If you’re a chronic procrastinator your habit is regularly impacting your business and your life. You may have tried things to stop the habit and some things may have worked for a while, but then you found yourself right back where you started. You’re not by yourself. What happens to most is that they get used to the impact and used to working the way that their habit has them work and dealing with the consequences. They become a bit resigned and continue to operate in the mayhem that procrastination causes.
That mayhem causes bad fruit to grow on what I call your Procrastination Tree™. Whatever you do plants seeds for something to grow later down the road, whether it’s something you want or not. You may not think of procrastination in these terms, but if you know who I am you know that I don’t look at or see things the way most do and this is no different. Your procrastination has roots (symptoms), branches and fruit (impact). The fruit shows up in your life as:
- An ongoing list of undone things
- Wasted time and energy
- Lost clients/money
- Physical symptoms like stress (Which can lead to other things)
- Missed deadlines and deliveries
- Lack of efficiency
If your habit of putting things off goes on for long enough, you’ll start to see the fruit turn up in other areas of your life too. If you want to stop growth of the bad fruit, you’ve got to first look at what’s going on. How is procrastination showing up in your life? You have to explore what’s really going on, get the big picture before you can remedy it. When you start looking at it you see its impact and at that point you realize that the fun is over. You’ve got the bill and see your cost for putting things off.
Once you can wrap your head around what it’s costing you, it makes it easier to commit to ridding yourself of it once and for all. Exploring your habit in depth…the symptoms as well as the outcomes that impact you gives you clues as to where to look on a much deeper level. That is where you will find not only the cause for your procrastination, but the solution as well.
If you’re interested in exploring your procrastination, uncovering the real reason you do it, and then annihilating your procrastination, check out this master class series.