In my previous post, I talked about busyness and the first type of busyness, the perfectionist (busy for perfection).

The next busy profile is the procrastinator, those not willing to do the important things now, but delaying and postponing the important things to later time. Then why are they so busy?

1. They’re busy doing non-important tasks, they prioritize fun and pleasure over the job and the main task they have to do.
2. They’re busy preparing, busy making up their mind, and keep on waiting for the right time to start making action. They can’t make up their mind, and indecisiveness is most of the time the time-waster in our life.

Here is what Tim Chester in his book, Busy Christian’s Guide to Busyness mentioned as often the excuse of procrastinator…

I work better under pressure. I need deadline to focus the mind. I do my best work when the heat’s on.
- Tim Chester

It’s very sad that because of this we are busy at the present and the future, at the present as we keep on making ourselves busy with the trivia task and wandering between one decision and another, while the future as we are actually putting back our responsibilities where we are still going to do it again in the future.

Why are they doing this? Tim Chester mentioned two reasons:

1. We prioritize our pleasures, facing things we don’t want to do, we’re delaying that, with temporary pleasures and enjoyment. It’s a short-term outlook, we choose our pleasure over our responsibilities. It’s a circle of doom, the longer you procrastinate, the more you have your pending responsibilities, more difficult for us to do and the more we choose our pleasures. Eventually we are busy doing our pleasures.
2. Our pride is threatened, especially when facing a daunting task, difficult things to do, or hard decisions to make. We eventually choose to pick small tasks, those we can do easily. Ever wondered why some guys that never turn up in the kitchen so enthusiastic helping out in the BBQ pit, some might use that as an action of running away, they preferred to be busy preparing the BBQ instead of getting socialize with the people, busy to avoid the activities that we’re not comfortable with.

Procrastinator are trying to trade their responsibilities with their temporary pleasure and pride. Let’s see what Tim Chester said about procrastinators…

Procrastinators are not strong people who can cope with pressure. They are weak people whose fragile egos need constant bolstering.
- Tim Chester

The quote from Tim Chester above really struck me as it’s so true in my life, whenever I’m faced with difficult task or decision to make, I will easily distracted into something else, go to the pantry taking biscuits, get some hot drinks, surfing the net, checking email, etc. Running away from difficulties and trying to get some ego booster, something that is easy to do…

Few ways to go and overcome busy in procrastination…

1. Remove your distractions! Identify your distractions and try to remove them away, one habits that really hinder me in working well in the office recently is checking my blog, the stats and updates, and eventually I’m trying to use some software tool to ban my own blog, or even unplug my network cable.
2. Be a faster decision maker! Making decision can be a hard time for an introvert, we are thinking very deep and analyzing the situation. This process makes us very slow in decision making. How to be a faster decision maker? The answer is practice! What happens when you take a decision making process as a practice? It’s OK to make mistake, it’s better to get into the corridor, make action now and learn from your failures, rather than busy preparing and not making action.
3. Be confident! The actions above can be useless unless you’re confident. As what Tim Chester said, it’s our little ego that needs some bolster, that’s why we choose to prioritize pleasure and guarding our pride. Be confident that you can overcome the difficult task in front of you, take one step at a time, get help if it’s too difficult, just be strong and courageous, don’t runaway from the difficult task in front of you.
4. Don’t be afraid of failure! I find that most of the time I procrastinate when I’m afraid of failure. Facing the difficult task to do, remembering the pain that comes with the past failures, and then I’ll choose to surf the net, check my email, or eat some snacks. Again I will say that we are experts of failures, take failure as an OK thing to happen, nothing bad about it, take the lesson and believe you can overcome your failure.
5. Read and apply this article on overcoming procrastination! This is an article from samirbharadwaj.com about tricks to fight procrastination. I like one of the step mention here on overcoming distraction, sometimes our mind is just too tired to think, then you might use that time to do your “laundry”, things that you easier to do BUT something that is useful and important to do, even if it’s not urgent.
6. The last step is pretty much spiritual, that is to turn to God as your refuge! Many of us choose busyness as refuge from facing a tough task, what I’m trying to say here, turn to God as your refuge instead, ask His help, He is our bolster, our comfort and our strength to face the life challenge!

Be strong and courageous to face your life challenges, you will be able to do it and you do not need to procrastinate it.

(photo by Tom A.)

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