One of the many Faces of Procrastination

Procrastination has many faces. Sometimes it is so well disguised you won’t even recognise it for what it is. And if you don’t know it’s there, how do you deal with it and move on? If you can’t spot it how do you move forward?

Deferring a task until later is just sensible self-management. You can’t do everything now. Some of your tasks are going to have to wait. If you have a lot on your plate (and- honestly- who doesn’t?) then there are going to be long lists of deferred tasks. And that is just as it should be. But did you ever have something on your list that hung around too long? That festered in the darkest corner of your best intentions? That thing that didn’t even get thought about until- oh shit- the deadline was looming? And then you only did a half-arsed job on it because you ran out of time? Even though when you added it to your list you had it, you were in control?

There are many reasons why you might have procrastinated on that thing in particular.

It is rarely a behaviour in and of itself- we simply don’t think like that: here is something to do that makes me a little uncomfortable… I know! I’ll procrastinate on it! So when you do find yourself procrastinating on a particular task it is important to ask yourself how you got there. That is going to be key to undoing it, to getting your stalled task moving.

A particularly subtle and hard to spot form of procrastination is something I call “Resource Procrastination”. I wonder if you ever find yourself doing this?

Something comes into your world. There is something for you to do here. You identify an outcome- what does “Done” look like?- and then you identify the very next action that will move you towards that outcome. You defer that task to your To Do List and then move on, safe in the knowledge that you will get to that action when the time is right.

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