How to tackle Procrastination – biggest enemy of productivity and work life balance

When we talk about work life balance, the first topic worth discussion and mention is always productivity. For any balance and related schedule to work out effectively, desired productivity must be achieved. But more often, productivity is hampered by unavoidable mannerism or habit – Procrastination.

Procrastination is pre-programmed entity in human brain, and can come in various disguises. Sometimes we have made up our plan to tackle a work, but just keep on deferring for endless reasons. Many times we just keep avoiding it and turn to tasks not as important, basically a denial phase. We also many times try to look and feel very busy and artfully postpone tasks that are important. And this is all despite knowing that finishing the task in question guarantees an “upside future”. The efforts required in ‘present’ take up priority to the end result. So, how can one train the brain to leave ‘procrastinating’ important tasks?

The best solution is rebalancing the cost-benefit analysis. This means that train your brain to feel the benefits of current actions and efforts bigger as compared to the costs of the action. In simpler terms, the reward of doing a annoying and pestering task must feel bigger than the pain of tackling the task in question.

Visualize: Visualizing how great it would feel to get this painful task done for once and all. Future happiness and benefits would feel so rewarding that procrastination would go flying out of the window.

Publicly pre-commit yourself: When you pre-commit or declare your plans of doing a task in such period of time has a great effect on putting yourself in an answerable position. It matters to any human being what others think of him. So committing to a third person makes you driven towards the task.

Analyze the status quo and downside of not doing the task: Weighing in the pros and cons of not doing a task as against the current situation drives you towards completing the task.

These simple steps are handy and doable when getting good riddance of procrastinating habit. The rewards are real and boost productivity, bringing you closer to the desired work life balance.