.

Play energetic music, especially playing full live concert via youtube (minimize this browser window) helps, best one to get energy is for me Red hot Chili pepperslive at slane castle full concert.

Be proud when you have done the work you indented to do pause for a moment and be proud of yourself.

Eat healthy, drink a glass of water or fruitjuice instead of cola and eat fruit when doing this consistently for more then a month you notice you have way more energy

Hope this helps some.

One big thing that keeps the procrastination cycle going is that it is natural for us to want to make a change in our lives quickly. We want it today, not tomorrow.

So, what we tend to do is put out a heroic effort and try to change all at once and the change rarely lasts with this strategy. We only burn ourselves out which makes us feel like a failure, which then makes us frustrated.

"Go wisely and slowly. Those who rush stumble and fall." ―William Shakespeare

"To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first." ―William Shakespeare

As you can see from the two quotes above, William Shakespeare understood this concept.

Habits are built the strongest by small consistent actions every day. Even if you spend only five minutes at a time on a particular task that is more than enough to get the habit going so that it can turn into an unconscious reaction.

You can build the habit even faster and stronger by adding a small reward right at the end of the positive action. It could be anything. The only important thing is that it causes a positive emotional reaction within you.

When you use positive reinforcement with small consistent actions you are literally changing your brain. Its a powerful way to make changes in your life.

Make sure that the reward is RIGHT at the end of the action. If its ten minutes later after you've stopped then your brain will not associate it with the desired action. It needs to associate the two together.

For example if you have a goal of writing a book within six months you could start by writing for just five to ten minutes at a time, a few times a day. At the end of each small writing session you could simply smile and tell yourself "good job, I am making progress and that is all I can ask of myself. I'm doing great".

That would be an example of a small reward. Just make sure that your reward isn't something that will cause negative consequences. For example, you obviously wouldn't want to reward yourself with a piece of chocolate cake after each writing session.