QUIT PROCRASTINATING I - Defragging Your Brain
The beginning of my series on how to tackle procrastination. I’ll indulge my personal history with it in more detail another time, so for now - i’m starting with the technique that became the first most effective means of *beginning* to address it within my own life. This exercise is a great starting point if you’re currently feeling really overwhelmed, stressed & depressed - because you’ve got far too many things to do which have been left unfinished.
This sort of list is very different to your regular everyday to-do list, because it’s used to list all the moments in your life whenever you experience something like;
“I really ought/should to get around to doing(or finishing) that!”
…and then it leaves you feeling truly shitty about yourself because you STILL haven’t gotten around to doing it. That yucky feeling inside which makes you feel terrible, guilty, feeling really really bad about yourself. You might hear self-talk & judgement that says,
“I’m so lazy” or “I’m such a looser”!
As soon as your body experiences that yucky feeling with thoughts like that - you go to the “things to do later” list and jot down the thing/task responsible for making you feel horrible about yourself.
What you need is a landing pad to collect these “things” as soon as you start feeling bad. It can be a blank piece of paper stuck on a wall, you can use a chalk board or a white board marker on the fridge, a small note book. It needs to be a writing space that’s easy for you to access, with the least amount of obstacles as possible.
For example - you can use a word document on the computer, but common obstacles to something like this would be to turn the computer on or that it takes too long to open up the program. If you’re using a notepad or piece of paper and you can’t find a pen anywhere in sight - you’ll be surprised by how something so small like that can hinder you during this process! It doesn’t matter what method you use - so long as it’s really easy for you to “access” and jot it down, as soon as possible.
If you leave it for far too long - you will easily forget about it, beause it’s usually a VERY deeply burried item or task which you’ve been heavily procrastinating on. Something which has been far too easy for you to allow it lurking at the very arsed end of your priority list. That’s why it’s so easy for such things to be forgotten and left in the back end of your brain.
This has happened to me many times in the past. I experienced a “yuck” - but I didn’t get around to writing it down (beause i was too lazy, or i couldn’t find a pen, or because i was too tired) …and then it got forgotten, for a very long time. Don’t beat yourself up over this if it happens! It’s normal.
The upside in completely forgetting about the thing you’ve been avoiding for so long is that it will eventually confront you by biting you on the bum and make you feel really really yucky, again!
In my experience with it, when my life confronted a second round of confrontation with something that i had forgotten to list down before, my brain would speak the following internal commentary:
“Oh! That’s one of those things you were supposed to write down, but you forgot about it again. You’d better go write that down before you forget again because it’s really important that you finish that in order to feel much better about yourself!”
When i first started this exercise, there were times when i used to forget to list things down 3-4 times. After gaining more experience & practise with this exercise, the second reminder was more than enough. The boost to my self-esteem that i experienced as the result of getting my “old” things finished began to grow, because i was eliminating the tasks & projects generating those negative feelings. It made my body very sensitive to such things getting me down after a while. I didn’t like these negative feelings at all, and that made me feel even more compelled to list them down - just for the sake of getting rid of them and out of my life, forever!
It may be a piece of “work-in-progress” that’s taking up residential space in your house somewhere. An unfinished knitting project sitting in the depths of a dark closet, untouched for many years. These things are the cobwebs in your life that need sweeping first. The more items you have and the longer they hang around untouched, the more dust they’ll begin to collect. The more dust you have living in your brain, the heavier it will make you feel.
Tackling the things that end up on this list, is very much like “defragging” your computer. The more redundant crap & bad sectors that you can clear living within your brain - the more efficiently it will operate. I’ve actually felt physical “space” opening up within my brain after finishing the things that end up on this specific list - it feels amazing! This list, essentially becomes one doorway towards hapiness.
The things that end up on this list can have a tendany to be really small & banal, like …posting a letter via snail mail. While my mind’s perception of doing something like that would say,
“Hey! That’s only going to take me just 5 minutes to do!”
The reality was that however small these things were on the list, it usually took an average of 6-8 weeks for me to confront many of them!
5minutes…. vs the reality of 6-8 weeks. This touches on how one of the key problems with procrastination is due to setting devastatingly unrealistic goals in the first place - so i’ll be writing more on this with another piece later.
Do a stocktake of the unfinished things living in your life. Review that knitting project (or other cobweb) - are you really going to finish it? Do you really want to finish it? If not - then make the decision to just toss the bugger out of the house. It’s perfectly ok to throw things out like that. When things like that are gone, they will no longer torment you! It’s finished because you’ve made an active choice to remove it out of your life, permanently. It’s gone - kapoof - nadda! You will never have to think about it, ever again!
There will be some things which you can’t delete from the list like this, but by finishing them off for good - you will be removing something in your life that’s responsible generating negative feelings, permanently.
I spent about 3-4 years using this system to clear the crap living within my life. I noticed the incredible benefits of it within the first year of doing it. I no longer need to resort to “the things to do later” list as much anymore because i’ve been able to address all of the items which were lying dormant & untouched for years. The experience of clearing those particular things out of my life permanently (or finally finishing them off) was incredible. Completed, gone - old doors from the past finally get closed and then i gained the space to start enjoying the opening of new ones.
This is the system that I currently work with at the moment with colour coded post-it notes. Each colour represents a particular branch in my life that needs attention. If there’s something important that needs my attention, but “life” is so hectic that it makes me push those things further down on the list of priorities - i make a note, and then stick it on the bottom of my computer monitor…
It doesn’t matter what system you use. While you may find present day items & tasks ending up on this list, the trick is in eliminating all of that accumulated baggage from the past, and putting it to rest - forever!
Like, just do it! Your brain will thank you for it.
NEXT anti-procrastination ARTICLE
