Procrastination – An Other Explanation.

There are very few people around who have the ability to snooze their alarm while in deep sleep in the morning and wake up completely after the next five minutes when the alarm rings again. Most of us would do two things – either snooze the alarm again or let the alarm keep ringing until the alarm gets tired and it itself surrenders and sleeps along with us.

This was just an incidence from our daily life where we delay something as we think that some other thing is more important than this one. Many a times in our day to day life we face such circumstances, they may be small may be grave, where we delay one thing for another. We postpone, we procrastinate.

It is said, “Procrastination is the thief of time.” It’s true, but it doesn’t satisfy me. I keep pondering upon the question whether we can actually do all the important works at the same time. I think not. And that is why we postpone some things so that we can do the other one. For that we give priority to one over the other. And this is an everyday story of our lives. We procrastinate, which is an inevitable event, but we do one thing wrong while doing it. We do not think about the importance of the thing we are postponing.

Since years a theory of time management has been famous. This is also used by the famous writer Stephen Covey. It says that a work can be classified in the following ways.

• Important and Urgent

• Important but Not Urgent

• Not Important but Urgent

• Neither Important Nor Urgent

From the above four categories of work, the things which fall under fourth category are the ones which we like to do the most. These are not important and not even urgent but still we love them to do. There is no set of specific examples here. When we are doing any work we most often very well know the importance of that work. A fourth category thing can be a second category for some other person. Here, the most critical part is to understand that which category of works we are mostly indulged in and re arrange them accordingly.

The habit of postponing, which we common people are really good at all the time, is what we can use for doing important things on time. But hey, isn’t postponing wrong?? Or is it that the criticality lies in what we are postponing. Let me put it in a short and concise way, we should not postpone the right things, instead we should postpone the things rightly!!

To understand a bit more, let’s look on how a habit is formed. The process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: Over time, this loop—cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward—becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges. Eventually… a habit is born.

This habit creation process we can use to our advantage in postponing things in a correct manner. Whenever we cross over a work which we understand that it is neither important nor urgent, bring the laziness inside us at its top level and say loudly to ourselves that it’s so tough, hard, difficult, unhealthy, unrewarding to do this thing; make those things look so obnoxious that we become repulsive to those things. This will be the cue to our mind. And the reward will be that all our important things will be completed on time. Eventually, when this rewarding becomes a routine and routine becomes our habit, we end up with an ability of procrastinating which helps us in being punctual!!