We all tend to procrastinate more or less, but if procrastination becomes a habitual pattern, it will become a serious problem. Chronic procrastination is even harmful to your health, bringing long-term stress, making you exercise less, or eating unhealthy food. Even when you are sick, you may postpone seeing a doctor. Then, can psychological research save us, help us reduce procrastination and increase the motivation to finish the task in time? Here are eight effective ways to control procrastination.
1, don't push yourself by willpower alone.
It is unrealistic to expect yourself to be more self-disciplined in the future than now.
People often think that willpower is the answer to procrastination. This method works occasionally, but willpower is just a kind of motivation, not the best. If you think that motivation is the fuel that enables you to achieve your goals, some fuels are good, but others are of poor quality.
The problem with relying solely on willpower is that sometimes you may achieve your goal, but sometimes willpower is too weak to always work. Don't rely on willpower to ignore the unpleasant aspects of the task, but regard them as an important and inevitable part of achieving the goal. Imagine that you have been running for 30 minutes, and now your muscles are very painful, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, but a necessary part of getting a healthy body shape.
2. Look for the positive side in the postponed task.
One of the ways to judge whether you are a chronic procrastinator is to ask yourself whether you will delay the task for fear of failure. The problem of procrastination is not only laziness or poor time management, but also difficulty in emotional adjustment.
If you are worried that you will fail, in order to avoid this unpleasant anxiety, you will find an excuse to postpone all tasks, which will make you feel better for a while, but if you fall into a vicious circle, the problem will come. Because of procrastination, you have less time to finish your work now, which increases the risk of failure and makes you feel more anxious, so it is even more impossible to start your work.
Looking for the positive side in the task helps to deal with these emotions. Ideally, this may not bring returns in the future, but the process itself will have some benefits. Maybe you will learn something, or once you get involved, you will feel more focused than you think.
3. Plan ahead.
Research shows that rewarding yourself in activities such as fitness will help you maintain good habits.
If you know that some kind of temptation will lead to procrastination, you can adopt a psychological strategy called "if-then". In other words, you can plan ahead what to do when you encounter some kind of temptation. For example, you can decide in advance. If someone suggests that you have a cup of coffee on the weekend, you need to catch up on your studies. You can choose to meet in advance and refuse their suggestion.
Psychologists reviewed 94 studies on this strategy and found that people who use this strategy are two to three times more likely to stick to their goals than those who don't.
4. Reduce workload
You need to make the task as simple as possible. The concept of "choice architecture" is now widely known. Some working restaurants will put fruit instead of chocolate near the checkout counter to promote employees to eat healthier. We can adopt a similar strategy. If you want to run around ten o'clock in the morning, you can put on your sportswear when you get up in the morning, or you can put the work materials of the previous night on the table, so you can decide whether you need to continue to complete this task when you get up the next day. Remember, eliminate all interference.
Also, disable the reminder function of the computer screen and mute the phone. If you can't resist social media, please don't use automatic login. Just when you enter the password, especially if you choose a long and complicated password, it may be enough to push you in the right direction.
Step 5 reward yourself
Planning in advance can make it easier for you to finish the task, especially when you expect interference.
Procrastination is attractive, because if you postpone the difficult task at hand, you will be rewarded immediately without facing negative emotions. So, you need to compete with other rewards. Compared with the reward you have to wait for, immediate reward can motivate people to work harder, so you need to find an immediate reward to make everything easier.
A study found that if people listen to exciting audio books in the gym (and only in the gym), they will go back to the gym faster and learn the following stories, which is their direct return.
There is even a two-week online course dedicated to reducing procrastination. Marcus eckert of Rhomberg University in Renfana shows students videos and exercises made according to certain strategies every day, which can not only help them plan their time better, calculate the costs and benefits of procrastination in different tasks, but also help them tolerate any possible negative emotions. For example, children learn to remind themselves with past persistence.
They also receive two text messages every day asking which task might be delayed that day and considering the possible consequences. After two months, the students who took the online course were delayed less than other students.
6. Have a more realistic understanding of yourself in the future
Most people tend to believe that there will be more time in the future. We are optimistic that we will become more organized, more energetic and live a life that will never go wrong. Of course it won't happen. This is also the reason why we often underestimate the time required for a task, the so-called "planning fallacy".
The most interesting example of planning fallacy is the birth of the first edition of Oxford English Dictionary. 1860, the editor announced that it would take two years to complete the dictionary. However, the dictionary was finally compiled by 1879, and it took five years to compile the word "ant". 1928, the Oxford English Dictionary was finally completed, but it was considered outdated at that time, so it was revised immediately.
We need to avoid creating this unrealistic vision of the future. Otherwise, we will let ourselves down and even delay the work at hand. We make ourselves future superheroes. Suddenly, the person we projected into the future now looks so far away, so unreal and so abstract that we no longer have a sense of identity with him.
7. Be nice to yourself.
Willpower alone can't help you solve procrastination.
This sounds like the last thing you should do, especially if you have wasted half a day online and the work needs to be finished. But in fact, the study found that the self-sympathy of procrastinators is lower than the average level, and they are already very harsh on themselves, which can't solve the problem.
In a study of students who didn't take the time to review for exams, those who forgive themselves for procrastination are more likely to review before the next exam than those who feel unable to relax and continue reviewing. People already feel bad about the task at hand, so adding more negative emotions won't help.
We don't treat our friends as harshly as we treat ourselves. Imagine that you would say to your friend, "What's wrong with you? Why are you procrastinating? Come on, keep doing it! " Really? No, you might go up and say, "Come on, you've been working hard for a week. I know this is a difficult task for you. Relax, I will support you. " Maybe we need to treat ourselves in the same way-show the same degree of goodwill.
8. Talk to yourself in the right way.
The use of language is not as simple as it seems. Just before the US presidential election in 2008, California conducted a study. Some registered voters were divided into two groups and completed a survey as required. A group of participants answered the question: How do they feel about "voting"? Another group asked them how they felt as voters.
Language differences may be subtle, but when it comes to actual voting, only 82% of the participants who answered the "voting" question finally voted; Among those who answered the question of "becoming a voter", 95% finally voted. Just seeing ourselves as someone can influence our behavior.