Procrastination – starts at school. Many students take this bad habit with them directly to their studies. And even at work, procrastination is a popular temptation for the weaker self. Solo self-employed in the home office in particular find it difficult to get away from it, but employees in companies also struggle with it – according to studies, just 24 percent of employees are motivated to work. Procrastination is not easy to combat, but it can be done with means of self-motivation. You can find out here and now. Please do not postpone until later, but read through it immediately. And put it into practice right away. Here are some tips to increase your motivation.
Definition: What is procrastination?
Procrastination is the more modern term for procrastination. Of course, everyone does that from time to time. Basically, it’s not bad at all if you now and then give priority to a certain task and thereby postpone another one.
However, in the worst case, procrastinating can develop into a habitual behavior that sometimes takes on pathological traits. If fear of failure, lack of self-control, or strong pressure to perform gain the upper hand, procrastination can escalate into a phenomenon with pathological value, which endangers the achievement of personal and professional goals – and thus success. Better not let it get that far in the first place.
But even if you haven’t procrastinated to such an enormous extent yet, you might want to learn to master it better. Because an efficient way of working, which can use the available time optimally, is not compatible with constant procrastination.
To be able to adopt such a way of working, you should first deal with your individual reasons for procrastinating.
Most of the time, procrastination is less due to a lack of discipline or lack of motivation, and more to factors like these:
- Excessive perfectionism: Anyone who tends towards perfectionism and always raises demands on themselves in a particularly high way tends to dwell too much on detailed questions. This can result in you getting caught up in little things that don’t really matter in the big picture, wasting precious time. The inner urge to always do everything perfectly also triggers a permanent feeling of pressure.
- Incorrect priorities: Anyone who has not created their priority list optimally according to actual weightings can get confused with the order of tasks. If you don’t know exactly which activity has priority, it can happen that you postpone the task that is most important for achieving the goal.
- Inefficient time management: If you often find yourself putting off tasks and not getting to them at the end of the day, then you should question your time management. A clearly defined hierarchy is very important for efficient work.
- Unrealistic Goals: Those who set unachievable goals or fail to adjust their schedules to real-world conditions will be forced to postpone tasks time and time again. But because that doesn’t help to solve the problem, constant frustration is inevitable.
What helps against procrastination? Tips for more motivation
After you have found out what reasons you have for procrastinating, you are now armed to establish suitable countermeasures – more motivation is needed.
What you should refrain from doing is self-reproach – it really doesn’t help at all. What was, is done, from now on it should be better and you more motivated.
A good start for a future without procrastination and a life with more motivation is the analysis of your working day. Establish an accurate schedule, identifying stages where you may be wasting your time.
Where are your unnecessary time-wasters hiding?
| Smartphone / Social Media | Find out how much time you waste on your smartphone or social media. There are apps to help you with this, for example, RescueTime. The result might surprise you! |
| Chats with colleagues | The same goes for nice chats with colleagues. Of course, you don’t have to do without it completely, but such small breaks shouldn’t get out of hand either. |
| Chaos on the desk | Pay close attention to how much time you spend looking for something on your desk. Those are wasted minutes that you could easily save. |
| Streaming or TV | How do you feel about video and film consumption? Are you a series junkie? If this even interferes with your rest periods and leads to a lack of sleep, efficient time management becomes impossible. |
| Lack of sleep | You can only make the best use of your time if you have a good night’s sleep and are fit. |
| Multitasking | The requirement to be able to multitask can also affect your efficiency. Do one task at a time thoroughly rather than do two things at once half-heartedly. |
Now you know your personal reasons for postponement and your time wasters. For optimal management of your own motivation, you should also deal with the psychosocial mechanisms of the human drive.
This is how motivation and self-motivation work
To be able to motivate yourself optimally, it is very helpful to understand the mechanisms of human motivation itself. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is used in social psychology for this purpose.
This pyramid puts the following basic needs about each other:
- self-realization
- individual needs
- social needs
- security needs
- physiological needs
Basic physiological needs such as food and sleep form the basis on which other needs are built. Man can only reach a higher level if the needs below are fulfilled. These fulfilled needs are then no longer motivating factors.
The inner striving to reach the next level of needs, on the other hand, is an excellent motor of motivation. The gasoline for this engine is called self-motivation. So your motto should be to refuel instead of procrastinating.
With the following tips, you can put this motto into practice.
Increase your motivation: how do I motivate myself?
Here are ten tips for more motivation that you can easily put into practice. Based on your personal reasons for procrastinating, the identified things that eat up your time, and your knowledge of human motivational mechanisms, you will find out the tips that best suit your individual procrastination.
Bodily happiness
The hormone serotonin is also known as the happiness hormone. There are several things you can do to ensure that your body releases enough of it. Sufficient exercise in the fresh air, soaking up the sun, and a balanced diet promote this release. This allows you to take full advantage of the natural mood enhancer serotonin. What could motivate you better than a good mood that springs from within?
Here are some things you can eat to improve serotonin synthesis in your body:
- Cocoa
- Bananas
- Foods that contain a lot of omega-3 fatty acids (including tuna, rapeseed oil, Brussels sprouts, and flaxseed)
Don’t complain about failures, use them instead
Failure is part of life, both privately and professionally. The best way to deal with this is to learn from failure. If you practice this consistently, you can always get better at it. Even Apple boss Tim Cook admitted in an interview that the failures played a cardinal role in the company’s success. If that isn’t a role model to emulate…
Never take failure personally
Never allow failure to lead to personal frustration. You didn’t manage to convince a customer to buy this time? Then analyze the situation. Maybe it wasn’t your fault. Perhaps the customer had reasons that you cannot assess and influence? If you find a mistake, then learn from it – otherwise, dismiss it and move on to the next customer.
Motivational questions
Ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing right now. Maybe Maslow’s pyramid will help you answer. Do you want to level up or get recognition? Do you want more money or your own office? These are all good incentives for more motivation. And there’s bound to be more if you think about it for a while. The next but one point will also help you to recognize and answer these motivational questions.
Self-reward motivation
One often waits in vain for recognition from superiors or colleagues. Don’t waste your time with it, just celebrate your successes yourself. Appreciate your achievements by rewarding the achievement of smaller goals. For example with a great meal or the fulfillment of a long-cherished wish like a new video game.
Make goals appear in your mind’s eye
Let your goals become reality in advance in your mind. Visualize the situation of achieving these goals. The desire to achieve this goal will become even greater as a result.
So get an accurate picture of your own office that you aspire to. And again and again. You can also put the fulfillment of your professional dreams into words, for example by writing down the story of your promotion. Or you hang a symbolic picture on the wall. Intense visualization makes you hungry. A good, in-depth article on visualization can be found here.
Actively influence your inner drive
Autosuggestion works through positive beliefs. Are you facing an important customer appointment? Then repeat yourself over and over again: Today I will convince this customer. If you pray this to yourself over and over again, you can manipulate your subconscious. And in the end, you believe what you tell yourself over and over again. A good way to eliminate any self-doubt.
Find positive attitudes
Similar to autosuggestion, you can recalibrate the way you think about a specific task. Do you have to call an unpleasant customer today? Don’t let the thought frustrate you in the first place. The fact that this is a difficult customer remains. But try to reformulate the task at hand for yourself, to change your attitude towards it. Something like this: “This phone call is an instructive challenge for me.” What can you learn from it? What positive challenge can this conversation be for you? The customer will perceive your changed inner attitude and may no longer behave so difficult.
Overcome moments of frustration
Of course, not everything always runs smoothly in professional life. In the example of a customer conversation, it can happen again and again that the contact person cannot simply be persuaded to make a purchase. You have to learn to deal with these things – frustration must not affect your motivation.
Meditation, for example, helps with this. A study by the University of Gießen has proven that this increases the performance of the brain and that meditation can even change the brain structure measurably within a very short time.
Document successes
Write down all your successes and good performances. In your success diary, you can always read how well you are doing and which goals you have already achieved. Before a difficult conversation, for example, you can recall the last successful conclusion. Write your own success story! If you can see in black and white what you have achieved so far, that is a great incentive – you will soon want to write another entry in your success diary and give your all at the next customer meeting.
Conclusion: increase motivation – it works!
Procrastination – probably everyone knows that from school. Most people will break this bad habit at some point in their lives. Others take them to work, where they are rarely motivated and thus miss the opportunity to climb further up the career ladder.
If you’re one of those people who will turn the habit into a pathological behavior over time, then you need to act now. It takes a little practice to change long-trained behaviors, but in the end, you will definitely be more motivated and happier.
Numerous ways of self-motivation help against compulsive procrastination. Because the postponement only brings a very short-term, apparent relief. This makes the problem itself even worse.
What procrastination type are you? Once you figure that out, our ten motivational tips are sure to help you lead a procrastinating-free life, both at work and in your personal life. In the private sphere, however, you can still let it go – it has to be a little fun.