Is procrastination killing your dreams and sucking the life out of you every day? Wouldn’t it feel great to just get off your butt and start moving your life forward again? You’ve probably got many tasks that need to be done, and they wouldn’t take nearly as long to accomplish as you think. Below are six different strategies you can use to get out of a rut and get things done already.
1. Stop Chasing Other People’s Goals
One of the biggest mistakes we make when setting our goals and making to-do lists is that we have many goals that are not really our own. We set goals that other people think are important, but we don’t really want to do them ourselves. Start there! Eliminate other people’s goals and think about the things that are truly important to you. You’ll have much more motivation and drive to accomplish goals you thought of yourself and that would directly benefit your life.
2. Set a To-Do Day
Have weeks ever gone by with a few simple tasks never getting done? Perhaps you need to just make doing those “important yet not urgent” tasks a part of your weekly routine. Set a day of the week to get things done you’ve been putting off. If you know that you’ll apply for your online MBA and write a letter to your grandmother on Thursday, you can happily put it off until Thursday comes. Then, make all the things on your to-do list your priority. You’ll get things done much more consistently if you focus on them once a week.
3. Do the Easiest Thing First
If you’re really having a hard time getting started and feel a bit overwhelmed, just pick the easiest thing on your to-do list and do it immediately. Then choose the next easiest thing and do that right away. The idea here is to build momentum with small wins before tackling the bigger projects.
4. Do the Most Important Thing First
If you could only accomplish one thing today from your to-do list, what would it be? What is the most important task on your list? Keep in mind that the most urgent task is rarely the most important one. If you can learn to focus on the tasks that will produce the greatest results, then you’ll be well on your way to living a happier, less stressful and more successful life.
5. Set Up Distraction Barriers for Yourself
One of the main reasons we don’t get things done is distraction. Social media is always just a smartphone-click away, and time-wasting websites are the first thing we want to do whenever we sit down to work on our computers. Set up simple website blocking extensions on your browser and hide your social media apps on your smartphone or delete them altogether. If you go a month without using these time-wasting sites, you’ll realize how little you need them and how much time you spend on them when you could be getting things done.
6. Give Yourself Milestone Rewards
One easy way to motivate yourself to get things done is to make your everyday activities into rewards. Rather than watching Netflix or play a game whenever you want, force yourself to treat these as incentives for yourself. When you get one thing done on your to-do list, reward yourself with a set amount of play time. When the time’s up, you’re done—until you cross another item off your list.
It’s so easy to procrastinate on things, even for weeks at a time. Aren’t you getting sick of putting them off for so long? It can’t be helping your self-esteem, so now’s the time to turn things around. Take one of these six strategies above – whichever one seems the easiest – and take action on it immediately!
Featured photo credit: Pixabay via pixabay.com
