Overcoming Procrastination: Three Easy Steps

Conquering Procrastination

Procrastination has been a huge issue throughout my entire life and I live every day knowing I must overcome procrastination. Until recently, I had always thought it was a silent "killer" of my own personal dreams. That was, until, I was at the receiving end of procrastination and missed an important deadline due to the chronic procrastination of another person. For me, procrastination was my own demon. Now I realize it is an issue that ripples through society and impacts not only my responsibilities, but also affects my children, my work and my personal life. For this reason, I have decided to tackle procrastination head on.

I am a telecommuting employee, also known as a person who works at home. While this may seem to be a luxury, it is one of the greatest challenges for a procrastinator. Working at home not only isolates a professional from social networking, it also provides us with easy access to our beds, interference in our work with household chores and distractions by the television, kids and the radio. In reading through materials on procrastination, I find I am not alone.

To overcome procrastination, I began to conduct extensive research in hopes of devising a method to alleviate the emotional stress I've created for myself with procrastination. In my research, I first determined that, to avoid procrastination, I must first define procrastination in my own sense and, the realize procrastination can be my friend or foe. The challenge, then, is to make procrastination a consistent ally in my ability to get things done.

As a procrastinator, I've first learned I must determine what part of the day I function best; when my attitude and cognitive functioning is at its peak. For me, the morning hours provide the greatest creativity level. For that reason, to avert some of my procrastination, I must choose to input my most creative writing pieces early in the day and choose repetitive and mundane projects, such as editing and responding to emails, late in the afternoon when my creativity and interest levels begin to rapidly decline.