Do you often feel that you are not able to work at your maximum potential and pace in the office? Are you often told that you didn’t perform as good as was expected from you by your boss?
Do you have this ‘mental laziness’ coming in every now and then, which makes you delay your tasks and waste valuable time?
Procrastination at work is a common phenomenon faced by employees at all levels. Whether there’s a fresh graduate struggling to survive through the probation period of his very first job, or a senior general manager who has worked all her life to attain her existing professional position.
Every one will feel a glitch in their performance levels when the job doesn’t appear as appealing to them as they would like it to be.
Make sure you are pursuing a career in the field of your choice
Human beings are driven by passion. If we want our heart to sink into the job or career we are pursuing, we cannot afford to compensate on the field or type of work we choose for ourselves.
Often in desperate times, we tend to accept any job offer that comes along, just to observe in a small period of time that we are not able to maintain our focus on it, as it requires us to do the kind of tasks that don’t interest us.
As much as it is good to make use of any opportunity that comes along in the bad times, we should take our choices seriously when we have the chance. Since it is also not a good habit to keep bouncing from one job to another, youngsters are often encouraged to identify their field of interest from the very beginning of their career.
When we are able to find pleasure in the work we do, we open doors for ourselves to innovate, excel and spread our motivation to others. It becomes easier to achieve deadlines, as we are not always in the lookout to get a break from work. Our job is our vacation, our hobby, and our goal.
Maintain a balance between personal and professional life
No matter how much of a workaholic a person is, nobody can deny the fact that spending time with our family is crucial for personal fulfillment and keeping the spirits high.
Most working people may not be able to take out the time to go on family vacations too often, but that doesn’t mean we start neglecting our loved ones entirely. No matter how hectic our work routine is, there is always a possibility to take out small slots during the day to give attention to those who care for us.
This habit gives us the strength to move forward in life with a purpose to fulfill and a goal to achieve. Smart people know how to maintain a proper balance between their personal and professional lives in a way that one doesn’t get into the way of the other.
If we give more time to our personal life in times when we’re not under much pressure from our boss, for instance, our close ones will be able to understand our situation better at a later point when we’re too caught up with deadlines and work submissions. In this way, we’ll be able to keep ourselves going, while at the same time keep our loved ones happy with us.
Schedule your tasks in an orderly manner
Preparing a calendar for our tasks at work is one of the most efficient ways to avoid procrastination. One good way is to split our monthly tasks into weekly, and weekly into daily.
This technique always works because it follows human psychology by making you feel guilty for each day when you’re not able to accomplish what you had planned for the day. It makes you realise the value of time by revealing to you that every hour is precious.
People who don’t schedule their days properly in advance often end up wasting half the day trying to figure out where to start.
If the sequence of tasks that we need to do is always jumbled up in our heads, we won’t be able to focus on any one task at a time, and eventually end up procrastinating with the excuse that we have too much to do.
In today’s times, we are lucky to have all kinds of apps, software and cloud-based services at our disposal to do our scheduling, most of which come with features like alarms, push notifications and automatic reminders.
The good thing about technology is that it doesn’t default in this regard. That’s why preparing calendars with reminders in apps or computers pushes us to be more efficient and productive than we would be otherwise.
how to stop procrastination
Anticipate roadblocks and plan to tackle them in advance
Sometimes we already know in advance that a hurdle or roadblock in coming soon in our way. For example, let’s say we have an urgent project deadline coming up, but our child is having a birthday in between, expecting us to throw a big party for him and be there with him the whole day.
How would we handle this situation? Would we delay our job to give time to our child; would we avoid our child on his birthday and give him an explanation later; or would we rather think of a third more reasonable way out in between?
Perhaps we could speak to our family about the importance of the project at hand, and convince them to organise the birthday party a bit later. This way, our child will have full attention from us during his birthday party, and our work will also be able to be completed right on time.
In the case of a student, a similar scenario could be when he/she has an assignment to complete and a family gathering to attend, both at the same time.
For this kind of situation, thinking and finding solutions beforehand is essential for avoiding misunderstandings last minute. The more we are able to identify the upcoming roadblocks, the better we’ll be at tackling with them.
Give yourself a treat on accomplishing each goal
We all like to get treats from others, and also from ourselves. Choosing to reward ourselves with a little treat upon accomplishing every little goal really helps in keeping us focused on our job.
We must make sure that the treatment that we plan for ourselves is something that we really long for, and would want to go an extra mile in order to get it. This way we would be able to give our best to our job for the sake of our personal gains, if not for impressing the boss. This might sound funny, but it actually works!
Learn to resist the temptations in your mind
As Elizabeth Lombardo from Essay Service states,
“We can reward ourselves or spend time cooling off as much as we want. But at the end of the day, there would still be some temptations to delay our work, waste our precious time, and keep ourselves from being totally productive at all times.”
This is where we have to adopt a little bit of psychology and be strict with our minds to consciously and voluntarily maintain focus on our job.
We need to regularly go through in our heads the reason, importance and value of our job, and resist any distractions that come along the way that can possibly make us lazy and procrastinate. We cannot push it too hard though, knowing that we are human, but we should at least make an effort to maintain a responsible and proactive attitude.
Employers are also responsible for our productivity
To some extent, it is also the employer’s responsibility to make sure that our work and work environment is challenging and interesting enough to keep us going.
Many big companies would invest millions of dollars on training programs, motivation schemes, job perks, and inspirational speeches to keep their workers motivated enough to perform at their full potential.
An additional element for achieving this that’s available at the hand of companies nowadays is the automation of the vital but low-valued tasks, in order to liberate managers and other employees from the monotony of repetitive tasks.
Employees are able to perform more productively when they see that boring tasks are being taken care of effortlessly.
In Summary
Making changes in our lives is never easy. But we must know that the earlier in life one can realise the value of time and put in the effort to rid the habit of procrastinating at work, the better would it be for their future, career and overall productive life.
About the Author
Lauren Adley is a writer and editor at Paper Writing Pro . She is dedicated to her family, work and friends. She is keen on reading, playing the guitar and traveling. She is interested in educational, marketing and blogging issues.
