At its root, procrastination is almost always based on some kind of fear. And figuring out how to beat that fear is the key to unprocrastination, in the long run.
Quick fixes are fine, but if the fears remain unabated, they will continue to act on you, causing you to want to procrastinate despite your best intentions.
So, how do you beat fear? One of the reasons fear can be so powerful is because it lurks in the dark — unnoticed, in the recesses of our minds, it acts without us knowing it. So, the first step is to shine some light on it — fear hates light. The light is our attention, our examining of the fears, our taking a close look at them to see if they’re rational or baseless.
Once we’ve shined a light on the fears, we can beat them with information. For example, if you’re afraid you’re going to fail, well, do a small test and see. If you don’t fail, that’s information — you now know that, at least with a small test, you won’t necessarily fail. Keep repeating the tests and you’ll gather a lot of information that is contrary to the fear, beating the fear because you now know with good certainty that it’s baseless.
Shine a light on the fear, run small tests, and beat it with information.
Let’s first look at some of the fears that cause procrastination, and then talk about shining a light on fears.
Some Procrastination Fears
A number of fears contribute to procrastination, including but not limited to:
- Fear that you’ll fail or do badly. Probably the most common one.
- Fear of the unknown — the task is not familiar to you, so you don’t know what to do or where to start.
- Fear of the uncomfortable. It’s easy to do things we’re comfortable with, but doing new things is uncomfortable so we put them off.
- Fear of starting in the wrong place. You don’t start because what if you’re not starting the right way?
These are all obviously related, and they can be summed up as “fear of failure or not being good enough”. Let’s take a look at how to beat these related fears.
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