Page 198 - End Procrastination Now Get it Done with a Proven Psychological Approach

162 End Procrastination Now!

facturers, determine what items to stock and what you can have
drop-shipped, find out how to process credit card orders over the
Internet, learn whatever you don’t know about what you don’t
know, and so forth.
In one scenario, you gather the information you need, includ-
ing doing a preliminary market analysis, and you look into how to
finance the operation. The information you gather points to a low
financial risk for a moderately profitable operation. You then bring
a procrastination element into the scenario. You have a strong
tendency to behaviorally procrastinate. You extend the scenario by
analyzing the procrastination process and by creating a solution.
To behaviorally procrastinate, you have to have done some-
thing in preparation first. You find research and planning appeal-
ing. You determine that the project is viable. You find that fact
interesting. However, you feel uneasy about how you’d handle
Internet and phone inquiries about the products you sell. You don’t
like dealing with customer complaints and sorting out whether
the returns were the result of preexisting damage or were
customer-related.
Your history of bringing yourself to the brink of getting proj-
ects up and running and then putting off the execution phase is
familiar. You recognize the emotional feeling of resistance to going
further as you imagine executing the plan. From past experience,
you recognize that your behavioral procrastination is a hard chal-
lenge to get beyond.
If you are going to behaviorally procrastinate, then except for
the joys of doing the preliminary research and planning, it’s less
costly in time and resources for you to drop the idea at the start.
The effort that goes into the research and planning phase in such
a set-up and stop scenario might be better applied to a productive
effort that you know you’ll finish.
In a second scenario, you walk yourself through the prelimi-
nary phases just as before. However, you create a strategy for ad-
dressing the behavioral procrastination phase that you anticipate.