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

Practice #11: Remove Hidden Blocks with the
Awareness Habit
A golden nugget that I learned from Leo Babauta’s article “Building
Awareness of the Procrastination Urge” is that
one of the simplest ways to
beat procrastination is to build what he calls the awareness habit.
The major challenge that folks have with procrastination is they’re often
unaware that they’re even doing it. That’s why a simple way to prevent it
is to create a habit where you track your impulses to procrastinate.
Here are a few techniques that Babauta recommends:
Create reminders. Write notes to yourself on pieces of paper,
and put them around the areas you usually procrastinate. You could
even create a wallpaper message on your computer or phone, using
a phrase like “Be aware!” to act as a reminder to not procrastinate
on what’s important.
Use tally marks. Carry around a small notepad and a pen.
Throughout the day, when you notice yourself getting the urge to
procrastinate, simply put a little tally mark on the paper. These tally
marks are not necessarily a good or bad thing. Instead, they act as a
way for you to build awareness of your desire to procrastinate.
Log it daily. Finally, at the end of the day, you should track the
awareness habit as something that you successfully completed. Like
any other habit, you should track the fact that you did it throughout
the day. You can even sign up on
Coach.me to track the awareness
habit
.
Once you’ve developed the habit of asking questions about your
procrastination, you can use this information to immediately address any
limiting belief that you might have.
To get started, ask yourself questions like:
What reason do I have for putting off this task?
Why do I feel it’s so tough to do?

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How many times have I successfully done it in the past?
What did I do then to get started?
What is the easiest step that I can do right now to get started?
Recognizing that you procrastinate on specific tasks is the best way to
break this habit. When you develop the awareness habit, you’ll start to
recognize the specific patterns and triggers that cause you to skip an
activity. Then all you need to do is to create a plan for how you’ll respond
whenever you feel the temptation to procrastinate.