The Stop Procrastinating Now Course. Week 1: Introduction & How to Stop Procrastinating Today

Transcription

1 The Stop Procrastinating Now Course Week 1: Introduction & How to Stop Procrastinating Today

2 Copyright Henrik Edberg, You do not have the right to sell, share or claim the ownership of the content of this course. This course is for informational purposes only and it contains my opinions based on my experience. You should always find the advice of a professional before taking action on something I have published. Page 2

3 10 years ago I was probably one of the biggest procrastinators on the west coast of Sweden. At the time I was studying at the university. But I spent most of my days with attending a few classes, hanging out with friends, watching TV-shows and movies and doing as little school work as I could. At least until there was about 5 days to an exam and I crammed in full panic mode. This habit of procrastinating did not only affect my school work and grades though. I was lazy with house work, overweight and out of shape and stuck socially because I could not get anything or sometimes very little done. I knew mostly what needed to happen so I could live a happier and more action-oriented life. And that just made it more depressing and sometimes felt quite shameful how I got so far behind many of my peers in so many important areas of life. This didn t really change until I one day understood that what I needed to focus on was not my social skills or fitness levels right now. I simply and foremost needed to become a person who could take action on what mattered each day, not just a few times a month when the pressure of my surrounding world teachers, friends, parents was on me. So started to read, learn and experiment with how to overcome everyone s favorite bad habit: procrastination. Page 3

4 Today things are very different compared to my days in school. I eat my breakfast and work for two hours before it s time for half an hour of intense exercise. Then it s time for lunch and I have done more of critical importance before noon than I used to do in a day in And before the day is up I will have accomplished more to move myself forward and upward in life than I used to do during most weeks back in the good old days. In this course I want to share with you what I have learned during this decade about procrastination and how to overcome it (and keep it away). You ll get only the best stuff that I use every week and month that has truly worked for me to turn my life around. Now, let s cut to the chase and get started with replacing the procrastination that holds you back with habits that will take you where you deep down want to go in life. Page 4

5 My name is Henrik Edberg and I live on the west coast of Sweden with my awesome fiancée and two adorable and slightly quirky cats. I have written weekly articles and newsletters on personal development on my website The Positivity Blog since 2006 for an audience of half a million monthly readers. Other courses that I have created are: - The Self-Esteem Course - The Smart Social Skills Course - 31 Days to a Simpler Life Course - The Invincible Summer a Course in Optimism Page 5

6 I will keep things simple in this course. Each week you will get just a few new specific action-steps to take. Because I don t want you to just read a whole lot of pages and feel good for a while. And I don t want you to feel overwhelmed and so you ll take little or no action after a while and lapse back into escape and procrastination. I want you to be able to change or add simple habits to your own life by using this course as a guide. I want you to be able to make changes in your mindset that stick so you don t revert back to your old familiar and negative thought patterns. Now, at the end of each week s guide you get a couple of action-steps to take that week. These steps always include doing some work with that week s worksheet. The exercises in the worksheets will help you to more fully understand yourself and how to apply the habits and strategies you learn to your own situation and life. So please do the exercises and fill in the worksheets throughout the course. It is only a few extra minutes you have to invest each week. Page 6

7 NOTE: If you don t have a printer to print out the worksheets simply use a pen and a notepad or a Word-document (or something similar) on your computer to fill in the answers to the exercises and questions of the week. On the next page you can find a few answers for questions you may have before starting this course. Page 7

8 Common Questions & Answers What do I do if I fall of the horse? As you are taking the weekly action-steps life may interfere. You have too much to do at home or at work. You get sick. Life throws you a curveball. And you get behind on taking action for a few days or a week. What do you do then? Instead of stressing yourself out and trying to cram in two weeks of actions into one week, relax. Instead of beating yourself up for not keeping up, be kind to yourself and nudge yourself on to the right path again. Do that by starting again where you left off. And if you need a day - or two - of rest during the course then take it and then continue where you were. If you get behind on the weekly schedule then that is totally OK and you will reach the final day anyway. It is important to not stress yourself out during this program but to take things one step at a time. Otherwise it is very easy to lapse back into inaction, procrastination and feeling unconfident. Page 8

9 What do I do if some strategy doesn t work right away or if I make a mistake? As you go through the action-steps of this course you ll hit a bump or two. If you try something during this week or weeks ahead and it doesn t work quite as well as you had hoped the first or second time then don t make one of the most common mistakes and give up. Instead, keep going. Keep using the technique or strategy during that week and the following ones. And if you slip up, if you make a mistake during these weeks then welcome to the club. Everyone who wants to do something of value, who wants to expand their comfort zone and make real changes will make mistakes and slip. It is the natural order of life and one very effective way to learn. So even though such a thing might sting for a short while don t take too seriously. Don t beat yourself up about it because that will certainly not help. Nudge yourself in the right direction once again and keep going instead. Page 9

10 What do I do if I want to spend more time on the course or I get overwhelmed? If you want to spend two weeks or a month on week #1 or week #5 for example then do that. Keeping the weekly schedule is just a recommendation. If the action-steps for a week feel a bit too much then take some more time to continue to work on them. Or skip a part in the action-step summery for that week to focus on what you are already doing and practicing that. Later on in the course, in action-step summaries for weeks 2 to 10 you get a quick recap of habits and techniques from previous weeks. If you can, keep using them so that each week they become more and more of the new normal and habits that stick. But if you get overwhelmed by a habit or two in the recap section then let one or more of them go for the time being. And then you can simply come back and work on the skipped habit(s) later on instead. So you can do this course at your own pace if you like. It s your choice. Page 10

11 Here s what we will explore each week during these 10 weeks of replacing procrastination with action, focus and other, healthier habits. Week 1: Introduction and How to Stop Procrastinating Starting Today. Week 2: Set Up a Daily Environment that Will Make it Natural to Take More Action. Week 3: The Essential Balance Between Fully Focused Work and Guilt-Free Play and Rest. Week 4: How to Get More of What Truly Matters Done Each Day. Week 5: The Fears that Lead to Procrastination, Part 1. Week 6: The Fears that Lead to Procrastination, Part 2. Week 7: How to View Your Work and Yourself in a Healthier Way. Week 8: The Power of Deadlines, Reviews and Positive Pressure. Week 9: How to Handle Setbacks, Stumbles & Failures in a Smart Way. Week 10: Following Up, Eliminating Remaining Energy Sucks and Looking Forward. Page 11

12 Why is procrastination such a common habit? Well, a big part of it is simply that people procrastinate because of many different reasons. And many of those reasons can be quite powerful. So where do you start to get a handle on this problem? One good place is with increasing your awareness about why you personally procrastinate. By doing so it becomes easier to quickly catch yourself in the act of starting to procrastinate and to replace that action with something better. And to see the personal trouble spots where you may want to focus a little extra of your energy and attention. Knowing the most common reasons for procrastinating can help you to build that awareness so let me share 7 of them (that may sometimes overlap). During the course I will also go more deeply into the best and most practical advice I have found to deal with each of these 7 reasons for procrastinating. Page 12

13 1. The fear of failure. This is one of the most common and obvious reasons. You don t want to fail, you don t want to shake or ruin your self-worth and your self-image and feel the pain of another failure so you hold off on taking action to be on the safe side. 2. The fear of success. This may sound like a more odd fear than the one of failure. But if you succeed then your life may change and that can be scary. How will your family and friends react to this success in your life, will it just be in a positive way? How will this success add more responsibility to your job for instance? And will you be able to handle that? Success may on the surface sound like a 100% positive thing but if you examine it then it almost always comes with things that can feel worrying or that scare you. 3. The fear of not doing a perfect job. If you want things like a bigger project or just as a small task to go perfectly then you may not even want to get started. Page 13

14 Because the task or project starts to feel so huge and daunting. And because you fear you cannot live up to your expectations and you feel you will disappoint yourself, so what is point of even getting started? 4. Worries about what people may think or say. The fear of what people may think or say if you fail, succeed or simply if you do anything odd that is outside of the comfort zone of your closest group of people can be a very powerful force that can hold back a person in a strong way. 5. The task at hand simply feels overwhelming or boring. And so you cope with that situation by procrastinating and pushing it forward and tell yourself that you will do it sometime later on. 6. You have more pleasant and easy-to-access distractions just in front of you. With a smartphone close by and Facebook, Reddit and your favorite forum easily available on various gadgets it can be very easy to become distracted (and to distract yourself with instant gratification). 7. You feel burdened by have tos and may procrastinate as a protest. When you feel you have too many have tos, especially the ones imposed by others, on your daily schedule or to-do list then that can build inner resistance and even resentment. Page 14

15 You may feel like you have little control over this part of your life that you feel parents, a friend, a partner or your boss controls. And so you start to procrastinate as a protest against authority. Or because you feel like you are a powerless victim in your own life and so your ability to take action becomes paralyzed. Now, the next step after having gone through this list of 7 common reasons for why we procrastinate is to do this each time when you start to procrastinate during next 3 days Ask yourself: What task am I procrastinating on now and why am I doing that instead of taking action on it? Write down those two answers as best you can when whenever you procrastinate during these days. Consult the 7 reasons again to help yourself to find the main reason. This exercise will help you to get started with thinking about why you get stuck in procrastination. By doing so you can to get to know yourself even better and see your own procrastination habit and pattern more clearly. Page 15

16 One simple way to keep this log is to write down the question above in a document in your smart phone and then to just continue to fill that document with the answers you find during your 3 days. Or to keep a pen and a small notepad - with the question written down on it - with you wherever you go. At the end of the third day, use your worksheet to record your top 2 most common reasons for procrastinating. And what top 3 tasks you have procrastinated on the most during these days. Page 16

17 When you find that you are starting to procrastinate this week then during the first 3 days write down the answers to the question in the previous section of this guide. But after that and directly during the last 4 days of this week use the routine I am about describe to go from being aware of the procrastination to replacing it with something better. The Simple Power of Being Still and Then Taking Just One Small Step How do you stop procrastinating? Well, one very good way to start minimizing this issue is to raise your awareness of it like I have described in the previous pages. Another very helpful thing is to reduce the pressure on yourself as much as possible. Because it is usually the pressure in some form that you feel is pressing down on you that makes you want to escape through procrastination. When you notice or catch yourself starting to procrastinate then it is time to do something else before you find yourself having spent half an hour randomly on Facebook. But this is not a time to start beating yourself up to get yourself to start taking action. Instead, be patient with yourself and kind to yourself. Page 17

18 One of own favorite habits when I am at this point is a combination of first being still and taking a pause. And then following that up with taking a small step forward in the direction I want to go. This one also works well if you notice that you have already slipped into procrastination and spent the past 15 minutes there. Here s how you do it. Step 1. Be still. As you notice yourself wanting to head over to Facebook or starting playing a game on your smartphone just be still. Do not move, do not do anything. Just sit or stand still and in your mind just observe the impulse and urge to escape into procrastination. Be still for a few moments or a minute or so. Because the impulse will pass. Step 2. Take a small step forward. When the impulse has become weak or simply gone somewhere else then it is time for the next step. To find your way back to what truly matters. Page 18

19 At this point I ask myself: What is one small step I can take right now to start moving towards what I want? The answer might be to: Just write on my next blog post for 10 minutes. Plan for a new project for 15 minutes. Go and work out for 20 minutes. Simply do half of the dishes that are waiting for me in the sink. What to do if you still want to procrastinate If you still find yourself returning back to an impulse to procrastinate even when you have found such a small step in your own situation then don t give into that. Instead, just be still again and let the impulse quiet down or disappear. Then ask yourself: What is an even smaller step I can take to move forward? The answers I get usually look something like this: Write on my next blog post for just 1 minute. Plan for a new project for 2 minutes. Go and work out for 3 minutes. Wash one of the plates and one of the forks that are waiting for me in the sink. Page 19

20 There is no shame in taking such a tiny step forward, I use this question every week in my own life. It is simply a smart strategy to break a larger task down into manageable pieces. And to help yourself to get going and to handle the feelings of overwhelm, boredom or dread that you can get when it comes to a certain task. You want to find a step so small that your mind goes: Oh, that s no biggie, I can do that. Because one small or very small step often becomes half an hour or more of work being done. Or the sink being totally emptied of dirty dishes. Plus, by focusing on one small win at first and getting it done and then on accomplishing more of these small daily successes you start to feel energized, more confident and taking action becomes easier and easier and more exciting (or it at least feels more acceptable). Now, have a look at the next page to find the action-steps for the first week of this course. Page 20

21 The Action-Steps for This Week Here s a quick summary of the action-steps to take this week: 1. Day 1-3: Raise your awareness of your own procrastination habit by writing down the answers to the why am I procrastinating question every time you start procrastinating. At the end of these 3 days use the worksheet to record your top 2 reasons and top 3 tasks you have procrastinated the most on. 2. This week: Each time you start to or find yourself procrastinating simply use the two step combo of being still and taking a small (or very small) step forward. 3. Day 7: Use your worksheet to review how being still + take one small step worked for you this week. Page 21