21 ways to stop procrastinating right now
Bruno Melnic Incáo/flickr
It's easy to tell ourselves we'll get to something "later." It's especially tempting to put off important tasks when we've got things like Instagram and Netflix at our fingertips.
But procrastinating can be costly, especially at work.
To stop, you'll first need to understand the causes and temptations of procrastination. Then you'll want to follow these 21 steps:
Vivian Giang contributed to a previous version of this article.
1. Fix up your workplace.
Flickr / Juhan SoninSince you'll be spending most of your waking hours at your desk, you might as well make it an inspiring space you enjoy working at, writes blogger Sam Cleasby on metro.co.uk.
"You are never going to work your best if you are in a hovel," she explains.
To add some personal and creative touches, Cleasby says she decorates her desk with photos of her friends and family, and other items that make her smile during the workday. "It cheers me up to have those things in my eye line," she writes.
2. Schedule your time in smaller increments.
FlickrIf your time frame is too far off in the future, deadlines becomes generalities, writes psychologist Susan K. Perry for psychologytoday.com.
To fix this, she advises planning your goals in smaller time increments.
For example, she says, if you plan on writing four chapters of your soon-to-be-published book in a month, you won't consider yourself actually procrastinating until the fourth week.
"There is a difference between saying, 'I'll write one chapter a week' and saying, 'I'll write four chapters a month,'" she writes.
3. Create hard-and-fast deadlines.
Getty ImagesInstead of thinking you will work on your project for three hours every morning, determine when you want certain tasks completed, Perry writes on psychologytoday.com.
"If the boss hands you an assignment, she doesn't say, 'Work on this each day,'" she writes. "No, she says, 'Have this on my desk by next Friday."
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