How to Stop Procrastinating: a simple Guide to Mastering Difficult Tasks and Breaking the Procrastination Habit

Reason #5: You Experience a Lack of Motivation
Have you ever thought to yourself that life always gets in the way of what
you’re supposed to do?
This lack of motivation can come from several underlying causes,
including:
fatigue;
stress;
other priorities;
unexpected emergencies;
trouble formulating new ideas;
failures in the past with this task;
negativity from the people (and events) in your life;
lack of confidence;
working in the wrong environment; and
unclear goals.
You’re not alone with feeling a lack of motivation for certain tasks.
In a
study done at Carnegie Melon University
, it was revealed that people lack
motivation when they find little value in the projected outcome of their
work.

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The lesson here is if you can connect a task to your interests, goals, and
values, then you increase your motivation for working on it.
Reason #6: You Don’t Know How to Get Started
What if the task at hand is too complex, unique, or difficult? What if it
has a lot of moving parts, making it unclear where to begin? This
uncertainty may keep you from starting because you don’t know your first
step.
Even if you can figure out the first step, once you are considering the
process, it’s easy to underestimate the time and commitment that’s
needed to complete a project.
The result is you’ll often procrastinate on a task simply because you feel
overwhelmed by all the steps that you’re required to complete.
What’s the best way to overcome this?
A very effective method is to use the approach David Allen discusses in
his book
Getting Things Done
.
The idea here is to break down any multi-step project into a series of
smaller tasks that can completed in a single block of effort. There are five
steps to this process:
1. Write down the specific tasks that have your attention.
2. Decide which actions can be taken care of right away and do them.
3. Organize the rest of the task.
4. Constantly review your breakdown of tasks.
5. Do each task, one by one, until they are all finished.
You can even take these steps further by creating a checklist and getting
the satisfaction of checking things off as you go. (We’ll talk more about
this concept in
Step #3
, where I show you how to break down any
complex project.)

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