In any given moment, you are doing what you believe is the most important thing for you to be doing. If you aren’t doing the thing that should be more important, it is because it isn’t as important to you as what you are doing, right now.
Have you ever got home from a long day at work and for a moment thought you really should do something; go to the gym, clean the house, fix something, etc. and the next thing you know, you realize you have spent the entire evening in front of the television and now it’s time to go to bed?
On the back side of one of these types of events, you find yourself doing one of couple of different things. You might justify it because after all it was a long day and you deserve to relax. You might, beat yourself up a little bit and tell yourself you need to stop watching so much television. Finally you might tell yourself that no matter what, tomorrow is going to be different.
Whether you like to admit it, it has happened to all of us. It happens around diets, exercise programs, studying, projects, ordinary chores and tasks, etc. In the English language we even have a term for it…procrastination. People have got so good at doing it, they even label themselves as being a procrastinators, as if procrastination is a bad thing.
What if procrastination is telling you something?
I know it might be hard to believe, however let’s go back to the start. Recognize anytime you are doing something, in that moment it is more important than any other option you have available. If you are watching television, it simply means of all the options you have available to you, sitting in front of the television makes the most sense. If something else was more intriguing or more pressing, then of course you would be doing that, however in this moment, the television wins out the draw for your attention.Procrastination is nothing more or less than simply wishing things ranked lower on your importance list, were somehow ranked higher. You would like those things to be important however in this moment, they simply aren’t. If you find yourself, seemingly wasting time doing things that produce few results, stop beating yourself up about procrastinating. Rather than wasting your time wishing those things were more important, ask yourself some different questions:
- What would need to happen to make them more important?
- Am I doing these things for me or am I trying to please someone else?
- Do I have exciting goals that I am eager to work towards or am I just floating along?
- Do these things really need to be done or are they things I think I should want to do?
- Am I avoiding something that if I just faced up to would re-engage and excite me in moving forward?
Recognize you will for evermore procrastinate around things that are not important to you…simple truth. If everything on your list was of equal importance then where would you ever start? If you want to be more productive, take control of your list…set goals that are important to you, stop fooling yourself into wanting to want to do things, remove the things that are simply just busy things and instead celebrate taking the actions that move you towards your desired future.