The procrastination loop

Day 125 / 365

You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again.

— Benjamin Franklin

Tell me if this sounds familiar to you. You have a nice weekend coming up and you have made plans to get shit done. It may be your school work, or chores around the house or maybe practicing your guitar playing. You had planned to start on the Friday night itself, but when the time came you thought you deserve a bit of a rest, so you postpone the work to next morning.

Saturday morning you wake up late, you realized time has passed by and you didn’t get started. You feel guilty -> You doubt yourself -> you feel helpless. This makes it even tougher for you to start working again. Even if you manage to do it, you will often end up being unsatisfied and the guilt and doubt will creep up again. That’s the procrastination loop.

So how does one get out of it?

There’s no shortcut here. You have to stop thinking and start doing. Make the feedback loop work in favor of you than against you

Do Something -> Feel good -> Feel confident -> Feel Hopeful -> Repeat

Another thing to remember is your to-do lists and plans should not be set in stone. You need to accept the fact that you will never be able to make a time table that you will follow exactly. You’ll have to constantly reaccess and make changes to it. When you accept this, then missing a deadline or a target isn’t a disappointment anymore. It’s an opportunity to come up with new targets, and who says they won’t be more effective than the original ones?

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — The Suicide of Socrates