Procrastination Is Okay If Youre Smart About It

Procrastination is Okay â€" If You’re Smart About It Procrastination: it’s a favorite pastime and a driving force for many of us. If you’re reading this, there’s a chance you’re having a pleasant procrastination session right now. What are people’s favourite ways to procrastinate? Well, YouTube views appear to show that cat movies are right up there, so if all you’re looking to do is waste some time and distract yourself from deadlines, be my guest: If, nonetheless, you’ve come here in the hopes of studying some useful tips about making procrastination be just right for you, then learn on! Procrastinators Can Still Get Work Done (Click here to tweet this thought.) As a former philosophy scholar, I spent most of my time procrastinating by reading anything however philosophy. Luckily, this implies I got here across a variety of ways of creating procrastination environment friendly and effective. As a procrastinator, you put off issues that you need to be doing, however the key is that procrastinators still do one thing. You simply do barely useful issues. When you’ve obtained assignments and essays to be doing, you tidy your room or start going to the gym. So what's the solution? As long as there are tougher tasks on the market you want to keep away from, a you could be made to do time-consuming and important duties by considering of them as a way of not doing something extra important. Structured Procrastination In an essay by John Perry â€" which he wrote when he had more necessary issues he should have been doing, and browse by myself once I had extra important issues to be doing â€" Perry describes how you need to create a hierarchy of the tasks you have to do, from crucial and pressing to the least. It’s crucial duties on prime that procrastinators keep away from. What a structured procrastinator does so properly is dedicating the time spent avoiding an important duties to completing the other worthwhile tasks decrease on the listing. Doing the apparently lesser tasks turns into an efficient means of avoiding the dreaded primary project, whereas truly making you a profitable and effective worker. Procrastinators usually fall into the trap of kidding themselves about their true nature. They try to decrease their commitments, assuming that if they solely have a few tasks as an alternative of very many, they may stop getting distracted and will get those few tasks accomplished. But when t he to-do listing is so small, the one method to keep away from doing the few tasks will be to do nothing. This is how a non-structured procrastinator turns into a sofa potato. So, We Never Do the Most Important Project? That Can’t Be Right! Yes, you’ve seen the issue rising here. How concerning the necessary duties at the high of the record? That’s a good query, and it’s why Perry explains the need for a second step within the artwork of structured procrastination: Picking the best initiatives for the highest of the listing. The best record-topping tasks have two key options primarily based round self-deception: The top-of-the pyramid duties should look like they've clear deadlines when really they don’t, and they need to look like incredibly essential, although they’re not. The structured procrastinator makes use of one character flaw to offset the effects of one other, so you should use self-deception to get probably the most out of procrastination. Committing to duties with exaggerated importance, whereas believing they’re essential and pressing, clears the way in which to accomplish all of those apparently much less-pressing duties. As quickly as another task comes around that seems more essential (howev er truly isn’t), the task you’ve been avoiding abruptly seems more appealing, since you’re utilizing it to keep away from the newly dreaded project! You can obtain anything in the world, so long as it is through avoiding something much more dreaded. How can you set procrastination to be just right for you? This post initially appeared on Interview Bull. Image: Flickr