You may chronically put off an activity because you aren’t
really sold on doing it at all. Reasons include:
- You don’t think it’s your job.
- You think it’s somebody else’s job.
- The job’s a waste of time.
- You have important things to do.
If that’s the case, you need to answer two fundamental questions:1. What’s in it for me if I do it?- What will happen to me if I don’t?
The first question may redirect and increase your motivation.
You’re no longer doing it because someone said you ought to.
You’re doing it to impress a boss, help a friend, make money, or
get to a task you really enjoy.
The second question is the negative of the first. Your motiva-
tion may become avoidance of something unpleasant, like a lousy
job evaluation, an angry, alienated spouse, or a disappointed child,
for example.
If you can find no internal motivation—no benefit for doing the
job and no penalty for not doing it, you may well decide not to do
it at all. It’s not one of your priorities, and you probably shouldn’t
be doing it.
Even if you can see a benefit to doing the job, you may still
decide that the costs in time and energy (and the other things you
aren’t doing) outweigh the benefits. In that case you can:
1. Do what you have to do to get out of the job. That’s not
the same thing as simply putting it off. This is an active,
conscious decision not to do it and to accept the conse-
quences, if any. In the long run, that sort of decision costs
less, in time and stress, than does the passive resistanceP R O C R A S T I N AT I O N