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Have you ever sat down to complete an important task and then suddenly discovered you were answering emails, scrolling through Facebook uploads, watching YouTube videos or maybe you should go ahead and have lunch, even though its only 11 a.m? Next thing you know it’s at the end of the day, your important task remains unfinished.
For many people, procrastination is a strong and mysterious force that keeps them from completing the most urgent and important tasks in their lives with the same strength as when you try to bring like poles of a magnet together. It’s a potentially dangerous force, causing victims to fail out of school, perform poorly at work, put off medical treatment or delay saving for retirement.
In surveys 95% of people admit to procrastinating with about a quarter of these saying that it’s a chronic defining characteristic. At any time, “To stop procrastinating” is among the world’s top reported goals.
But the reasons people procrastinate are not understood that well. Some researcher have viewed procrastination largely as a failure of self-regulation like other bad behaviours that have to do with a lack of self-control, such as overeating, a gambling problem or overspending. Others say it’s not a matter of being lazy or poor time management, as may smart overachievers who procrastinate often can attest. They say it may actually be linked to how our brain works and to deeper perceptions of time and the self.
The word procrastination comes from the Latin, Pro which means forward, in favour of and crastinus which means of tomorrow. So procrastinators are in favour of tomorrow. Most psychologist see procrastination as a kind if avoidance behaviour, a coping mechanism gone away in which people “give in to feel good” says Timothy Pychl, a professor who studies procrastination at Carleton University, in Ottawa.
It usually happens when people fear or dread or have anxiety about, the important task awaiting them. To get rid of this negative feeling people, they open up a video game or facebook page instead that makes them feel better temporarily, but unfortunately, reality comes back to bite them in the end.
Once the reality of a deadline set in again procrastinators feel more extreme shame and guilt but for an extreme procrastination, those negative feeling can be just another reason to put the task off, with the behaviour turning into a vicious, self defeating cycle.
Stop procrastinating, do it now. Thanks for reading