What causes procrastination and how should you deal with it?
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Procrastination is often caused by anxiety over the difficulty, or perceived difficulty, of the task at hand; or over the perceived effects of performing it wrongly. A person believes that the task or its outcome will be unpleasant, and so they put it off for as long as possible. Often this can persist until external circumstances – deadlines, looming failure, etc – cause *”not doing the task”* to become more unpleasant than *”doing the task”* and so the person does the task in a hurry, at the last minute. This can be very stressful because of the external circumstances being so threatening and so close, which in turn validates and reinforces the original feeling that the task would be unpleasant.
Breaking free? Well, there are a few options, but my personal method is to pick apart the task into pieces which are too simple to feel anxious over:
* Anxious about an assignment? Break it into chunks and write a *super, ultra-rough draft* for each chunk and then work from there.
* Anxious about making a phonecall? Write a full list of what you need to get from it, and contingency options to recover if things don’t go as expected.
* Too much on your plate and can’t decide where to start? Write it all out, making sure you get out whatever’s in your head, and then see where you can start.
Work on things from the most accessible ‘handhold’ — grab onto it and see what else becomes possible. Just getting a proper grasp of the task can get you moving with enough momentum to keep going.
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