If you are procrastinating about something, one can make the following assumptions:
• The end result is important you.
• The means to the end is unpleasant in some way.
If the end wasn’t important, then you wouldn’t call it procrastinating. If you don’t care about becoming a violinist, you can’t procrastinate your violin practice, duh. If the activity was enjoyable you wouldn’t put it off. You don’t procrastinate planning your next vacation do you?
So procrastination actually comes down to two dueling perceptions:
• How much you desire the end result: Your perception of how good the payoff will be.
• The end result is important you.
• The means to the end is unpleasant in some way.
If the end wasn’t important, then you wouldn’t call it procrastinating. If you don’t care about becoming a violinist, you can’t procrastinate your violin practice, duh. If the activity was enjoyable you wouldn’t put it off. You don’t procrastinate planning your next vacation do you?
So procrastination actually comes down to two dueling perceptions:
• How much you desire the end result: Your perception of how good the payoff will be.
• How unpleasant you expect the activity is: Your perception how to get the payoff.
"Victory belongs to those who want it the most...who want it the longest." - Lt.Col. Doolittle
"To achieve success, whatever job we have, we must pay a price." -Vince Lombardi
"You don't pay the price for success, you pay the price for failure." - Zig Ziglar
Why do we care when we put off going to gym? Because we should? It’s because there is some result that we desire that is lost when we procrastinate- If you don’t work out, you spend another summer making excuses to keep your shirt on.
Why don’t we go to the gym then? We put it off because the reward of the good body doesn’t seem worth the effort. The reason why exercise pills, DVDs, and retarded vibrating equipment are bought so frequently is they claim to reduce the effort required to get the result. Would anyone put off the gym if just one gym visit per year could give you a 6 pack? Of course not. The gym would be full...once a year.
So if you want to stop procrastinating, you have to do one or both of the following:
• Desire the end result more
• Find a way to make the means to that result easier
"When you want something so bad that it hurts, doing the things that bring that thing to you automatically becomes the path of least resistance.”
It’s not enough to “stop procrastinating.” Even if you force yourself to “get to it,” you will likely do the thing half-assed just to get it out of the way. However if you’re focusing on the desired result more, it will hurt more to not do what you were putting off. Keeping images in your mind of that end result will give you "an itch" to start moving. The motivational poster industry has thrived on shitty slogans because of this.
Along with this, you need to make the job, or at least your perception of the job, easier. This comes from learning the proper material by getting a coach, or simply making a plan to do those things.
