What is Procrastination and how can we beat it?

A wise man once said, "Humans take as long as you can offer them in terms of time. They always find ways to fill the time gap". This statement holds like a gospel truth and we haven't been able to shake it off yet.

Procrastination is nothing but the act of differing any task to a point where it has to be hurried to catch the deadline. There are multiple ways in which people procrastinate. A few are listed below: 

• By keeping the important task waiting while taking up a task that they can easily do in their free time. Or by changing the order of their To-do-list.
• By choosing to think ridiculously long for the task before taking action. 
• By sleeping it out. This happens more in the case of very high disinterest in the task.
• By acting like a perfectionist, and planning out everything before taking action (this actually falls into the category of partial procrastination).

By nature we all are procrastinators. Our brain is programmed to think and do stuff that give us instant gratification. We are unable to think or commit ourselves to something which has a long gestation period. An act that might give results later is the biggest procrastinated task based on a survey. This is also called "Present Bias".

Since we are not inclined to pursue tasks that have a long gestation period and are more inclined to take up instant gratifying tasks. The solution to this problem can either be, amplify the benefits and reward of the task with a longer gestation period or compressing the cost of it. 

The amplification of benefits can be done by vividly imagining how satisfying, rewarding and uplifting the result can be. Once we drag our brain into imagining the reward part of the task, while we are able to visualize it, the chances of taking action increases substantially. The same concept can be used to vividly imagine the downside of inaction. The reward will change into risk and our vivid imagination will show us downside of this inaction, like losing something, getting fired, getting embarrassed etc. These vivid imaginations and visualizations can do wonders in pushing us to take action.

The compression of cost part is somewhat tricky. Tasks with longer gestation periods are usually big and takes longer time. So to compress the cost (which in this case is time and to some extent the task itself), one needs to break the task into many smaller sub-tasks. The smaller it is the better. This breaking up of a bigger unit into many smaller ones changes our perspective towards the task. We are no longer overwhelmed by the thought of it and thus are more willing to take action. Even better, if you could derive a smaller sub-task which can give you instant gratification or reward in that entire task. This will not only shift your interest towards this sub-task but will motivate you take the first step. It is often seen that the first step is all it takes for us to get into action and finish the task. 

Conclusion:

We all procrastinate and it is kind of an inbuilt negative widget within us. But with a few initiatives we can be slaying our To-do-list regularly within deadline. We need to be easy on ourselves and perform a simple cost benefit analysis of the task. The cost in terms of the time and efforts it would take and the benefit and reward we will enjoy, after the completion of the task. If we are clearly able to imagine and visualize the amplified benefits we will be able to motivate ourselves to act on it. Same way if we are able to visualize the reduced costs in by breaking the task in sub-tasks, we will be able to take action much faster. This concept of reduced cost and amplified reward works wonders in beating procrastination.