Symptoms of Procrastination

All of us are kind of guilty procrastinating and wasting time for unproductive things. And I bet that for this new year, TO AVOID PROCRASTINATION is for sure part of your resolution. I think for us to really defeat this enemy no. 1 of self-productivity, we should define procrastination clearly.

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How many times I've heard excuses from my students why they failed to submit on the due date of their assignments or projects. Most of those are just make-up excuses I know, but what they are missing actually is to accept the fact that they don't have time management and that they are totally unaware that they are being struck by this sickness called procrastination. 

We should identify some symptoms that we are actually procrastinating. Christian H. Godefroy and John Clark in their book "The Complete Time Management System" gave the following symptoms to alert us that we are already procrastinating and I also included some tips on how to combat these symptoms:

1. You let your mind wander. Daydreaming while working is a usual cause of procrastination. Counter-attack: Be in the NOW! Focus to what you are currently doing and never entertain thoughts of the past or future.
2. You voluntarily let yourself be interrupted by anything that comes up, a phone call, an e-mail or a visitor. Counter-attack: Screen you phone calls, set specific time to reply to all your messages, sometimes it's not really bad to close your doors to some friends, surely they will understand that you just can't take your hands off with the tasks that you need to finish. 
3. You get sidetracked by the least little unimportant job instead of doing what you really should. Counter-attack: Your TO-DO LIST must be arranged from the most important tasks to the least important tasks. Be sure to tick off those most important and urgent tasks first. Prioritizing is very important if you want to be more productive. 
4. You take long coffee breaks, over-extended meals. Counter-attack: This is not to say that you should not enjoy "break times or vacant periods", these are also essential to increase our concentration, but remember that these are just energizers, so allot just enough time frame for it. 
5. You do a lot of things that you don't really have to do. Counter-attack: Simple tasks like paying bills, going to groceries etc. can be delegated to others so that you can concentrate with your task.

Godefroy and Clark (1989) also suggested that for us to avoid procrastination we should have clear defined goals. What is your goal? Do you really want to attain it? Most of us also have fear of failure, so that we are really afraid to start the task. This fear is usually caused by our previous failures. It's important to note that failures are ladders to our success. It's true that by avoiding these tasks we can escape failures, but surely we can't also experience success.