Procrastination - Pros and Cons

Procrastination gotta be a bad thing right? I mean you have a lot up your sleeves, you should be facing them fair and square not pushing some aside right? Well, I beg to differ.

I feel that might not always have to be the case. A good number of persons tend to place their focus way too much on tasks which hasn't been completed, but you really can’t tell if procrastination is bad or good thing by only looking at whatever it is you couldn't get done; rather you have got to look at what is getting done.

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Let's say rather than writing this post, I decide to fiddle around or browse the web; thus spending much mindless hours on social media sites or reading jokes, probably not a good thing. At the moment, this post appears to be way more valuable to me than a single minute wasted on the Internet. But if I decide that I really don't want to write this post and instead decide that it is nice enough outside where I am, so I could go hang out with friend for about an hour, that isn't really a negative thing either. Perhaps I just came up with this idea as a form of procrastination in a bid to put off writing this post, but my procrastinating activity could be said to be more valuable than the activity I’m putting off; you get it right?!

So basically, there are two ways to procrastinate.

The first is by doing something which is of much lower value than the activity you are putting off and the other is by doing something of higher value than the activity you are delaying. If you are engaged in an activity with higher value, then you really aren't wasting time. There are obviously, quite some limits to this but eventually I have to take the time to pay my bills and I can’t just put that off forever. For some known reason, procrastination could show up packed with a number positives, so long you are shifting to an activity which you value more than what you are putting off.

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Sometimes the feeling of “I don’t really want to do this” is our subconscious trying desperately to point out that the activity we are about to start really isn’t that important to us and we should be doing something different. When this results in a change of plans where we do something valuable it can be a good thing. Rather unfortunately we often tend to replace such activity with this activities which is even of lesser value to us. Those type of activities are quite equivalent to junk food as they are chosen due to the fact that they appear quite easy to start. it's always much easier to begin a task of randomly browsing the web than it is to begin a task of preparing your taxes.

One trick you could adopt to become productive is to essentially be able to recognize the feeling of procrastination; then carry out the appropriate actions. The moment you are able recognize that you are indulging in a procrastinating activity, you need to steer you wheels toward doing something not just valuable, but much more valuable. Pick out some few minutes to decide if the task you want to put off really really needs attention at all. Even if it does need to be done, perhaps now isn’t the best time for it. At some point, you would need to just give a go ahead with the task; get it complete, but endeavour to give yourself an option to do something different which can be liberating.