Did you know that procrastination can be a habit. It becomes addictive and we repeat it over and over again, despite knowing how negatively it affects our productivity and feeling good about ourselves? How do we stop procrastination?
There are many roots of procrastination, and one of most foundational one is our tendency to (subconsciously) avoid unpleasant feelings. It could be fears of failure and judgement, feeling of overwhelm with the task, and seeking unachievable perfection. We could also be lacking the “why” – motivation behind whatever we are doing.
In his book “7 habits of highly effective people”, Stephen Covey puts “Always begin with the end in mind” as a #1 element in starting anything. When ‘the end’ is not clear, it’s very likely we won’t be moving forward with the goal.
Setting the right goals for us is a topic for one of my next posts – now I wanted to come back to procrastination and share a very sobering exercise to remind us of the biggest asset in our life – our time.
These are our 90 human years in weeks. And as sad as it is to admit, 90 could be a very optimistic forecast for some of us.
Some days feel really long and some days, the time flies. This chart is a great reminder that those years are most certainly limited.
Print this chart, colour in the weeks you have already lived through and see how many weeks are left. Now ask yourself – how would you like to spend them?
Take yourself to your 90-year old self, look back at your life and imagine what would it be like if you carry on as you are, and most importantly what would you love to feel and see, looking back at your life?
Now.. what are you going to do today for the life worth feeling proud when you at the end of this chart?
