Welcome to Part 3 in Gaetano’s series on procrastination. We know the causes. Time to talk about the effects.

Procrastination Mini-Series – Effects

by Gaetano Caruana

Procrastination seems to be fun to do at first but it won’t take long until the procrastinator feels the effects of his/her choice. Procrastination has devastating effects on the person who does it and is completely not worth it. In this part of the procrastination mini-series, I am going to highly some of the procrastination effects, with the hope of making you more aware about procrastination and motivate you to avoid it or work hard to beat it.

Sense of guilt: Even though it is you who choose to procrastinate, you still feel guilty for doing it. The fact that you waste time instead of getting things done makes you feel bad with yourself. Even though, with a lot of effort and working extreme hours, you manage to make it by the deadline of a particular task, you will still feel guilty. This is because you will have doubts whether you could have produced something of better quality if you made good use of your time.

Become a liar: In today’s world nobody works alone. Everyone is part of a team and every team member depends on other members. The fact that you procrastinate and fall behind schedules makes you feel bad, since you keep back the whole team with you. When asked to give reasons for the delays, you start lying to find excuses to cover up your procrastination problem.

Prone to other vices: A study conducted by Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl of Carleton University, clearly shows that procrastinators are more prone to start other vices such as smoking or abusing alcohol. Starting new vices will further make it difficult for you to stop procrastinating and will further make your life miserable

Health Problems: Living a procrastinator life is not easy! Procrastination has both psychological and physical effects. The same study by Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl shows that college students that procrastinate in their schoolwork are more likely to have health problems such as suffering from insomnia, diet and exercise problems

Gaetano Caruana writes for the FruitfulTime Blog, where you’ll find the free ebook Stop Procrastination Now.

________
Thanks, Gaetano!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Welcome to Part 2 in Gaetano’s series on procrastination. Knowing where it starts seems to be a great place to dig in.

Procrastination Mini-Series – Causes

by Gaetano Caruana

The first step to deal with your procrastination problem is to identify its causes, the reasons why you procrastinate. It is common that a lot of people procrastinate due to a subconscious reason; that is they don’t know exactly why they procrastinate. Others think they know all causes for their procrastination problem. When I started researching procrastination I thought I formed part of the latter but to my surprise, I discovered that I knew only half the reasons why I used to procrastinate.

Fear: For some a particular task or duty seems to be bigger than them making them afraid to face it. In this case procrastination seems to be the easy way out, a form of escapism, from reality.

Escapism: Either because you are afraid to take responsibility of a challenging task or because you are lazy, you choose to escape from reality hence you procrastinate. Such people lie to themselves and come up with excuses such as: having other more important things to do or they need more time to handle that task in order to avoid the challenge posed by a particular duty.

It is very difficult to find out whether you procrastinate due to escapism or because you are afraid. This is because both fear and escapism is most of the time in our subconscious. You have to reflect and be honest to yourself in order to find out whether the above two reasons are in fact what causes you to procrastinate.

Perfectionist: Being aware of the quality of what you produce is an excellent attribute to have. But if you take it too far, perfectionism becomes a minus since it will slow you down. Ideally you only produce perfect stuff but in the real world, you have to learn how to strike a balance between the time it takes to produce something and its quality. Unfortunately perfectionists choose to invest a lot of time in one task from many tasks they need to get done.

Vicious Circle: The fact that in the past you had procrastinated has a direct influence on your future behaviour. People that procrastinated in the past are prone to keep procrastinating. It seems to be extremely difficult to break the chains that hold you back from becoming more productive. Like every other habit procrastination poses a challenge but by applying the right techniques, which will be described in the next article in this series, you can make it easier for yourself to smash your procrastination problem.

Gaetano Caruana writes for the FruitfulTime Blog, where you’ll find the free ebook Stop Procrastination Now.

________
Thanks, Gaetano!

–ME “Liz” Strauss