What Procrastination Really Is and How to Beat the Hell Out of It

Procrastination is deadly, here are three steps to overcome it.

Procrastination is a powerful force. It doesn’t eat, and it doesn’t sleep.

Procrastination is like the Terminator. It has only one mission, and that is to f*ck you up. Not only you but everyone else, including the devil himself.

Procrastination doesn’t rationalize. It doesn’t accept reasons or exceptions. Once it finds itself in you, it will quickly disarm and disable you.

Procrastination is a lifeless force. It doesn’t care what happens to you. It doesn’t care if your life gets f*cked up. All it cares is to suck the life out of you.

Procrastination is the perfect killing machine. It kills dreams, time, motivation, and inspiration.

Procrastination wants you to be poor, filthy, unproductive, miserable, lonely, desperate, and anxious. We have to establish the fact that procrastination is bad. It is the source of failure, and like the apocalypse, it only brings destruction.

If you find yourself arguing with yourself, rationalizing and reasoning, then that is procrastination in action.

If you know someone who is supposed to be dead but still alive, that’s procrastination bushwhacking the Grim Reaper.

It is what it is, but you must understand how brutal procrastination can be in order to beat it.

How Do You Beat Procrastination?

The only way to beat this mother f*cker is to use the same cunning methods it uses against you. You need to find out how it operates and once you learn that, it would be easier for you to knock down your enemy.

First, you must understand that procrastination does not stop. It keeps on going no matter what. It will keep on wreaking havoc by throwing negative thoughts and suggestions non-stop in your minds.

Like I previously mentioned, it’s like the Terminator. Every inch of it was programmed to destroy you. Fortunately, unlike the Terminator, procrastination can’t touch you when you are asleep. It actually wants you to be asleep at all times, so you will all become useless and unproductive.

But as soon as you wake up, it starts beating you. It will tell you to go back to bed. It will convince you to call in sick and skip school or work. It will give you all sorts of excuses why you don’t need to get up.

Second, procrastination feeds on your weaknesses. It becomes more powerful when you are tired, bored, or when fear creeps on you. It makes your minds come up with excuses not to do what you need to do.

On the other hand, procrastination is weak when you are happy, motivated, and inspired. This is where you exploit the enemy. Hence, you should strive to be optimistic at all times, and this is how you beat procrastination.

Below are three steps to win the battle against procrastination.

1. Develop Self-discipline

Procrastination does not stop. Therefore, you should always stay vigilant and be on guard at all times. And the only way to do this is to develop self-discipline.

No sugar coating, but you need to develop strong self-discipline to beat procrastination. Without self-discipline, you will always be at the mercy of procrastination.

Self-discipline is the ability to control one’s self when it is doing what it is not supposed to do. To direct ourselves on the right path whenever it loses focus.

Self-discipline is the ability to overcome your weaknesses and pursue what you want to achieve despite the endless temptations bombarding you to abandon them.

Building self-discipline accomplishes two things. First, it strengthens our control of ourselves, and second, it helps you build our powerful allies — habits. For you to move to the next step, you need to master first the art of self-discipline.

2. Build Habits

Habits are strong allies against procrastination. Instead of doing things with sheer effort, with habits, you can do things even without consciously thinking about them. They help you achieve your short-term goals. They make your lives easy. They allow you to stick to your diet plans, daily exercise, and other productive daily routines.

It can be tedious and cumbersome to build habits. It takes time and requires a tremendous amount of effort and self-discipline. But once they are fully developed, most of our tasks in life will run on auto-pilot.

Habits can help you drive a vehicle while listening to audiobooks, talking to someone, or simply planning ahead of time. They can make you do two or three things at the same. With habits, you can conjure the motivation to do a specific action, like running, when the clock hits a particular time of the day, like 6 AM.

With habits under your belt, it would be easier to beat procrastination. If you develop the habit of accomplishing your tasks forthwith, procrastination won’t find its way to destroy you.

3. Reward Yourself

The benefits of rewards are underrated. People simply look at them as incentives for accomplishing something. But it doesn’t stop there. If done correctly and with the proper mindset, rewards can do more than that and can significantly boost motivation and productivity.

Rewards fulfill two things. First, it serves as an incentive for finishing something. Secondly, it provides satisfaction and it brings euphoria upon completing a certain task. And like addiction, it sparks the need to do it again in order to achieve the same euphoric state.

A good example is saving money. The majority will look at “saving” not as a reward but as a punishment. True, you are deprived of spending your hard-earned money at the moment. But by doing this, you shift the benefits of spending it in the future when it can be spent more meaningfully.

People who see “saving” as a reward become financially stable in life. As they watch their savings grow, they become more motivated. Procrastination cannot touch these individuals. It cannot because they have already established the discipline to save. They have built a well-established habit, and it provides them with a feeling of satisfaction.

Rewards increase productivity, improve performance, conjure inspiration, fuel motivation, encourage enthusiasm, and make mundane and tedious tasks exciting.

There is a Battle to be Won

These steps will not shield you from the darkness of procrastination 100%. Eventually, every once in a while, procrastination will win. But if we stay committed, vigilant, and disciplined, we will beat the hell out of our common enemy.

Battles are waging in our minds, and we need to win as much as we can to succeed and go far in life.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War