Within the productivity community, it's rather common to have procrastination seen as the ultimate enemy. In fact, it seems quite obvious that if you keep telling yourself "I'll do it later" you are probably failing at getting things done, but... what is the real reason for you to postpone things in the first place? A careful look into this might bring interesting food for thought...

 

 

Priorities and discipline

 

In most of my seminars, I ask participants what moved them to come. "I can't manage my priorities" is a winner answer. When we explore what that means, typically we reach something like: "In fact I know my priorities quite well, I just don't seem to respect them". For many, the logical next step is: "I need more DISCIPLINE!!!".

 

I suspect if you could buy discipline at a supermarket, it would go out of stock on a daily basis. People seem to genuinely believe that if they could be ruthless execution soldiers of their to-do lists they would be a lot happier living in their super-achievement world. Well, in my opinion, that logic is a profound misconception of how inner motivation works and even what happiness is about...

 

 

Motivation: attraction and repulsion

 

Generally speaking, there are two forces that enable any of us to move from situation A to situation B:

 

1) you are attracted to the positive things that you believe situation B will bring;

2) you are repulsed by negative things that you believe situation A is bringing.

 

 

Highly subjective, the question "move from A to B - yes or no?" will be also computing bad things B may bring, and good things lost from abandoning A. Put in a rather oversimplified way, this heuristic system is working within our mind at a fairly outstanding rate for everything in life at any moment. And it's how "it" chooses if you will tackle the first item of your to-do list or check your e-mail first or go for a cup of coffee...