Productivity | Self Improvement
13 Possible Reasons Why You’re Not Taking Action Fast Enough
Laziness is not the one.
Taking actions at a certain minimum pace is too essential to become successful at anything, and even for maintaining a basic day-to-day life.
Lack of enough action can result in many unexpected problems and can push you into many unwanted situations. Also, it reduces the quality of your everyday life.
No matter how smart you are and how great the ideas you have, it is worth nothing if there is no real action on that.
Many people know about all these, but even after that, they lack enough action.
So the question is — what holds people back from taking action? Laziness? Not really.
Laziness is a very effortlessly assumed cause. Many people are being tagged “Lazy” without knowing and understanding the real cause of their laziness.
There can be many more possible reasons why someone is not taking enough action. And knowing the real cause can really help someone make the real changes in their life.
1. You’re unable to get over things easily.
You can’t easily enter a new mental state or leave the old one.
If you’ve been through any good situation, you stay super excited for a long time, and if bad, then stay depressed, demotivated, afraid, and anxious for a long time.
After doing any small thing you feel mentally exhausted as you feel emotions quite too strongly. Then you have to sit back and take a big break to regain your energy.
2. You’re facing perfectionism.
I already have written a whole article about perfectionism that you can read here.
Perfectionism is too much obsession with perfection.
Every time you think of doing something, you get a feeling that the current time is just not right to start it. Either you feel a lack of enough tools, skill, or just the mood is not right.
At this moment, you procrastinate thinking that you’ll do it once everything will be perfect. And this act of procrastination gives you the reward of relaxation.
You’re setting very unrealistic standards for results that are hard to meet with your current abilities.
Also, most of the time you don’t feel satisfied with whatever you’ve done and hence you lose the motivation to keep going ahead.
3. You feel too much fear.
The fear can be of anything. People, failures, or just facing unexpected situations.
This fear can become an obstacle in your action-taking capabilities because whenever you think of doing something, the bubble of fear pops up in your brain, and resists you from taking essential actions.
4. You’re not planning enough.
Do you have the next thing to work on once you’re done with your current task?
If not, then here you’ll waste a lot of your time in figuring out what to do next. Also, you’ll lose the momentum in working.
I know, many people don’t like planning things too much and prefer to go by the natural flow and spontaneous decisions.
But if you’re facing these huge gaps between your two tasks, then you definitely have to plan things on a short-term basis, at least.
5. You’re planning too much.
Too much planning destroys flexibility.
Many times you have to adapt to the new changes and make spontaneous decisions according to the new circumstances.
If any small thing goes off the plan and you’re becoming completely clueless and unable to figure out how to continue from there then you’ll end up giving up on the task in the middle.
So many times you’ve to plan out only the major actions of the task and have to figure out things as you go ahead according to the circumstances.
6. You’re not spending enough time on learning.
Are you a person who takes action on impulse without learning and knowing enough?
To do anything successfully, you need to have the basic required understanding of things.
Learning the required things makes things easier and convenient. Even it increases your chance of success.
But many people skip the learning part and dive directly to the action part thinking that they know the things already.
Later, they mess up everything and feel doubtful about their capabilities. Despite that, they repeat the same methodology and fail again and again. Even at very simple things.
So here, many times you might feel that you know the things already and learning them again is a waste of time. But you don’t know if there is any new important thing that you’re missing.
And even if there isn’t anything new, the revision refreshes your memory and makes things more clear.
7. You’re learning but not practicing enough.
A lot of people like to learn, learn, and just learn. But not to practice.
Are you one of them?
Learning is important, but practicing things in real life is equally important.
If you have the data and understanding of things just in your brain but haven’t practiced them enough, there are very high chances that you won’t be able to take the action quickly and effectively, when it is required in real life.
Remember, learning from real-time situations and failures has its own influence on your skills and it comes only from practice.
8. You’re living too much inside your brain.
Are you living inside any personalized imaginary parallel universe? Because many people do.
They spend most of their time thinking and fantasizing about things that they want to do, and stay motivated and happy just with that.
In their imagination, they do almost everything — They talk to people, create useful products, do bodybuilding, drive luxurious cars, solve the world’s problems, give TED talks, become entrepreneurs, and even taste the imaginary success of everything.
But, in real life, they do nothing.
Yes, It’s okay to fantasize about things. But doing something even small but in real life is far more meaningful than just creating a castle in the air.
9. You don’t have a purpose.
Purpose creates inner motivation that keeps you going ahead.
Otherwise, you constantly have to look for motivation from outside. Also, this external motivation is very unsustainable and drains very quickly.
When any task is given to you without telling its purpose, most of the time you won’t feel the excitement to do it. Now, either you’ll avoid the task if it’s avoidable, or will do it without putting in enough effort.
So here, you need the purpose. A clear purpose of things you want to do and things you’re doing.
Learning something? Know the purpose. Doing something? Know the purpose.
Also, the lifelong purpose like working on something big can keep you inspired throughout your life. It can be society reform, research on something, solving any big problem, entrepreneurship, creating and improving any product, making a big transformation in any industry, or working on anything else that improves the life of mankind.
10. You want to do too many things.
Many times a person who wants to do a lot of things in life stays just there doing almost nothing at all.
And this is because the person doesn’t have any clear and fixed goal to focus and work on. Hence, he/she will just keep going here and there wasting their time.
So, if you also have too many interests, then you have to narrow it down and pick something that you can start working on consistently.
Later, after working on that thing for a long enough time, you can change it if you don’t like continuing or, can just start doing a new thing along with it.
11. You’re creative.
Yes, you might have a creative personality and because of that, you don’t like to work on many things.
According to psychologist and personality scientist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, many creative minds don’t like to work on repetitive and routine tasks.
They get easily bored working with the same thing and find it hard to stay focused on one single thing.
Also, they like to create ideas and concepts but hate to take action and execute them in real life.
But remember, there is no use of your creative ideas if you can’t execute them in real life. And apparently, execution requires action.
12. There is something that holding you back from taking any other action.
There can be something going on inside your brain that you’re constantly worrying about.
It can be something that is not in your control — any upcoming difficult situation, or any hard-to-do task.
Due to the anxiety and panic being generated by that, you just can’t shift your mind elsewhere and just can’t feel the comfort to start doing anything else.
13. You might have ADHD
ADHD is the worst enemy of productivity.
If you don’t know what is ADHD then it is a mental disorder in which a person feels an unusual level of hyperactivity and impulsive behavior and it makes it difficult for a person to focus on things.
But don’t worry, it’s very common, and treatable as well.
If you feel any sign of ADHD in you, then you should definitely do some more research on it to find out if you really have it.
