Page 196 - End Procrastination Now Get it Done with a Proven Psychological Approach

160 End Procrastination Now!

Draft a Specific Plan. What do the three New Year’s resolutions
have in common? They are personally selected and discretionary.
Carrying them out would have some value; otherwise why decide
on specific self-development goals? They involve goals, and per-
haps a vague plan. However, people who make resolutions without
deciding how they’ll go about achieving the resolution (goal) risk
procrastination.
You can love the idea of accomplishing your self-development
goals. Sure, it would be great to manage conflict effectively. You’d
be happy to shed an inhibiting fear. Losing weight looks like a
good choice. Life could be easier if you were better organized.
However, because you are responsible to yourself for the choice
and its execution, you can usually find a way to give yourself an
extension. You can also give yourself an excuse. Are you not the
only person that gets hurt by such delays? That often-used ratio-
nalization to justify procrastination holds as much water as a
lead ball.
If your promissory notes to yourself stay on the drawing board,
this may happen for roughly these reasons:

• Weak commitment
• Underestimation of the ways in which old patterns interfere
with the new ones you want to establish
• Lack of planning or inadequate planning
• Not building in counter-procrastination strategies
• Not planning for addressing procrastination about pro-
crastination

When you procrastinate, you may have an idea for a productive
plan that you can fall back upon. But that plan may be too general.
If you want to tackle an entrenched form of procrastination, you’ll
normally do better if you formulate an organized plan that takes
the cognitive, behavioral, and emotive aspects of procrastination
into account.