5 Ways to Work With Procrastination

I’m not going to give you a long lead in to this. If you found your way here, it’s likely you’ve spent the day scrolling your Instagram feed or your emails, or playing games on your iphone, or editing videos, or down a YouTube or TikTok rabbit hole.

You procrastinated on the things you needed to do.

Maybe you’re beating yourself up about it, even just a little bit.

And perhaps you’re looking for guidance.

So let’s get right into it.

First: Normalize It

Everyone procrastinates sometimes.

Everyone.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

It’s important to normalize this. You’re not a failure for having procrastinated.

Of course, if your procrastination is chronic, that’s a different issue and deeper work for another time.

But even if it is, you can choose, today, to give yourself some grace. Embrace self-compassion.

Studies show this is a more effective way to get out of procrastination than self-berating and self-criticism.

Second: Not all delay is procrastination.

Procrastination is when we delay something where the delay is against our interest.

Sometimes a thing just doesn’t need to get done.

Or, it doesn’t need to get done today.

Not doing that thing isn’t procrastination. It could actually be a smart move.

Why waste energy doing something that doesn’t need to get done at all?

Third: Look at What You Were Doing Instead

This is the crucial piece most people overlook. We can get so focused on what we didn’t do that we don’t notice what we did instead.

I call this the Procrastination Vehicle.

Your Procrastination Vehicle offers a lot of clues as to what’s going on.

Were you just laying around watching television? Maybe your body and mind were tired and needed a thinking break.

We often underestimate the cognitive load we take on during a day, a week, a month, or a season.

Or maybe you spent an hour coloring. It’s likely you needed to have a cognitive break and activate your brain’s default mode network to process things in the background.

If you judge the procrastination, you can’t see the message it’s trying to give you.

Fourth: Consider What Procrastination is Giving You

Sometimes, Procrastination Vehicles can lead to new skills.

Lately I’ve found myself procrastinating by editing videos of my sessions with my trainer and my workout drills.

This feels a lot like procrastination, and in some ways it is. But when I examined it more closely, I discovered that it’s offering me a lot of things that I actually need.

Improving my video editing is a skill I actually need to work on. Editing these videos also forces me to watch and listen to myself on video, which has been a big hurdle for me in filming reels and being more visible on social media.

These videos offer me a low-risk project for working on these skills.

Fifth: Consider the Timing and Message of the Procrastination

I notice I tend to have periods of “creative procrastination,” where I put of cognitive work in favor of more tactile and tangible projects.

Rather than viewing this as bad, or making it wrong, I take it as a message that my brain needs reduced activity and I need to feed the part of myself that likes to make things.

I also consider the timing. Does procrastination happen more at specific times of year? If so, it could be a message about what’s happening in the energy of that space in time.

For example, the week between Christmas and New Years is a time for going inward. If you’re not executing on your intentions, it may be because this is a time for going inward.

What is Your Procrastination Saying?

Everything we do, or don’t do, has a message for us. Take a look at your procrastination and see what it’s telling you.