How To Hack Procrastination-Quick Results

by Darpan Sachdeva

Problem solving is an integral part of life. We all do it on regular basis as we move forward. In the age of technology today any tech issue or a bug if comes up we try to locate the issue ,analyse and find a cure for it.

I wish the human problems could as well be solved with the same metaphor. In real life we have problems that are huge and massive that takes time to resolve .They’re all complex, hard to measure, and comprised of many different small solutions–some of which will fail to work! It usually cant be solved in as a solving of a technical bug .Some times this can take lots of hard work , time and energy to get to the solutions. How to hack procrastination to get through to the solutions.

Because of this complexity, we easily become demotivated by the bigger issues and turn our attention instead to things that are easier to measure and easier to quickly fix. This is why we procrastinate. And the procrastination generates guilt, which makes us feel bad and therefore procrastinate some more.

So how to hack procrastination?

I have struggled with this for quite some time now. I have set up massive goals for myself which need a huge amount of determination, efforts, focus and time. Having high level goals ,be it be in any field of life, demands from me hard work and consistency. Since the goal is big it makes it harder, if you do something toward improving it, you can’t tell immediately or even after a week that anything has changed. In fact, you could spend weeks or months if not years before you could notice any changes. So a  week later you might have nothing at all to show for it.

This is the kind of demotivator that can jump right up and beat you into submission before you even get started.

This suffering would have continued for me until I came across a read where health coach is asking his students in a gym

“Was today better than yesterday?” 

When I read this I realized that it was the answer to all pains in life. I recognized it from the big problems I have successfully solved in my life. This is what I am practicing now implement in my daily habits.

The secret is to focus on making whatever it is you’re trying to improve and make better today than it was yesterday. That’s it. It’s easy. And, it’s possible to be enthusiastic about taking real, tangible steps toward a distant goal. This is the answer to how to hack procrastination.

To do the small incremental changes in achieving your long term massive goal. And making one small improvement is motivating. You can clearly see the difference in that one thing you’ve fixed as soon as the change is made. This keeps you alive and focused towards your big goal before the procrastination would take over it.

You might not be able to see a noticeable difference in the whole with each incremental change, though. The micro improvements you make each day often won’t lead directly to tangible results. This is, as we have observed, the reason big goals become so demotivating. So, for most of the big, difficult goals you’re striving for, it’s important to think not about getting closer each day to the goal, but rather, to think about doing better in your efforts toward that goal than yesterday.

I can’t, for example, guarantee that I’ll be physically fitter today than yesterday, but I can control whether I do more today to lose weight. And if I do, I have a right to feel good about what I’ve done. This consistent, measurable improvement in my actions frees me from the cycle of guilt and procrastination that most of us are ultimately defeated by when we try to do Big Important Things.

With these measurable daily wins you will also increase the happiness level in life. Small improvements also decrease the cost of failure. If you miss a day, you have a new baseline for tomorrow. This is how to hack procrastination.

This is the one simple formula that you can apply to any field of your life. If you every day you do a little better than yesterday toward improving yourself, you’ll find that the otherwise ocean-sized proposition of achieving the massive goal becomes more tractable.

Give it a try:

Was yesterday better than the day before? How can you make today better? Do it again the next day. Put it on your calendar. Spend two minutes thinking about this each morning.

Towards your success in hacking procrastination !!!