I have a confession to make. I am a master procrastinator. There I said it. Now I’m betting that you may be challenged by it too, so I’m going to share some of my tried and true best strategies for beating the demon of procrastination. The image below is a classic case in point.
#1 Reward Yourself
One of the biggest reasons we procrastinate is that we just don’t love some of the things we have to do. So give yourself a bit of added incentive and create a system of rewards.
For example, if you love to get outside, give yourself a 30 minute outdoor break, once you have replied to all emails, updated your networks, and submitted the two RFP’s on your list. Or perhaps you need to write your ezine or blog post and you can reward yourself with lunch with a friend after that’s done.
#2 Delegate Your Weaknesses
One of the fastest ways to eliminate procrastination is to get rid of the tasks you aren’t good at and don’t enjoy. This means delegation. Find that Virtual Assistant or employee who you can hand off these task so you can invest your time in more profitable activities that you do enjoy and are good at.
#3 Eliminate Perfectionism
Perfectionism is a surefire way to stay trapped in incompletion and procrastination. You’ll put something off until you can do it perfectly. STOP! It isn’t going to happen. Go for good enough and move on. Go for as they say in blue collar comedy “Git’er done.”
#4 Finish What You Start
Are you a starter but not a finisher? It seems like 70% of the globe is afflicted with this challenge while the other 30% are finishers looking for starters. (The good news is that it takes far fewer finishers to complete what we starters put in the works.) Before you launch any new project, agenda, or task, be sure that you have completely closed out any other open ones. Otherwise you will wind up like a dear friend of mine with 11 home improvement projects and counting and none any closer to completion than the first he began.
#5 Get a Maid
Maybe you don’t have this particular procrastination, but I sure do. I love to leverage cleaning house as a procrastination tool and it works too since I work from a home office on most days. The simple solution is to get a maid! If you can’t imagine that someone at $20-$50/hour will save you several hours of your time (which I hope is worth a lot more), well then maybe you need to re-examine your business.
