Procrastination is a habit of delaying the inevitable. If you build a habit of procrastination, success will always remain elusive. If you evaluate the one common factor among all successful people, it is that they don’t delay tasks. If you procrastinate, you are bound to fall into a vicious circle, where the mantra is always to find an excuse to get away from achieving your goals. The easiest thing to do for any individual is to keep pushing things away and not meet deadlines. We all have few friends who keep delaying things, and there is always a specific excuse for the delay; in the same context we see individuals who make it a point to complete their tasks within the allotted time, and they always tend to focus towards meeting their goals. Those in the second category are well in command of their actions, they are organised, they manage their time well and ultimately, they are successful.

The most common trait of those who procrastinate is that they will spend most their time engaging in unproductive gossip, use social media obsessively, hold important task off until the last hour and then eventually panic because they always miss the bus. 

This new year, kick this habit of procrastination out like you’ve always wanted to. Here are some tips to help you develop the habit, and more importantly to keep it:

Improve your environment

Look around your workplace, study room, or even your bedroom. Does your environment encourage you to be productive? Does it energise you during work? Or does it naturally makes you fell dull and sleepy. If it is the latter then you must immediately change your environment and make it positive and goal oriented. Colour, pictures, brightness, furniture all of these have an impact. In order to institutionalise a habit, you need to start with the physical environment around you. 

Divide your tasks

Always divide the total task into sub tasks and then further plan timelines to complete the sub tasks in. 

If needed, take help of friends and colleagues to complete your tasks. If you are a manager, you must ensure you know how to delegate work to your subordinates or co-workers. But always keep in mind, if you are delegating, make sure you communicate why the delegated task is important, what is expected and by when the task needs to be completed by. 

Develop deadlines

If you have a task at hand, you must have a deadline. If you do not have deadlines, it means you will eventually lose focus and drive. Working without deadlines is leaving room for excuses.

Surround yourself with people who are action oriented

It is true that who you are is because of the friends you choose. Never surround yourself with negative people. You must always surround yourself with people who are goal oriented and who mean business. If you surround yourself with action oriented people you will find the spark in you to do something positive for yourself and others. 

Keep things simple

This I believe is most important; you will find many of your friends who keep complicating things. Instead of making everything complicated, try to keep it is as simple as possible. By keeping things simple you are trying to ensure that you make your task easy for yourself as well as for other around you. 

At the end, the above tips will carry no meaning without having clear purpose of what are doing and why you are doing it. If you don’t like what you do, you will always procrastinate, but if you love what you do, then the task at hand always becomes interesting. 

Roshan Rathi

Rathi is an educationist, facilitator and a management practitioner. 

He can be reached at [email protected]